S9E8: Decolonising the Language Classroom
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultant Dr Amina Douidi talks about racial basis in teaching, materials, and assessment in the context of the language classroom and shares actions we can take to address the problem.
Key talking points
Identifying Racial Bias
Amina explains that racial bias in the classroom often manifests through disciplinary issues. Teachers might disproportionately describe students with negative characteristics based on their race or ethnicity. These biases are rooted in societal and historical hierarchies and become systemic in the classroom.
Impact on Students
These biases affect students' self-perception and can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Representation matters greatly; seeing positive representations of their race or ethnicity in teaching materials and curriculum can significantly impact students' motivation and performance.
Decolonising Teaching Materials
To decolonise the curriculum, Amina suggests diversifying teaching materials. Highlighting contributions from minority groups to society can make the curriculum more representative and relevant.
Inclusive Classroom Language
Teachers should identify and eliminate problematic language, including sexist, racist, ableist, or ageist terms. Reflecting on biases in both the languages used in the classroom and students' home languages is crucial.
Assessment Practices
Amina shares an example from Orlene Badu's book "How to Build Your Anti-Racist Classroom," where integrating relatable literature for black Caribbean students improved their reading and writing skills, thus increasing students' motivation and performance.
Sustainable Change
Amina emphasises the importance of collaborative efforts among teachers to review and revise curriculum and practices. Long-term, sustainable changes, rather than quick fixes, are necessary for meaningful impact.
About Amina
Dr Amina Douidi is a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Intercultural Communication consultant in English Language Teaching (ELT). She collaborates with publishers and education providers as a trainer, reviewer, and researcher, focusing on promoting anti-racist, decolonial, and inclusive practices. She earned her PhD from the University of Southampton, where she researched the intercultural potential of Algerian English textbooks and their use in the classroom. She speaks Arabic, French, Spanish and English and is an amateur volleyball player.
Visit Amina's website or LinkedIn to learn more.
References & Resources
Links will direct you to resources Amina mentions in this episode and more.
Watch the video with closed captions or refer to the transcript below.
Transcript
00:00:00:02 - 00:00:28:06
Laura
TESOL Pop! Season nine, episode eight. Hello or welcome to TESOL Pop, the mini podcast for busy teachers. My name is Laura and joining me today to talk about Decolonising the Classroom is Doctor Amina Douidi. What does racial bias look like in teaching materials and assessment, and what actions can we take to address it? Amina addresses these questions and shares insights into the steps we can take to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive learning environment.
00:00:28:08 - 00:00:32:13
Laura
Let's join the conversation where I asked Amina, how can we identify racial bias?
00:00:32:15 - 00:01:41:16
Amina
Racial bias is often conflated with disciplinary issues, sometimes in the classroom. So you hear teachers speak about some students, for example, being undisciplined and unmanageable, being for example, too angry or too disturbing or too noisy or too something to insert an adjective and, although these characteristics could be describing any child or any student from any race and ethnicity, the research actually shows that students who, from systematically marginalised, the historically marginalised group, often associated with these adjectives and often very negative ones, although we also talk about positive stereotypes when it comes to for example, students who come from China, for instance, we talk about, these biases related
00:01:41:16 - 00:02:15:16
Amina
to their nationality, their race and ethnicity with regard to how disciplined they are or how good at maths they are or how, docile they could be. So those character mistakes that we assign to student, we may do that because of their actual behaviour in the classroom. And it's an actual observation. However, when you look at the research, you find that there is a huge tendency to associate certain behaviours with certain groups.
00:02:15:18 - 00:02:39:06
Amina
Every year you have teachers saying it's always the same group of students who do the same kind of behaviour, and that's where you want to stop and question - Is that what I am observing? Is it truly because of what is happening in the classroom, has nothing to do with race and necessity, but most of the time it has.
00:02:39:06 - 00:02:54:17
Amina
And this bias comes from the society, comes from how the history has created hierarchies among people, and it gets articulated and translated in the classroom in a very and systemic way.
00:02:54:18 - 00:03:25:09
I imagine this, obviously affects and the students perceptions of themselves. So if they have these impressions placed upon them from people as, revered as teachers, as school environments, where they spend a huge majority of their time, that can then shape students perceptions of themselves and their direction that they may take. If people are always putting them in a box of being, you know, the positive or negative that you just mentioned are, they're good at maths or, you know, a troublemaker.
00:03:25:11 - 00:03:28:19
It can sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:03:28:20 - 00:04:04:21
Amina
100% yes. Basically the motto should be representation. Representation matters. And what I see I can become. So for example, in the context of the UK, you have black and ethnic minorities, Asians, students of Muslim backgrounds or any other minority religion background would also be considered, historically marginalised or systemically marginalised. However, if you go to a different context that’s in Algeria where I come from.
00:04:04:23 - 00:04:36:15
Amina
That group would change according to the context and the history and the demographic of that region, for instance. So the idea here is that the students who are from those marginalised or systemically marginalised groups, usually get very less representation, especially positive representation in the materials they use in the curriculum, in the language that the classroom teacher uses as well.
00:04:36:20 - 00:05:05:17
Amina
So everything around them would tell them that either they are invisible or they do not matter, or they will not do something important in their life or in their future career. And this idea would, of course, impact how they behave in the classroom, but also how they study, how they how what, how much motivation they put into the work and how much effort they could put could put into the into the work as well.
00:05:05:20 - 00:05:22:03
Amina
What we are trying to do here is make the teachers aware of this systemic issues, but also their role in reinforcing this system of iniquity. But we're not necessarily saying that teachers are bad people, are we?
00:05:22:03 - 00:05:44:21
I wonder, Amina, could we look at each of those segments that you mentioned, like the teaching, the materials, the assessment? You've already mentioned some examples of what racial bias can look like in each of these. Could you go over each one and then tell us what we can do to try and, yeah, make the classroom in our practices more inclusive and supportive?
00:05:44:23 - 00:06:36:04
Amina
Sure. If we start with the materials for instance, decolonising the curriculum might sound is a, a big word, a big concept. So what we could rather do is think about what we teach in the context of English language teaching. For instance, if our references, all our references are Shakespeare or white Europeans that can be problematic. However, when we look at English as a global language and the contributions of people of colour and of black people, of black writers in the global North or in the global South, that would make the curriculum much more representative of the reality that the students will be navigating in English, but also would acknowledge the contributions that have,
00:06:36:06 - 00:07:12:15
Amina
made, wonderful Nobel Prizes that we not often hear about. And they who also happen to be coming from the from the global majority or the historically minoritised, communities. so that would be one way of decolonising the curriculum if we think about the classroom and the classroom dialogue, the classroom discourse, the language of the teacher, then it would be very, very important for the teacher to do the work of identifying problematic language that they themselves perpetuate.
00:07:12:18 - 00:07:47:15
Amina
And it's a really good exercise to actually look at how problematic language looks like in the mother tongue and in other additional languages the students speak, and also how it would look like in English. And what I mean by problematic language is this sexist, racist, ableist age language that we perpetuate either through idioms or simple expressions that we use, which sometimes end up being rooted in a bias that we might not have been aware of.
00:07:47:17 - 00:08:26:05
Amina
So it's a really good exercise that the teacher goes through, questioning the socially constructed language that they use and they teach, but also invite the student to reflect on where those biases sit in their own languages or home languages, which they practice on the daily basis. With regards to assessment. Actually, I was reading, yesterday preparing for this meeting this wonderful book called How to Build Your Anti-Racist Classroom by Orlene Badu.
00:08:26:07 - 00:08:52:02
Amina
And she speaks about an intervention that was made in the school about, reading, and, and writing because they found that black Caribbean children were falling behind every year in such a systematic way when it came to reading and writing.
00:08:52:02 - 00:09:28:14
Amina
So what they did was first start by creating, reading lists and integrating and decolonising the curriculum. Integrating black Caribbean authors who this and also stories that the students could relate to. So they started by integrating literature and stories that the students could relate to, which increased interest and motivation. And when it came to assessment and writing, the student had things to say because they could relate to the content that they have been exposed to.
00:09:28:18 - 00:09:55:09
Amina
They had very creative ideas. They had also stories they could write about. And the language also developed along the way, which meant that relate ability was one way that these teachers have managed to change assessment and also the curriculum to kind of challenge the racial bias that was inherent in the school system. out there.
00:09:55:11 - 00:10:18:06
You know, when you're talking about this, I mean, I was thinking of so many challenges that come up when teaching in schools, and motivation is one of the biggest ones, like how do you engage your students, how do you get them excite it about what they're studying and thinking about? The students I've taught, I think about the transformation that's happened when they've been able to see someone like them in a story.
00:10:18:08 - 00:10:33:10
And I think this also relates to that, doesn't it? Students may completely transform overnight because the materials, the language, the tasks are relatable to their world and feel and they feel a part of it.
00:10:33:12 - 00:11:06:04
Amina
Yes. if we take the example of museums, for example, and you have an assignment or an item test with the [student] where you're asking the student to write about a visit to the museum, the teacher needs to be aware that music terms don't look the same everywhere; don't have the same attraction everywhere. So museums in the global North, for example, in Britain, in France, in the US, if you visit them, you will find rooms from different continents where you get to explore different cultures.
00:11:06:06 - 00:11:39:21
Amina
However, there is a colonial and imperial history that has filled up and led to these room to be filled up and led the whole industry of museums to develop and flourish the way it is here in the Global North. So when you have a an assignment or an activity for students who come from the Global South, from these countries that have been colonised by Britain, by France, by Spain, by post, by Portugal, to talk about museums, the relationship that they have with museums is completely different.
00:11:39:23 - 00:12:09:18
Amina
And the that the the politics of museum in that home country or in their context is completely different. So coloniality is embedded into that. So you end up with student writing fake phrases or sentences about their interest, about museums and, and things like that. And you think like, well, they're not really motivated to do the work. they, they're not working so hard to get the grade that they should be getting to succeed.
00:12:09:20 - 00:12:12:01
Amina
But relevance again is a point here.
00:12:12:02 - 00:12:38:08
So much of what you've talked about today, I mean, it doesn't have to be a teacher acting alone. from what you're describing, this could be teachers sitting down together having a discussion. You mentioned looking over the curriculum, thinking about where the bias is. thinking about their own language, having those reflective conversations, maybe also involving students in this process, it's not just we're not asking just one teacher to change everything.
00:12:38:08 - 00:12:46:05
It can be conversations that happen. You mentioned like that baby steps one step at a time that can make a real big difference.
00:12:46:07 - 00:13:18:19
Amina
Yes, especially slow process, long term sustainable one is what would have a better impact in my opinion. However, if we think about quick changes and again, I am citing here, Orlene Badu, who speaks about this idea of getting fixes quickly and changing the curriculum quickly, and she advises against that. Actually, she says that it should be a school effort because it's a system that we're trying to change.
00:13:18:21 - 00:13:33:23
Amina
And what happens when individuals try to change systems? Those institutions and systems end up changing the society. And therefore, we will be hopefully living in a better world.
00:13:34:00 - 00:13:55:15
Thank you so much, Amina, for your time today and for sharing these really practical and inspiring tips. I will include the links to your LinkedIn, website, and the book you recommended in the show notes so listeners you can find that easily in the show notes. Now, if you have a question that you'd like us to answer or topics that you'd like us to pitch for the podcast, you can contact us via Facebook, Instagram or the website: tesolpop.com
00:13:55:18 - 00:14:13:21
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