Bibliographic Information
Title: (Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical Love in the Chilean Context
Author: Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone, and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela
Year: 2020
Citation
Fasching-Varner, K. J., Stone, M. P., and Montalbetti Viñuela, M. (2020). (Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical Love in the Chilean Context. In Steinberg, S. R., & Down, B. (Eds.). (2020). The sage handbook of critical pedagogies (pp. 469-479). SAGE Publications, Limited.
Realms of Application
Summary
Fasching-Varner and colleagues describe a foreign exchange program for pre-service ESL teachers from the United States. Through the Freirean idea of Radical Love, they analyze students’ responses to the experience.
Fasching-Varner and colleagues start their article by constructing a vision of their own cultural and intellectual Context, which will serve as a frame to describe their intervention later on. They see context as transcending national borders, and emphasize the need for cross-cultural connection in an era of increasing distrust of cultural difference and xenophobia. For them, knowledge of Context, the educator’s and the students’, is central if teachers are going to successfully bridge cultural divides to teach. They observe that a more traditional approach “often articulates either only vague and lofty goals of being culturally relevant without discussing means, or focuses on micro-pedagogic tools and strategies labeled culturally relevant to the exclusion of a larger practice or outcome of cultural relevance” (p. 471). They identify four main challenges to productive cultural connection in ESL classrooms: the pervasiveness of stereotype threat, hostility towards difference in interactions in and out of the classroom, turnover and teacher apathy due to cultural clash, and simple lack of preparation to connect across cultural difference.
Their program, then, focuses on allowing their students, Pre-service ESL teachers from the USA, to construct their own understanding of their future students’ perspectives through their own inter-cultural experience. They suscribe to Freire’s idea of Radical Love as a tool of Theory, designing the students’ interactions with the goal of allowing them to experience not just what it feels like to lose the hegemonic power of speaking the dominant language, but also what it feels to Love people who they have little in common with.
Fasching-Varner and colleagues’ Lesson tools are, thus, not at all classroom-oriented, but experiential. They place their students with local host families in Chile, and they leave them to experience the lostness of not speaking the language, the dependence on bilingual children and adolescents that is so common in the United States, the value of multilingualism. Journal-writing and prompt-answering help the students reflect on their experiences, but the perspective of the authors is that Learning happens through the experiences themselves. This idea reinforces and is supported by the concept of Radical Love, as the learning experience is transferred from the class exercise and written assignment to the every-day life of the student during the exchange program: students participate in their hosts’ family lives, and through these moments they come to appreciate the cultural differences between their own people and their adopted family, and also “the universal nature of hopes, dreams, and aspirations” (p. 475). But Love is not just about understanding, it is also about discomfort. Fasching-Varner and colleagues highlight how a key element of the program is that students realize the limits of their own understanding. Their interactions with these families are inherently limited by their inability to communicate, verbally and non-verbally, across the cultural divide. Ultimately, the authors note that participants’ reflections evolve from making sense of their own difficulty to imagining that of their future students.
Throughout their program, it is clear that Fasching-Varner and colleagues regard a grounding in Context as the central aspect of a pedagogy of Love. They construct their intervention around their understanding of their students’ environment, but they also highlight Radical Love as the purpose of their educational program in order to instill in their own students a deeper appreciation for their future pupils’ own experience.