Honing Critical Social Imagination Through a Curriculum of Social Empathy
Bill Templer, Bulgaria and Phuangphet Tonawanik, Malaysia
Bill Templer is a Chicago-born educator with research interests in English as a lingua franca, literature in the ESL classroom, and critical applied linguistics. He has taught in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Israel/Palestine, Austria, Bulgaria, Iran, Nepal, Thailand, Laos and, most recently, at the U of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He is currently again on the staff of Preslavsky University in Shumen, Bulgaria, and also active in the Roma community there. Bill is also staff translator/editor at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History, University of Leipzig, and is a widely published translator from German. E-mail: bill_templer@yahoo.com
Asst. Prof. Dr. Phuangphet Tonawanik is a highly experienced Thai ESL teacher trainer, with many years of service at Chandrakasem Rajabhat University in Bangkok, and is a Visiting Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. She has carried out numerous research projects in central and northern Thailand, and has authored several textbooks on ESP, including English for public relations (Bangkok, 2006). She has a strong interest in teaching critical thinking in the ESL classroom. E-mail: ptonawan@hotmail.com
The ‘interior monologue’ is a powerful tool for sharpening students’ social imagination, as they attempt in imagination to enter the minds and hearts of others, either from fiction or reality, and to deepen their sense of empathy with those imagined individuals in their situation. The monologue can take many forms: a poem by or about the person, a personal letter by her or him, a song text, a diary entry, and other types of text, both spoken and written, individual and in group work. The paper presents the concept of interior monologuing as developed by Linda Christensen (2000, 2001, 2009), and suggests its application in the EFL classroom where learners are encouraged to explore issues of social justice. In its second half, we provide a sample lesson plan centering on child labour as an important social issue. Numerous links to online video and text are given. Four ‘extensions’ from the draft lesson plan explore related topics, culminating in Extension 4 with a look at the social imagining of people with disabilities. This exercise in ‘imaginative stepping into the heart and mind of Others’ is viewed as part of a pedagogy of TESOL for transformative social justice, solidarity and equity. It is conceived as a contribution to critical pedagogy in the TEFL classroom and is a joint effort, based on the experience of both authors teaching in Thailand and Malaysia, and Bill in Bulgaria, Laos, Nepal and Israel/Palestine.
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Students need opportunities to think deeply about other people---why they do what they do, why they think what they think. They also need chances to care about each other and the world. Interior monologues are a good place to start.
Christensen, 2000, p. 131
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
A. Einstein
The paper sketches an approach that seeks to put students ‘inside’ the life worlds of others, exploring avenues to sharpening ‘critical social imagination’ in the EFL classroom. Its core is writing or speaking what are called ‘interior monologues.’ In such a monologue – structured as a poem, reflection, a letter, a journal or blog entry, a kind of autobiographical narrative or other form -- a student tries to imagine the thoughts of a character in literature, a movie, or a person in history or life at a specific point in time, assuming their persona. Often, the focus is just on an ordinary person. Interior monologuing asks the student: “How would you feel in that person’s place? Try to visualize and articulate that” (Christensen, 2000, pp. 134-136; Bigelow & Christensen, 2001; Christensen, 2001, 2009). This tool generates much original work, and the authors’ experience indicates plagiarism (from Internet or other students) is very rare.
In our view, such an approach is a classroom-based catalyst for transformative critical pedagogy in five areas:
To help build a transactional, more ‘constructivist’ ESL classroom, where students’ voices are heard in many modes and octaves, as contrasted with traditional ‘transmissional’ pedagogies (Karolides, 1992b, Reyes & Vallone, 2008;). In a recent critique of American schools, Gatto (2009) deplores the mechanisms of compulsory schooling which cripple imagination and discourage critical thinking. We suggest that interior monologues are one mode of exploration of Self and social reality that can counter this trend. A curriculum of social empathy is a catalyst to student creativity, a powerful stimulus to social imagination (Christensen, 2009).
To help provide a platform for experimentation in forms of cooperative learning (Jacobs, 2003), within a more democratic, student-centered matrix of discovery. This generates a space where students speak with one another about topics that matter, and listen and read each others’ interior monologues. That can encourage new forms of oral presentation and ‘ensemble work’ (Maley, 2008). These are especially needed in EFL in countries like China, where “Mute English” is recognized as an entrenched norm (Qiang, N., & Wolff, M., 2010), and students have little practice either in speaking or listening, nor is their speaking ability seriously tested. In India, students in rural environments likewise face formidable obstacles learning English, especially listening & speaking skills, as reflected in Andhra Pradesh (Yellapu, 2010; Chimirala, 2010). We need but recall that nearly three quarters of India’s population urban and rural lives on less than $2 a day, and their knowledge of English is often scanty. In Thailand, a tenacious reluctance to speak is often linked with the need not to ‘lose face’ by making mistakes in front of one’s peers, the culture of kreng jai, interpersonal deference. Holmes & Tangtongtavy (1995, pp. 52, 56; Adamson. 2005, passim) look at this core cultural value, whereby Thais may be reluctant to express direct feedback to their seniors on the job or to teachers in the classroom, a powerful “affective filter” in Krashen’s classic sense (1982, pp. 30-32). Related to this is sam ru am, a Thai Buddhist value emphasizing the ability to show restraint and composure in stressful situations; it can create the impression that the Thai learner is passive in discussions or classroom debate, and avoids “critical questioning” or is “culturally shy.” Foley (2005, p. 229) comments on the “the apparent lack of initiative, weakness and subservience that can result from an unhealthy degree of Krengjai.” ‘Imaginative monologuing’ can perhaps help to mitigate this widespread EFL malady of ‘speaker’s block.’ We feel the broader research context should be guided by growing insights from the “social ecology” of second-language acquisition and critical thinking pedagogy (Leather & van Dam, 2002).
To help foster new approaches central to Reader Response theory and practice in the teaching of literary and other texts (Rosenblatt, 1983; Ghaith & Madi, 2008; Karolides, 1992a), including developing meta-cognitive awareness (being able to think about one's own thinking and imagining), a crucial component in all learning (Henry, 2009).
To sharpen Emotional Intelligence (EI) and its corollary EQ (Churchill, 2007) in students and teachers, competencies for being better aware of emotions in their complexity, better able to tap and manage them, and spurring empathy for others. This human capacity is deemed ever more crucial today by many psychologists and educators (Goleman, 1995; Upadhyaya, 2008; Mayer, 2009), and is essential to the more ‘aesthetic EFL’ that Maley (2008) envisions. Can it be better taught? We believe interior monologues are a creative means for directly shaping EI.
To contribute to creating a space where students think, write and speak about aspects of social and economic justice, inequality and the need for equity in their own life worlds and societies, and beyond the borders, using the tool of interior monologue (Christensen, 2000). Christensen (2009) comments: “Students demonstrated both pain and outrage through their poetry and interior monologues, a fitting memorial to the children of Soweto. But […] also an expression of their understanding of the events in a way that quizzes or discussions miss” (p. 214). Classroom experience in North America shows that interior monologues (oral and written) are an inventive and effective instrument for galvanizing empathy and self-awareness, particularly for pupils from more disadvantaged backgrounds. The broader aim is to envision a society of enhanced social empathy, inclusion and concrete solidarity with the Other (Carianopol et al., 2002; Templer, 2008a, 2008b; Fox et al., 2009), a TESOL matrix where students are encouraged to become “a conscious, lucid agent of social transformation […] who seeks emancipation” (Amin, 2010). Monologuing can make this surprisingly concrete, as students are fast to recognize and appreciate.
The paper begins with a section presenting monologues as a pedagogical tool, and its connections with Reader Response and Emotional Intelligence pedagogy. This is followed by a section ‘constructing interior monologues.’ For concrete illustration, we look briefly at war and its horrors as a theme. We then move on to the prime focus area for the present paper: children’s rights and their abuse, centering on child labour, with a core lesson plan.1 That plan also has some extended activities, including a brief focus on people with disability, under the motto “we are all differently abled” (Liat Ben-Moshe). A final section discusses overcoming obstacles on the pathways to constructing interior monologues.
The critical thinking component developed here is a very concrete way of ‘giving a voice’ to an imagined character in a specific situation who might otherwise never be heard, and energizing social consciousness in the process. That goes to the very heart of what education for a critical thinking citizen anywhere on the planet should be. And it is a springboard to a kind of strategy in life-long learning, as we try to construct a “momentary entrance into another person’s life” (Christensen, 2000, p. 135). “The monologue technique gives structure to the assignment, but the freedom to write from anyone’s point of view allows students to mold the piece to the contours of their lives and interests” (Christensen, 2000, p. 135).
Linda Christensen has largely taught underprivileged pupils from inner-city Latino and African-American backgrounds in Oregon. She stresses: “My students walk out the school door into a social emergency. They are at the center of it. I believe that writing will help them both understand that emergency and work to change it” (2000, back cover). Linda underscores that “[t]eaching for joy and justice also means locating the curriculum in students’ lives. Many of my students experience injustice. […] I want students to examine why things are unfair, to analyze the systemic roots of that injustice, and to use their writing to talk back. Putting students’ lives at the center of the curriculum also tells them they matter—their lives, their ancestors’ lives are important” (2009, p. 4). Elsewhere she notes:
This is no easy accomplishment in a society that pits people against each other, offers greater or lesser amounts of privileges based on accidents of birth, and rewards exploitation with wealth and power. […] A social imagination prompts students to wonder about the social contexts that provoke hurtful behaviors, rather than simply to dismiss individuals as inherently "evil" or "greedy” (Bigelow & Christensen, 2001).
It should be borne in mind that trying to empathize with others we don’t know – which means most of our fellow humans anywhere, including even people you may know casually in your own life world, or even our own family – is a form of emotional and cognitive guess work. It helps to hone the social imagination -- a tool for a form of what Freirian educators call conscientization – learning to perceive sociopolitical and economic contradictions and act to change oppressive realities. But of course, as an exercise in expanding our own bonding with others, it is only an exercise in flexing the mind and heart. Empirical inquiry is needed on how much it actually changes students as readers, writers, learners – and persons. Christensen’s (2000, 2001, 2009) extended hands-on experience is a promising stimulus for action research.
Exercises in self-projection
Using interior monologues as a teaching tool is an exercise in self-projection into another person, or even other creature or inanimate object, written, oral or in groups. It hones critical thinking and raises consciousness, as students engage in “excavating emotional territory” of other imagined consciousness (Christensen, 2000). Students can find someone’s story in a newspaper article, a textbook, their own everyday experience, or elsewhere in the great landscape of culture, history and belles-lettres, present and past. And then, through imaginative empathy, students try to articulate something about that person’s innermost thoughts and emotions from their own point of view. It can be the monologue of a hungry girl arrested for stealing food, an orphan, a child labourer, a person who is sightless, legless, physically impaired, with some ‘exceptionality.’ It can be a girl from a poverty background trafficked into the sex trade, a contemporary form of human bondage. It can be a schoolchild being teased, laughed or bullied by others. It can be a soldier sent into battle, or the interior thoughts of a slave --- or even of the slave’s chain (Christensen, 2009, pp. 194-195). It can be the thoughts of an enemy soldier, a slave owner, someone persecuting or harming an innocent victim, even a shaheed terrorist (see David Rovics, “City of Jenin,” below). The potential spectrum of possible human situations to focus on is as broad as the human canvas in all its diversity and complexity.
Seeing beyond the walls of the Self, changing perceptual screens
Creating interior monologues, students learn to develop understanding about people whose culture, race, gender or sexual orientation differs from their own. They imagine someone with a totally different social background, a particular job. They break down preconceived ideas about people from other cultures, other social classes, other life worlds as they spin out beyond their own – people “with whom, on the surface, they may appear to have little in common” (Christensen, 2000, p. 134).2 And they can even break down preconceptions about one’s own life world, and what we take for granted, changing their perceptual screens. In a similar vein, Gee (2008, p. 221) stresses that schools “ought to allow students […] to create new Discourses, and to imagine better and more socially just ways of being in the world.”
Beyond monologue, such social empathy pedagogy can also use forms (dramatic mini-genres) such as role play and improvisation, where several students write a sketch and perform it, with a monologue by one character framing the whole, or as a dialogue, a kind of mini-drama, as exemplified throughout Christensen’s more recent work (2009, esp. pp. 162-205).
Activating Emotional Intelligence
Such construction of interior monologues also likely sharpens another key element in critical pedagogy, the schooling of emotional intelligence. EI is comprised of an ensemble of competencies that involve recognizing and managing your own emotions as well as those of others, including self-awareness and empathy. Robinson (2008, pp. xii-xiii) stresses: “Emotional literacy is a way of knowing and being premised on care and empathy in educational contexts. […] Just as knowing academic content and applying pedagogical content knowledge are essential for effective science instruction so is emotional literacy.” Upadhyaya (2008) provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of training for emotional intelligence in teacher education in northern India. Churchill (2007) has explored applications related to enhancing one’s EQ (emotional quotient), and we are certain that interior monologues are a powerful tool for such pedagogy. Mayer (2009) maintains an informative site online dealing with research on EI and controversies surrounding its investigation. Gustafson (2010) describes the current growing trend in American schools to incorporate social and emotional learning (SEL) to encourage students to become more aware of their own feelings toward themselves and others. Yet this now popular approach may, in the subtext in Gustafson’s description, also be geared to making children more ‘manageable,’ controllable, precisely what Gatto (2009) vehemently critiques. So EI can be abused by educators to actually ‘pacify’ children by connecting them with their inner feelings and then training them to ‘control’ themselves, internalizing regimens of obedience to authority. All this needs the prism of a more finely attuned “social ecology” of learning (Leather & van Dam, 2002).
Reader Response
Interior monologuing can be conceived as a variant of core components in Reader Response theory, where readers are encouraged to identify with individuals in the stories, dramas and poems they read, and may “demonstrate an increasing ability to search for the underlying psychological attributes, long-range goals, and the meta-perspectives of the story characters” (Ghaith & Madi, 2008, p. 15). Interior monologues, by their very nature, spur greater meta-cognitive awareness. A number of chapters in Karolides (1992a) explore transactional theory – students interacting very personally with the text -- in its concrete dynamics in a Reader Response classroom. Duff (1992) utilizes Reader Response to develop an interior monologue assignment for Langston Hughes’ short story “On the Road,” a tale about a homeless African-American. His students are asked to imagine the thoughts of Sargeant, the main character, and to speak with his voice in answering the question: “How do you suppose Sargeant feels about what is happening to him?” (p. 209).3 Duff calls this ‘role visualization.’ Such visualizing of a character’s inner self is a proto-form of interior monologue, and we recommend that Reader Response approaches incorporate monologuing more centrally in their tool kit for imaginative transactions between reader and text.
Generating an’ imaginative tool kit’
Interior monologues can tap other people’s pain, their hopes and dreams. As the Root-Bernsteins (2003) see it, such empathizing is part of a critical “imaginative tool kit.” That kit is a set of instruments to “reassert the fundamental role of the private and sensual in creative thinking, so often overlooked” (p. 377). Such ‘tool kits’ for the creative social imagination can be developed and utilized in the EFL classroom. They are indeed central to what Maley (2008) has called for in shifting to a more aesthetic, ‘artistic’ EFL curriculum, grounded on imagination. That tool kit can also include ‘self-questioning taxonomies’ (Buehl, 2009, pp. 157-161) that provides students with strategies for generating their own questions about texts and their own responses.
Students can construct monologues focusing on a variety of situations and imagined persons. We will first give some examples about war and its horror, and then move on to focus on material for centering on child labour. It is best not to give too many examples of such monologues across multiple genres, but rather allow students to write as they conceive it. Our experience is that even the genre of an imaginative letter can be very revealing and effective, and easy for students to invent, often with highly inventive individual elaboration. In the literature classes of one of the authors (B.T.), letters written as a kind of ‘epistolary monologue’ by characters in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Pinter’s Betrayal were surprisingly original, and none were plagiarized.
Some guidelines for the teacher
As points of departure, Christensen (2000, p. 137) stresses that success in crafting interior monologues as a teaching focus depends on several factors, including:
Drawing on media or readings that are emotionally powerful.
Brainstorming character and situation choices so most students can find an entry into the assignment.
Allowing students the freedom to find their own passion --- they might want to complete the assignment as a poem, a dialogue poem, or from the point of view of an animal or an object […].
Giving students the opportunity to read their pieces to the entire class.
Using the collective text of students’ writing to launch a discussion of the bigger picture.
Teachers can (and perhaps should) also write monologues of their own along with their students to “tap into our own well of pain, pride, sorrow, confusion, and joy” (ibid., p. 135), likewise a form of cooperative joint learning venture (Jacobs, 2003), in a more democratic and ‘constructivist,’ student-centered classroom (Reyes & Vallone, 2008).
A monologue about war
In a unit on American history, Christensen (2000, p. 135) tells how her mainly ‘minority’ students in Jefferson High School in Portland/Oregon watched the 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, about the Vietnam war era and the attitudes of Americans on the home front back in the states. Christensen reminds us that “poetry levels the playing field. […] Many of my students who struggle with essays write amazing poetry. Poetry unleashes their verbal dexterity --- it’s break dancing from the tongue” (2009, p. 14). In the film, one of the soldiers interviewed says: “We’re taught to obey our government. I would have to go [to Vietnam] if I were called.” Using the words of this soldier as a point of departure, one of Christensen’s students then wrote the following powerful monologue poem, also responding to information she learned while watching the film (p. 135):
It doesn’t matter
that I would be going against
all the values by which I’ve lived my life.
It doesn’t matter
That I would break all of God’s commandments.
It doesn’t matter that I would have to murder
and torture
innocent human beings
It doesn’t matter
that this war has been caused
by my own government
It doesn’t matter
that I have no idea why we’re fighting
It doesn’t matter
that my government is poisoning
soldiers with Agent Orange
It doesn’t matter
that my “enemies” are fighting only
for the right to govern themselves.
It doesn’t matter.
This poem, reflective today of the possible inner thoughts of many U.S. servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, is -- with its powerful repetition of the cynical refrain “it doesn’t matter” -- a paradigm for one kind of interior ‘poetic’ monologue. In Christensen’s experience, quite average students can learn to do it. In class, they can read their work aloud, discuss and learn from each other. The teacher also learns, and the ‘collective mosaic text’ the class produces ensemble can spark a discussion of the bigger picture. Christensen knows this is a kind of ‘imaginative guessing’:
As is true anytime we wonder about other people’s lives, our monologues are only guesses, at times marred by stereotype. But the very act of considering the question “How might this person experience this situation?,” develops an important “habit of the mind” and draws us closer together (ibid.).
Expanding the focus
Along similar lines of a focus on war, one approach one of the authors has used in teaching is to take a classic anti-war ballad like “Paddy’s Lament,” about a young Irish immigrant to America (“our fortunes to be makin’ we were thinking”) who gets caught up in the carnage of the Civil War. Students can listen to the song, study its lyrics, and then write a poem monologue by Paddy, a diary entry, or a letter to his mom or lost sweetheart back in Dublin, describing the loss of his leg.4 They can write about his disappointment in migrating to America, to discover “there is nothing here but war, where the murderin’ cannons roar, and I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin.” “Paddy’s Lament” is an extraordinary text of the nightmare of immigration to the United States in the early 1860s, and the horrors of the American Civil War for new immigrants fleeing an impoverished Ireland.
“Write that I …”
Christensen (2009, p. 52) uses the “Write that I …” technique for an interior monologue, in effect letting the persona speak as if telling someone else her or his story. She applies this form to the Soweto Uprising in apartheid South Africa, where students imagine they are one of the young protestors involved, or even give voice to the bullet that killed a youngster. Below are two poems (ibid., p. 57) by her students..
Soweto Uprising Group poem, 2007, Grant High, Portland
Write that I
Had the stone,
Cupped in my palm.
It was hard
It was cold.
Just like the white man’s heart.
Remembering the Afrikaans
They stuffed down
My throat
I threw the stone
Just like they tried
To throw away
My culture.
Soweto Uprising Jayme Causey
Write that I
sang as loud as I could
in unison with my brothers and sisters
until a deafening “Nkosi Sikeleli’
iAfrika”
was all that could be heard.
Write that I,
along with my people,
posed no threat to the police
except for
the threat of our knowledge
the threat of our desire
the threat of our power
marching united and strong
like a pack of lions.
Another student writes an interior monologue of Minnie, the silent heroine in Susan Glaspell’s play “Trifles” (1916). Minnie strangles her husband in desperate retaliation after he has in a fit of anger murdered her pet bird --- “the creature that brought her the only moments of joy in an otherwise bleak life” (Christensen, 2000, p. 136). Linda’s student Maryanne assumes the persona of Minnie Wright, and “tries to imagine what in her life would lead her to commit such a horrid crime”:
Write that I was young,
Tender like the gardenia blossom …
I know that you think
I killed my husband,
My keeper, protector.
I stayed in that house, broken
chairs beneath me […]
Please don’t forget the bird.
You must tell them about its voice.
It was strangled,
We were strangled.
“Trifles” is the first powerful one-act play about women’s resistance to male oppression in the North American stage repertoire.
Discrimination against children by depriving them of schooling and forcing them to work at a young age is a major form of abuse of the young both in the Global North and South. Students in Asia and elsewhere may be familiar with children working in agriculture, family food stores and restaurants, night markets, and small-scale industries. Such abuse is also a species of what is termed ‘adultism,’ the attitudes and practices of adult society in discriminating against children and teens, akin to ‘racism’ or ‘sexism.’ It can take many forms, and all of us have experienced it in some way when we were growing up: “It happens anytime children or youth are ignored, silenced, neglected or punished because they are not adults” (Freechild, 2008). The website www.freechild.org is a rich site with many ideas about the oppression and emancipation of the young.
Child labour in East Asia
The International Labour Organization (ILO, 2008) estimates 165 million children between ages of 5 and 14 are in child labour worldwide, with a total of some 215 million children and teenage youth engaged in illegal labor, “with half being in the worst forms of slave labor. This includes, but is of course not limited to, the sex trade, child soldiering, bonded labor and the illegal drug trade. The Conspiracy of Hope ( http://aconspiracyofhope.blogspot.com ) is a compelling, moving site for learners to explore. As they remind us: “Right now, a population of children, the size of the USA, are walking around without shoes. This year one million of them will die from illnesses contracted from being barefoot. As they say, imagine the world to be 100 people in a room, 40 would have no shoes, almost half of those would be kids.” The number of working children in the Asia-Pacific region is by far the largest in the world and represents 18.8 per cent of the 650 million 5-14 year-olds in the area, almost one if five. Some of these child workers are in extremely low-paid domestic employment, largely invisible to the outside world, toiling as maids, cleaning boys, household helpers. The latest report of A Conspiracy of Hope, “Children in Hazardous Work” (June 2011) is also an eye-opener.5 Many work long hours, often in dangerous conditions. Both authors of the present have direct experience of this in Thailand (P.T.) and especially Nepal (B.T.). The ‘Conspiracy’ also reminds us: “Each year 1.2 million people are trafficked. Half of them are children, average age 13. Every 2 minutes a child is sexually exploited.”
In Uganda in June 2011, filmmaker Irene Kulabako launched her feature film “Stone Cold,” dealing with children working in Ugandan stone quarries, often sent there by their desperate parents. Irene notes that 1.8 million children in Uganda are working in exploitative labour. A trailer for the film contains a powerful scene.6
Child labourers in Thailand
According to the ILO (2006), some of the worst forms of child labour persist in Thailand: “victims of trafficking, working children under 15 years old, children used in begging, and children in domestic labour. Others sectors include child labour in some manufacturing and fishery industries, services such as karaoke bars and restaurants, and in the agricultural sector. Vulnerable groups include children of minority groups, migrant children, and children in poverty.” Some 300,000 teenagers 15-17 are employed and registered, maybe many more unregistered. In one study, some 35% of child labourers interviewed were under the legal age of 15. Around 40% were working at night or unspecified hours. About 40% reported being exposed to high levels of dust and smoke. Half were being paid less than 2,000 baht (= $63) a month, less than half the legal minimum wage. Sexual abuse was limited (7%), but probably under-reported. Cropley (2007) tells the story of a young Mon girl from Burma working under abusive conditions in a Thai shrimp factory. There are huge numbers of Burmese child labourers in many industries in Thailand, often heavily exploited, and as ‘illegal’ migrants left with virtually no rights or protections.7
Ask your classes: What do you know about child labour?
This powerful video on child labourers in Thailand can be watched before reading on: http://youtu.be/-AHPWOxEALQ
In a preliminary exercise, students can discuss what they know or have heard about child labour in their country. Some may know a family with a child working as a domestic, or have seen children working in their own neighborhoods or towns. Students can read the excellent site Child Labor and the Global Village: Photography for Social Change
(www.childlaborphotoproject.org/childlabor.html ). It has 12 FAQs with brief answers, and then highlights the stories of six child workers, with striking photos. Students could imagine an interior monologue for Miriam in Peru, a brickmaker, or Sankar in India, a seller of water at a train station in Orissa state, both aged 13. The FAQs can make a basic and probing multi-group discussion as a set induction to the broader issue of child labour:
What is child labour?
What is a child?
Who are child labourers and how many are there?
Where do child labourers live?
Is there child labour in the United States?
What do child labourers do?
Why should we care?
How can ordinary people help reduce child labour?
How was child labour reduced in today's developed countries?
What are some of the myths or misunderstandings about child labour?
What causes child labour today?
What are some of the solutions to child labour today?
Mirzapur, India carpet-weaving labourer
Sawai and Pablo
One of the authors (B.T.) has experimented in Thailand and Malaysia with introducing students to the problem of child labour using autobiographies from materials online at the site of The New Internationalist: Global Issues for Learners of English.8 Thai students overcame their reluctance to speak to talk about their own knowledge of child labour in their own home towns and regions. Especially working-class students who may have grown up helping their own fathers, fishermen and rubber-tree farmers, as in the case of B.T.’s students in the Thai south. Such materials are very relevant for new approaches in “working-class pedagogies” for English as a lingua franca (Templer, 2008a).
Sawai’s story is from northeastern Thailand, the impoverished region called Isaan. She relocates to Bangkok at the age of 13, to worked in a small garment factory. Her life story typifies many young girls working in garment factories across Asia.9 Pablo works in a street market in Bogota, Columbia.10 These can be downloaded and are dealt with in the Lesson Plan below. Sawai’s story is partially included in the video on Thai child labourers highlighted below.
Imagining the life of another: focusing on child labour
But if you think you’re doing it tough, imagine this: There’s someone in India right now, born on the same day as you, born into a family like yours. You’ve spent your whole life at school, they’ve spent their whole life working. Day in day out, mindless, harmful exhausting poverty-making work. Born into debt, forced to work, and denied an education. Over 200 million children around the world didn’t go to school today, they went to work. In India alone, there are as many as 60 million children in child labour. […] Why is it in our world that the country of your birth determines the course of your life? (World Vision Australia, 2009, 1:25 min.).
Grade level: intermediate level English Core subjects: ESL / EFL Interdisciplinary connections: Critical thinking, critical pedagogy; enhancing emotional intelligence; schooling for transformative social justice (Templer, 2008b; Fox et al., 2009). Topic: interior monologues on child labour
Overview of Lesson Plan: In this lesson, students learn how to compose interior monologues centering on the life and feelings of an imagined child labourer, and learn something about this major social problem of child labour in its expanse across the planet. It is also an exercise in developing social empathy, a key component in emotional intelligence training, and encourages cooperative learning techniques. It also aims to heighten a sense of solidarity with the child labourers central to this exercise in imaginative stepping into the heart and mind of Others, part of what can be called a ‘pedagogy of TESOL for transformative social justice, solidarity and equity,’ grounded on “mutuality, connectedness, and psychological sense of community” (Fox et al., 2009, p. 6).
Suggested lesson time: 3 or more 45-minute sessions, plus homework and follow-up activity time, including optional time for independent study and extensions.
Activities / Procedures
A. WARM-UP / SET INDUCTION
Lead students in a brief discussion about their experiences while doing some physical work, over many hours, at home or elsewhere. Ask whether they ever did a job they were paid for. What do they know about kids who have to work from a young age, in their own country or elsewhere? Do they have any friends who work after school? Or know kids their age who don’t attend school, and work somewhere? What do they do? Tell some stories about them. Introduce the site
Child Labor and the Global Village: Photography for Social Change, which can serve as a focus site for the extended lesson. Students can also view and discuss the brief video from World Vision Australia (2009), which challenges students’ identities growing up in an economy of relative privilege.
B. VISUALIZING A CHILD LABOURER: INITIAL STEPS
Present the video “Child Labour” from Pakistan.12 Students watch the video and then discuss the images Tell them: try to imagine the life of someone born the same day as them who is working now, not going to school, and has worked since he or she was about 10. They should give that imagined young person born on the same day a name. Some students can choose one of the six children from Child Labour and the Global Village, and study their photos, the text about their lives.
Tell them to close their eyes and try to visualize something about his or her life. At this stage, they need not write anything.
Striking is the interview with Halima, a Bangladeshi 11-year-old who works in a garment factory. She discusses the difficulties of her everyday work, the way her bosses beat and harass her, her weariness.13 Have students look for similarities and differences between these child labourers and their life worlds. Ask students to spend four minutes thinking about Halima’s life, and then speak a very short interior monologue, working in small groups. A group could also present three of its dialogues to the rest of the class. Again, students can use input from Child Labour and the Global Village.
In a further sequence, have students watch the 2006 BBC video broadcast June 12 (International Child Labour Day) about child labourers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.14 These children, some as young as 10 years old, work 12 hours a day in harsh conditions mining copper and cobalt. Those metals go into the batteries in mobile phones, and other electric appliances, like TV sets. Maybe the mobile phone you or a friend has, or your TV set, contains copper mined by these children. Imagine the metal as it travels through their fingers, and on into the phone in your pocket, or that of a friend. After the video, tell students to discuss their impressions in groups of three. The group names a discussion guide, and after 6-7 minutes, the groups report on their discussion in one minute to the rest of the class.
Students can then watch the Indonesian video “Street Children & Child Labour” from Makassar in Sulawesi Selatan, Indonesia.15 They then discuss in small groups the images they have seen. What are the lives of these kids like? What are they selling or doing most of their day, often for 12 hours? They can also view a video on child labour in the Philippines,16 or in Nepal.17 The situation in Nepal is one of the most extreme in Asia, with many young girls trafficked into India as bonded sex workers, often under the age of 15. The ongoing revolution in Nepal under the Maoist movement seeks to put an end to bondage and child labour in the country. This springs from some of the most extreme poverty in Asia in the Himalayan villages. CNN premiered a powerful film, “Nepal’s Stolen Children,” dealing with this on 26 June 2011.18
Students watch the video “Street Singer & Newspaper Boys of Makassar.”19 They then can discuss what these boys do, what they earn, and listen to the interview in Bahasa, with English subtitles.
They should also view the video “Unknown Workers: Child Labour in Thailand,” which also features Sawai’s story (see below).20 Ask students to write a short monologue as a poem, or perhaps a diary entry by Sawai. The format “Write that I …” can be used.
C. FOCUS ACTIVITY: WRITING AN INTERIOR MONOLOGUE
In this activity, students will read the stories of Sawai (Thailand) and Pablo (Columbia). Divide the class into two, and half reads Sawai’s story, half reads Pablo’s story.
Classroom activity: students in groups prepare factual questions on their text. They should also prepare at least two questions about how these children feel, and provide short answers to the questions. The groups then get together.
D. WRITTEN HOMEWORK
Ask students to write an interior monologue, stepping into the persona of Sawai or Pablo. This can be in the form of a poem, a letter by Sawai or Pablo to a friend, a kind of blog or diary entry. It can deal with her dreams of the future, her hardships in the present, or with some incident at work. It can talk about how she knows others kids are at school and she is working extremely hard for low pay just to survive. The focus can be whatever a student thinks can help convey some of the inner life of Sawai or Pablo, their life worlds and humanity.
E. CLASS WORK AS FOLLOW-UP
Students break into groups depending on whether they have written on Sawai or Pablo. Each student reads her monologue text. Students in their groups then discuss the merits of these monologues, some of their differences, a round-about activity (Christensen, 2009, p. 171).
Students choose in each group the monologue they like best. This is then read aloud (with some aspects perhaps of performance, schooling the art of presentation a bit) to the entire class. The class discusses aspects of these monologues, what they stress, their language and form. The teacher can also record the monologues as they are spoken. Students can also exchange their written monologues afterward, and they can comment on, suggest changes or correct each other’s texts, or even create a ‘collective text.’
Alternatively, students can choose one of the six children in Child Labor and the Global Village, and build a similar monologue plus group activities around one of them.
F. FUTURE SPIN-OFF ACTIVITIES
Students are asked to write another monologue, this time by someone who knows Sawai or Pablo, such as Sawai’s father, her cousin or Pablo’s best friend. This helps to extend the social imagination to encompass others in the social network of the child labourer.
Ask students to rewrite their monologue, but changing the ‘genre’ a bit: if they wrote a letter, maybe try a short free-verse or prose poem. If they wrote a poem, maybe try the lyrics of a song, set to some tune they know. They can also write a postcard by the labourer. Another technique is to alter the frame to ‘what if’: imagine Sawai or Pablo or some other imagined child labourer has an experience that changes his or her life completely, such as meeting someone who helps her break out of the oppressive situation, or go to school full-time, transforming their life.
Students can consider performing the recitations for a larger group, such as several English classes at the school. They might even consider putting together a video with a number of the monologues recited, with some explanation, and then upload this to youtube.com or SchoolTube.com.
Students can write up this monologue for an article on this class project in a class or school newspaper, or even put it together as a project and submit it to Topics Magazine, an online magazine written by students learning English around the world.21 Other options are a class bulletin board display, or several dramatic skits, based on what they have learned in working on these monologues. Additional activities to build on this might include drawing several/ graphic, comic-like episodes, likewise based on the stories of Sawai, Pablo and others, even as a collaborative learning project.
The approach suggested here develops collaborative skills of various kinds, including group autonomy, simultaneous interaction, equal participation and individual accountability (all construct their own interior monologue), positive interdependence and cooperation as a value (Jacobs, 2003; cf. also Baloche, 1998). It can also energize ‘self-questioning taxonomies’ (Buehl, 2009) that students can develop together.
G. FURTHER EXTENSIONS
Extension 1: ask students to read the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child written in simplified English. Then ask students to prepare to discuss the bulk of the 42 articles presented in this version in easier language.22 They can do this first in smaller groups, each group choosing five articles with groups reporting to the class as a whole on the main points discussed, and personal observations. Then the class as a whole can discuss the significance of this international convention on the rights of all children. It can serve as a bridge to looking at other social issues relating to children’s rights,23 and how children and youths in most societies are abused and disempowered by adults, what is termed ‘adultism.’ All these texts school critical thinking in greater depth about questions of social equity and poverty. In this way, students can engage in a form of ‘narrow reading’ (Krashen, 2004) on a topic central to thinking about social inequality and the abuse of the young, and the broader topic of human rights in general.24 It affects us all. As Krashen notes: “ It may be much better if second language acquirers specialize early rather than late. This means reading several books by one author or about a single topic of interest” (p. 17).
Extension 2: students can be encouraged to explore in greater depth the video narratives of child labour on Sulawesi Selantan in Indonesia. They can view the video on Abu, a 13-year-old child bicycle rickshaw driver in Makassar.25 A striking video “Boat boys, fish mongers of Makassar” introduces several boys and their stories.26 Another video introduces us to four boys toiling as scavengers on the largest garbage dump in Makassar, gathering what they can ‘recycle.’27 Some of the hardest labour is done by child construction workers.28 For students in English literature studies, the city of Makassar forms the backdrop of the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (www.gutenberg.org/etext/9344).
Extension 3: another issue dealt with on the New Internationalist site is how our clothes are made, often by workers who get very little money. An article about sweatshops in Mexico (in Easier English) can be used as supplementary text.29 You can also read about Assane, a shoe-shine boy in Senegal, and the very sad story of Kumar in Nepal.30 A link to other sites on child labour can expand student background reading.31 Students can watch the trailer to the Ugandan film “Stone Cold” and discuss their feelings as they see a family torn apart by selling a daughter away as a domestic worker, in a very powerful scene (see fn. 6 above). Perhaps the full movie can be found.
Extension 4: Imagining the life worlds of persons with disabilities: “we are all differently abled”
Learning to empathize with people with ‘exceptionalities’ can be another focus for ‘critical empathy’ in the EFL classroom. Students can be briefly introduced to the concept of ‘ableism,’ a close cousin of racism in all societies everywhere: discrimination and prejudicial attitudes toward persons with some physical or mental ‘disability.’ Students will possibly know children in school or in their neighborhood who suffer from some mental or physical disability and were isolated, laughed at or bullied because of that, and were not accepted by their more ‘normal’ peers. We have found that students immediately grasp what is meant by ‘ableist’ attitudes or behavior.
In the current field of disability studies, a basic conception is that disability is not an inherent trait located in the disabled person’s body and mind, but a ‘social construction’: people with ‘exceptionalities,’ physical and mental, are not disabled (Davis, 2006). Rather: all people are different and have unique needs. Societies identify, construct and label people as ‘normal,‘able,’ ‘disabled,’ ‘mentally challenged,’ ‘handicapped.’ So ‘normal,’ ‘average,’ or ‘able’ are all socially constructed terms, not something ‘universal.’
In a curriculum of empathy, students are encouraged to imagine what it would be like to be sightless, or soundless, or legless. Or to be ‘less intelligent,’ and so labeled by society, like the ‘mentally retarded’ Lennie Small in Steinbeck’s novel and stage play Of Mice and Men, or Forrest Gump in the movie many of our students know. Rapley (2004) explores in depth how mental disability is socially constructed. There is an ideology of what constitutes ‘normalcy. We are raised in a normalizing world. The alternative is a society where difference [of all kinds] is accepted and respected. Difference is what normalcy fears, represses, and fights against.32 Liat Ben-Moshe has noted: “If we truly understand that disability is a continuum, not a binary, then we are all differently abled” (personal communication, 21 February 2008). Liat stresses that we can learn to “interrogate the way we use abelist language in the classroom and the ways we can all create inclusive classrooms and communities” (ibid.; see also Ben-Moshe et al., 2005). “We are all differently abled” is a simple almost poetic epigram for teaching an egalitarian attitude toward abilities and their diverse distribution (see Ben-Moshe et al., 2009).
As mentioned, a number of problems need to be borne in mind in any such attempt to get students to empathize with the disadvantaged young people in the context of child labour.
Its inherent downside is that it may give us an easy misleading sense of ‘knowing’ the situation of someone else when of course we don’t, and can’t. It brings us up against the very barriers of our own selfhood in the world, and how difficult it is to enter the shoes of another, let alone their skin and heart and thought. Students should always be aware of the limitations of any such imagining of Others. Empathy, is always a construction, always hypothetical, always a tentative attempt. Moreover, it is not sympathy (Christensen, 2000, p. 137). We can empathize with people who do what we find despicable, trying in our minds to “probe for the social causes of human behavior” (ibid.). We don’t condone that behavior, don’t excuse it. We try to imagine what could bring someone to do such an act.” ۞ The controversial song “City of Jenin,” by American-Jewish folk singer David Rovics, is a variant on an interior monologue about a suicide bomber in Occupied Palestine, and what brought him to his action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MljDx259nOM&feature=related . It is a set of questions that begins: “Child, what will you remember / When you recall your sixteenth year?” Here the text: www.lyricsmania.com/jenin_lyrics_david_rovics.html This powerful song tries to reach into the tortured mind of the young shaheed (martyr), and his life world. It would extraordinary to teach a lesson on this song in the Israeli schools, and on the Occupied West Bank, including Jenin.
Students more shy or weaker in proficiency may be reluctant to attempt such monologues, or share them with others in the classroom. Their honest hesitation or sharp desire to ‘save face’ (Foley, 2005; Adamson, 2005) can be overcome in part by fostering a more cooperative, collaborative framework, working in peer groups. As Niphon (2003) notes for the Thai context: “preserving one another's "ego" is the basic rule of all Thai interactions both on the continuum of familiarity-unfamiliarity, and the continuum of superior-inferior, with difference only in degree. Even a superior would also observe not to intrude too much of the subordinate or the inferior's ego.” Our experience is that the genre of a letter, a personal diary entry or even a postcard from an imagined individual can initially be very revealing and effective, and easy for students to invent, starting from mid-elementary level. Such monologues are also useful as a form of testing, and in our experience, even less proficient students respond better than on other testing modalities, since this taps their creative potential.
Internet access is necessary for any utilization of youtube materials, and an LCD for classroom projection. Where that is not feasible in practice, teachers need to rely on printed materials, and perhaps more on the kinds of classroom narratives generated by students who may themselves be aware of child labour and its ‘stories’ in their own environment. Interior monologue pedagogy, and all other avenues in education for greater critical social awareness, should never be crucially dependent on high technology as a prerequisite. For learning in lower-energy, less-resourced environments, other ideas need brainstorming, inventive experimentation (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009).33
The New Internationalist site in easier English has not been expanded for many years. There is need for texts in simpler English on the Internet dealing with social issues from a critical perspective (Templer, 2008b), to serve the large mass of learners who need readily comprehensible material. The TEFL profession socially critical texts in simple discourse, along the lines of VOA Special English (Templer, 2008a). One of the present authors (B.T.), based on experience in Thailand, Laos and the Bulgarian Roma communities, is especially concerned to find simpler pathways in easier English to talking about injustice.
Can such dimensions of critical Emotional Intelligence and engaged Reader Response be taught effectively in the ESL classroom outside Euro-Atlantic teaching ecologies? Do they need to be more localized, indigenized, especially for learners in less privileged learning environments, especially in the world of the ’social majorities,’ the bottom four billion of humanity? To answer that, more empirical research outside the West is needed, best undertaken by teachers in their own classrooms at the grassroots of the profession, in rural India and elsewhere (Upadhyaya, 2008; Yellapu, 2010). Christensen is superb in her approach, but it is grounded on working with students largely in the multi-ethnic urban center of Portland in the United States (population 590,000). If planetary pedagogy can be genuinely transformed, it is only sustainable within initiatives for change from the bottom up, on the multiple peripheries where English is taught to ordinary learners, often in smaller rural communities, as in Nepal --- underprivileged, even in deepest poverty --- and not just the ‘comprador’ privileged, educated, moneyed elite. Sezgi Yalin (2011) gives a concrete compelling narrative of some of the extraordinary challenges of teacher training in rural Himalayan Nepal and the hardships the profession faces there, though Sezgi perhaps underplays the role of the ongoing social and political revolution in Nepal today and its implications for democratic radical educational reform now on the horizon, in the view of one of the authors here with extended experience in Nepal (B.T.). The entire question of human trafficking from Nepal and other countries – such as Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria in Eastern Europe -- is another sensitive issue which students could explore. Trafficking into the sex trade is of course difficult and highly ‘sensitive’ as a topic in some ecologies of teaching, but needs to be broached.
Empathy with others, disabled or underprivileged, should be at the vital center of a pedagogy of social empathy and social solidarity for ELT (Ben-Moshe et al, 2009). Interior monologues are a powerful tool in that pedagogy. That is particularly imperative in this transition period of growing economic collapse and widespread hardship, affecting the Social Majorities around the planet. This needs to be put on the agenda of educational innovation, reconfiguring “intuitive tools for innovative thinking” (Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2003) in an ESL classroom better attuned to nurturing creative and critical thinking, related aspects of Emotional Intelligence and the fostering of meta-cognitive awareness and strategies for interactive learning (Buehl, 2009). A curriculum of social empathy in a constructivist learning topography is a powerful catalyst. But it needs openness and academic courage to experiment, hands-on action research to chart its changing contours, and in-depth qualitative case studies focused on its actual concrete impact, often looking at a handful of individuals (Stake, 1995). Greater teacher ‘connectivity’ needs to be generated at the grassroots, so that teachers actively share their own experiments, through new avenues of local communication and horizontal cooperative self-development and self-study (Foord, 2009; Samaras & Freese, 2006; Robinson, 2008). Approaches need, we feel, to be guided by an “ecological” approach to second-language acquisition and what goes on in syllabi and classrooms, one which in research “sees the individual’s cognitive processes as inextricably interwoven with their experiences in the physical and social world” (Leather & van Dam, 2002, p. 13).
As stated, this approach is integral to a ‘TESOL for transformative social justice, solidarity and equity,’ in the spirit of a ‘critical psychology’ (Fox et al., 2009, pp. 4-19).34 We want our students to become “a conscious, lucid agent of social transformation […] who seeks emancipation” (Amin, 2010) as a longer-term goal. In East Asian and other ‘social ecologies of learning’ where cultural values like kreng jai (Holmes & Tangtongtavy, 1995; Niphon, 2003; Foley, 2005) often encourage students to remain silent and passive, and avoid critical comment, this is especially important. Preserving “face” in China, the largest TESOL laboratory on the planet, is a crucial central concern, and a key “affective filter” in Krashen’s (1982, pp. 30-32) sense. Adamson (2005, p. 75) reminds us: the “porous nature to classroom walls may or may not be conscious to every Thai in terms of what particular aspects of Theravada Buddhism influence their social and learning behavior,” but teachers (and students) everywhere need to find strategies to address those influences creatively. As mentioned, such strategies are very relevant for new approaches in “working-class pedagogies” for English as a lingua franca (Templer, 2005; Templer, 2008a). These pedagogies continue to remain under-explored in a TESOL too heavily oriented to ‘meritocratic’ elite values and privileged learner communities and social strata. And in rethinking assessment, and approaches to classroom research, we should keep in mind Einstein’s dictum: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
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