As the title and theme for JALT2024 is Moving JALT into the Future: Opportunity, Diversity, and Excellence, this short piece focuses on the challenges and benefits of diversity that we have experienced throughout our personal and professional lives. Based on a combined total of more than 75 years living as “visible minorities” in England, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, mainland China and elsewhere, we briefly discuss what it has meant for us to be such minorities over all those decades in all of those places, while acknowledging that not all differences are visible. We also distinguish between academic expertise in diversity versus decades of lived experience, as we believe that the most positive and impactful work in this area needs to be able to draw on and combine both.
As the title and theme for JALT2024 is “Moving JALT into the Future: Opportunity, Diversity, and Excellence,” we would like to focus this short, personal piece on the challenges and benefits of diversity. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the origins of the word “diverse” can be traced back to the 14th century, when it originally meant: “different in kind, not alike, essentially different” (Harper, 2024). In Middle English, the word could also mean “disagreeable, unkind, hostile,” with the more recent sense of “including and promoting persons of previously under-represented minority identities” not appearing until the 1990s (Harper, 2013). Today, for example, in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2024), diverse is defined as “including many different types of people or things” and “very different from each other.” However, defining a word is one thing; living it your whole life is quite another.
In the 1950s, Andy’s parents made the long and somewhat perilous journey by boat from what was then British Guiana in South America to the Colonial Motherland, England, where Andy and his siblings were born, so that they could have a better life. Indeed, it is possible that throughout all of human history, that is what has driven migration: the search for a better life for the next generation. But as many immigrants find, life in the new country is certainly different, though not always better (Curtis & Romney, 2006). At first, Andy’s family lived in one of the immigrant ghettoes in Birmingham, where many of the people looked like them, i.e., they were Brown. But like so many upwardly aspiring immigrant mothers, Andy’s mum was determined that they would move to a better neighbourhood, i.e., White. And so began his life-long journey as a “visible minority”: a phrase which has fallen out of favour in many countries and contexts, but which is still a clear and concise phrase to explain that someone looks different from the majority of the people around them (Curtis et al., 2023).
Liying has had her own unique journey, moving to Canada from China, where she was born, grew up, and educated. Being an Asian professor in a predominantly White, male university in a small town in the province of Ontario presented different diversity challenges. One of them relates to assumptions and expectations in terms of how Liying was perceived by a classroom full of mostly local, White students growing up with English as their first and only language, raised in small, provincial towns where encountering people who were different in any way from them was a rarity. Another challenge was respect for different and diverse ways of defining what ‘good’ teaching and learning look like (Cheng & Curtis, 2010; Curtis & Sussex, 2018). In a study of second-language students in Canadian universities, Liying and her co-author, Jenna Fox (2008) referred to this process as academic acculturation, which they defined as “the dynamic adaptation processes of linguistically and culturally diverse students engaging with the academic study cultures of Canadian English-medium universities” (p. 309). Within such a definition, acculturation was framed as a process where learning, relearning, and unlearning take place. And this process involves constant contact and dynamic interaction with different languages, cultures, and different ways of teaching and learning. To summarise this, Liying (2020) created the acronym CARE, which stands for: compassion, acquisition, respect, and evaluation.
It is, of course, important to acknowledge that not all differences are visible; for example, language. So, if someone is speaking a language that is different from that being spoken by the majority of the people around them, then that might be considered to be an “audible minority.” There are all kinds of differences that are not visible, but the thing about skin colour is that it is one of the relatively few differences that is visible at a distance. For most of the invisible differences, it is usually necessary to be in close proximity to a person, and to be with them for some time, before we can spot the difference(s). And here we are not talking about “race”—which has long been debunked as something we just made up; a social construct designed so that one group of people can oppress, colonise, enslave, declare war on, etc., another group of people—but which some world leaders running for president continue to weaponise so that they can get elected (again) (Curtis, 2022).
By now, Andy has lived for well over half-a-century as a “visible minority” in England, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, Mainland China and elsewhere. Liying, too, has also lived for decades as a visible minority in different countries. Therefore, for the two of us, diversity is not just something we have researched, published and presented on for decades, but it is something that we have lived every day for much of our lives. As such, our take on diversity is different from those who have not lived such a life, but who nonetheless consider themselves “experts” in the area of diversity. Furthermore, even though academic expertise can be claimed in certain areas, the experts who have no first-hand lived experience of what it is they claim to be experts in will always be limited in their understanding no matter how much literature they review or how much data they collect.
One important aspect of diversity that we appreciate from the perspective of life-time and long-term visible minorities, but which we do not hear mentioned often, is how challenging and problematic diversity can be. In our genuine desire to promote diversity, we sometimes fail to fully appreciate the potential benefits of a lack of diversity. For example, a room full of people who look and sound similar, who have come from similar socio-economic, educational, and other backgrounds are (much) more likely to get along well with each other than a room full of people all of whom come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to each other. Sameness can be quick and easy. Diversity can be difficult, time consuming and labour intensive.
Another challenge is the clumping and lumping together of disparate but equally important concepts, in this case, in the form of “DEIA”—much more easily pronounced as “IDEA”—standing for inclusion, diversity, equity and access/accessibility, to which “belonging” has recently been added. However, inclusion is not the same as diversity, diversity is not the same as equity, equity is not the same as access, and so forth. Furthermore, when we embark on our missions to make our workplaces more diverse, we should start by acknowledging all the factors that are actively working against such diversity, including racism, people holding onto inter-generational money and power, and right-wing, anti-immigration politics.
It is entirely understandable that those who have lived a lifetime of privilege mainly because of, for example, their skin colour and/or gender—after centuries and countless generations of such privilege—would be highly reluctant to give that up. If we were in their shoes, we would probably be reluctant to give that up too! But it is that resistance which accounts for the move in many countries to more far-right, populist politics and politicians in the USA, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. Thankfully, the 2024 elections in the U.K. and France gave us some glimmers of hope on that front.
As international educators and language teacher-learners, we know the benefits of diversity, as many of us can see those benefits every day in our classrooms and in our workplaces. And for us two, in our daily lives, there too do we see the benefits of diversity, every time our family gets together, representing as we do, India, China, Europe and South America, with even just a few of us around the dinner table. However, after the long, multilingual, multicultural lives that we have led, we are also well aware of the challenges of diversity. We therefore applaud the JALT2024 Conference Committee for making this one of the focal points of this year’s 50th Anniversary event, to which we are very much looking forward to being a part of, learning from, and meeting many different peoples from many different places.
References
Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (4th ed.). (2013). Cambridge University Press.
Cheng, L. (2020, April 7). Compassion, acquisition, respect, evaluation (CARE): Key to academic acculturation. Queen’s University. https://www.queensu.ca/hreo/together-we-are/compassion-acquisition-respe...
Cheng, L. & Curtis, A. (Eds.). (2010). English language assessment and the Chinese learner. Routledge.
Cheng, L., & Fox, J. (2008). Towards a better understanding of academic acculturation: Second language students in Canadian universities. Canadian Modern Language Review, 65(2), 307–333. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.65.2.307
Curtis, A. (2022). The new peace linguistics and the role of language in conflict. Information Age Publishing.
Curtis, A., Effiong, O., & Romney, M. (2023). When visible minorities lead visible majorities. In H. Reinders (Ed.), Language teacher leadership: Insights from research and practice (pp. 181–208). Palgrave Macmillan.
Curtis, A., & Sussex. R. (Eds.). (2018). Intercultural communication in Asia: Education, language and values. Springer.
Curtis, A., & Romney, R. (Eds.). (2006). Colour, race and English language teaching: Shades of meaning. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Harper, D. (n.d.). Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved July 20, 2024, from https://www.etymonline.com/
Andy Curtis (PhD) is a Specially Appointed Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Macau. From 2015 to 2016, Dr. Curtis served as the 50th President of the TESOL International Association. He has (co)authored and (co)edited 200 publications, presented to 50,000 language educators in 100 countries, and his work has been read by 100,000 language educators in 150 countries.
Liying Cheng (PhD) is Professor and Dean at the School of Education, City University of Macau. Prior to joining the City University of Macau, she has been Professor and Director of Assessment and Evaluation Group at the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. Her seminal research on washback illustrates the global impact of large-scale testing on instruction, and the relationships between assessment and instruction—with $2.4 million CAD of research grants and more than 170 publications.
Plenary Abstract
50 Years of JALT – And a Journey of More Than a Century
To say that life is a journey is to invoke a saying so well known that it is sometimes thought of as a cliché. However, in the case of international educators, the metaphor of the life-long journey is especially apt, and one which brings to mind the famous poem by Robert Frost, The Road not Taken. Published in 1915, the poem concludes: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” Now, after 50 years of life as an association, JALT can look back at half-a-century of change and challenges, of growth and development. And likewise, so shall we two, as JALT’s first ever joint plenary co-speakers, be reflecting on our combined journeys, together yet in different directions, of a total of more than a century by now, covering dozens of countries, working with thousands of teachers, and travelling more than a million kilometres, around the world and back again. Ending, in some ways, where we began, and peering, tentatively, into some possible futures, including the end of the EFL/ESL distinction, the end of a historical monopoly on the ownership of English by a select few countries, and the recent and important rise of English as an international language, owned by all, used by all. In relation to the conference themes, we will also be sharing our personal and professional experiences of trials and tribulations, joys and pains, highs and lows in relation to opportunity, diversity, and excellence.
Workshop Abstract (Andy Curtis)
The New Peace Linguistics: Words and Worlds, War and Peace
Although the idea of Peace Linguistics (PL) has been around for decades, the practice of PL is much more recent, and until recently PL in the field of TESOL was defined and described mainly in terms of English language teachers working with English language learners to help them use non-threatening language that would not upset anyone, and thereby avoid conflict. In addition to adding more to the already-full plates of such teachers and students, much of the PL work was heavy on the “P” for Peace but light on the “L” for Linguistics or Language Study (i.e., with little, if any, deep-level systematic analyses of any language). Consequently, PL was re-defined as “an area of applied linguistics, based on systematic analyses of the ways in which language is used to communicate/create conflict and to communicate/create peace. PL is interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as peace studies/peace education and conflict resolution/transformation, bringing those together with fields such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, including text/genre analysis” (Curtis, 2018). Out of that re-defining came a new peace linguistics (NPL) that focuses on the language of the most powerful people in our world today, as it is they—sadly not us, as language teachers and learners—who have the power to end the war or to end the world. How they use language can affect us all. Therefore, NPL dives deep into the language of those people, to help us make a more peaceful and less war-torn world.
Workshop Abstract (Liying Cheng)
Assessing for Student Success
In the present educational climate, teachers are continually faced with complex assessment issues. There is a great deal of discussion now about alignment as a guiding principle for high-quality assessment; that is, the degree of agreement amongst standards/examinations, curriculum, learning outcomes, assessment tasks (including tests) and instruction. Alignment, along with validity, reliability, fairness, consequences, and practicality, are viewed as central aspects of assessment practice which supports learning. Assessment serves as the key process to check on learning and provide essential information to teachers. Assessment is an ongoing, iterative, and cyclical process of supporting students throughout teaching. In this sense, teaching and assessment is one integral and interconnected process. Teachers need to constantly ask themselves: Have my students learned? And how well have they progressed as a result of my assessment practices? For teachers to support student learning through assessment, teachers need to engage themselves as well as their students in the discussion of assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. We know that alignment and assessment of, for, and as learning ultimately empower our students’ language development.
