Page 268 - Beyond Methods

256 Ensuring social relevance
Taking into consideration that English is a global language, Cor- tazzi and Jin (1999) suggest three types of cultural information that can be used in preparing teaching materials:
• target culture materials that use the culture of a country where English is spoken as a first language;
• source culture materials that draw on the learners’ own culture as content; and
• international target culture materials that use a variety of cul- tures in English and non-English-speaking countries around the world.
This suggestion is based on the recognition that both local and global cultures, not just the culture of the target language commu- nity, should inform the preparation of materials for learning and teaching an L2. This is one sure way of ensuring social relevance in the L2 classroom.
Expanding Possibilities
Ensuring social relevance in the L2 classroom is closely linked to the pedagogy of possibility discussed in chapters 1 and 2. Recall that a pedagogy of possibility demands for us to take seriously the social and historical conditions that create the cultural forms and interested knowledge that give meaning to the lives of teachers and learners. As I have argued elsewhere (Kumaravadivelu, 2001), the experiences participants bring to the classroom are shaped not only by the learning and teaching episodes they have encountered in the past but also by a broader social, economic, and political en- vironment in which they grew up. These experiences have the potential to affect classroom practices in ways unintended and un- expected by policy planners, curriculum designers, or textbook pro- ducers.
Two examples, one from Sri Lanka and another from South Africa, demonstrate how life in the street can easily influence les- sons in the classroom. Canagarajah (1999) reports how Tamil stu- dents of English in the civil war–torn Sri Lanka offered resistance to Western representations of English language and culture. He shows how the students, through marginal comments and graphics, actually reframed, reinterpreted, and rewrote the content of their