On Heritage Languages…

    All of us who grew up in the American public school system learned early on that Patrick Henry, in courageous defiance, uttered the phrase "Give me liberty or give me death". The context in which this speech was delivered was not without parallel to our current context. Of course, Henry delivered this line as part of a greater appeal to the Virginia government to join the cause for American revolution, and its legacy seems to permeate the very fabric of our existence. Before we are able to understand the concept of what could potentially be impediments thereto, the dogma of freedom and liberty are pushed upon us until we all feel the urge to chant call and response across the centuries with Mr. Henry himself. The problem with the liberal pursuit of freedom carried on and praised in the American cultural tradition by the likes of Thoreau, Steinbeck, Emerson, Whitman, Abbey and others is the failure to acknowledge the subjectivity of experience that comes with "freedom". It is curious the way we perceive things is rarely universal. What may be free to me (blogging contently on my Zimmerman library computer) is definitely not free to the guy who looks strikingly like my uncle, earning considerably less, but diligently completing his tasks sweeping the floor around the computer station. By the same token, the way I teach Spanish to the people who have grown up in similar circumstances to my own will necessarily look different than when someone else teaches Spanish to a general population class in SSL, or even if I myself teach Spanish in the SSL context.

    So where is this all going, you may ask (assuming you've made it this far). The parallel that can be drawn from this seemingly tangential aside is that Heritage language instruction was born out of the same circumstance. It was born out of the realization that what looked like a "good way" to learn a language in one context was not meeting the needs of a large population who had lived experience with the language in other contexts. In her latest publication, Kramsch calls for, "an ecologically oriented pedagogy that approaches language learning and language use not just as an instrumental activity for getting things done but as a subjective experience, linked to a speaker's position in space and history, and to his struggle for the control of social power and cultural memory". If we dissect such a statement, we realize that there are powerful implications. Language, in Kramsch's view is not adequately attended to by a "natural method" or a "communicative approach" because language and life are necessarily experiential. The language we use is a reflection of our existence. This is not something that is unique to SSL or SHL per se, but it is a discussion worth toying with for the purpose of my current blog.

When we've talked in class about who can be SHL vs. SSL teachers, and what qualitative differences exist between the two programs offered by our department, there is an important distinction to underscore. That distinction is not which program does better at attending to the type of pedagogy called for by Kramsch. I believe that both programs take great pride in trying to instill the spirit of Kramsch's goal into their instructors. The difference is a foundational philosophy. The field of SLA research can talk about "what we know" as a discipline and discuss patterns of language learning, metrics regarding common tendencies in language acquisition, and methods that have been fine tuned to enhance the intake/uptake/acquisition of conceptual language knowledge. I will be the last person you will hear downplay the importance of this type of research. I think that it informs language instruction universally, and can and should be incorporated into any method for teaching heritage languages. Where I find a deficiency in the SLA discipline for attending to Heritage language pedagogy is that it has generally regarded a language in the context of a code to be learned and mastered instead of a lived experience. It is comforting to know that the field of Pragmatics takes this lived experience of language as a point of departure and is beginning to make inroads in the SLA community at large. Unfortunately, however, it is not something we are seeing in the textbooks yet. (It is important to note that Heritage Language textbooks are generally not much better at attending to Pragmatics.)

The difference we see in SHL is that it takes for a point of departure the notion that language is an inextricable component of a person's existence. Indeed, language is the most formidable system we have to make meaning and communicate ideas beyond a basic sentimental/emotional level. As noted in Kramsch's citation, SHL pedagogy emphasizes the link in language to " a speaker's position in space and history, and his struggle for control of social power and cultural memory." We see this on a daily basis in SHL. When I first heard the term decolonization I was skeptical in that I viewed myself as a child of the Patrick Henry tradition, always having been free to think, read, write whatever it was that suited my family, community and heritage in the best interest of the collective. It turns out that this is not the case. It is amazing to me that subjects such as civil rights, Chicano history, New Mexico history and circumstances that lead to our becoming a state and designing our constitution the way we did have quickly been forgotten. Things as recently as the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid in the 1960s have all but been forgotten by the New Mexico education system. Land grants, though they figure prominently in New Mexico's history, are not something highlighted in our history classes. Instead we get civil war battles at Glorieta, Billy the Kid, the Pueblo Revolt, and Oñate as topics we learn. The point to all this tirade, is not that we need to radically change the education system (perhaps we do, but not for the purposes of this blog) but rather that control of social power and cultural memory is linked to language in the most essential ways. Furthermore, the maintenance of this control is premeditated, measured, and comprehensive.

Indeed it is only through programs like SHL, only available at the University level, only available to those who were successful at mastering the tradition of liberty as preached by Patrick Henry, that people are even granted access to an alternate perspective. In my class this semester, only people who had taken Chicano studies knew who Cesar Chavez was, only two knew of Corky Gonzales and Reies Lopez Tijerina, and none of them knew that the national guard was called out in the 1960s to restore order in Tierra Amarilla. This is the reason why there needs to be a separate track. I have myriad concerns about what is being sacrificed to achieve this, but this is one of the few tools we have to attempt to mend the link between a birthright language and our collective subjectivity as "manitos". Our position in space and history remains a mystery because we have not demanded control of our cultural memory at an institutional level. Did we ever stop to ask ourselves what led to the differences (I don't even have to mention them because you know what they are if you grew up or spent enough time in Burque) between Rio Grande / Highland / Valley when compared to Albuquerque Academy / Sandia Prep / La Cueva? Probably not until you got to college, had become conversant in the rhetoric of the American revolution, and were already harboring ambitions of moving to that side of town and sending your kids to the latter kind of schools.