Rule Ethnicity Out

I feel like I have to blog about this because it left me feeling very uneasy after class today. I think that we have to be careful to give due regard to objectivity in our class discussions. In the conversation regarding the teaching of ESL to the Spanish-speaking population, the assertion was made that anglo-saxon ESL teachers were more likely to carry an assimilation agenda. I feel like this assertion is not only impossible to prove, but it is a social attitude that misses the point of what we are trying to study at the University. I maintain and would like to strongly emphasize that ethnicity as an isolated variable has no bearing on an instructor's pedagogical philosophy. That kind of statement leaves our scholarly effort vulnerable to myriad criticisms, not the least of which is carrying a reverse-racist agenda ourselves. So what do we do? I think we can say anecdotally that among a population sector in a given location there are palpable social attitudes that manifest themselves in the classroom in the form of an assimilation agenda. But we have to focus on the fact that they are social and language attitudes that are born of a person's life experience, not of their ethnicity that decides the kind of agenda / pedagogical philosophy carried by an instructor. In other words, it is not the instructor's ethnicity, but rather the context in which they were raised and educated that leads to their social and language attitudes. If we could create an experiment that controlled for the social attitudes that are manifest in language and its instruction, I am very confident that we would find no significant difference in the pedagogical philosophies of ESL instructors when categorized solely on ethnic terms.