Liverpool IATEFL Talk: Are You A Social Justice Warrior?

I have had many requests - well, one or two :) -  for my recent talk at the Teacher Development / Global Issues Special Interest Group  at the IATEFL Conference. 

Here you are - hot off the ACC podium at King’s Dock in Liverpool.

Are You a Social Justice Warrior?                                               

·         How do we create lessons to ….?

·         What activities can we do…..?

·         How do develop our own approaches…?

 What struck me as unusual was that the sub-questions somehow affected the function of the main question. Was it rhetorical or redundant? Well, neither, really but it served to point to the embedded subtext of Presupposition:  Go ahead, be a social justice warrior!

Let’s consider other language features whereby additional meaning can be conveyed

A  LANGUAGE

a) Ambiguity

Different interpretations can be generated from each of the following headlines:                        

                                                 

                i)         THREATENING FEMINISM.

                   ii)         San Jose cops kill man with a knife.

                  iii)        Milk drinkers are turning to powder.

At i) Threatening can be the gerund with feminism as its object, the thing being threatened; or threatening as the gerundive is describing feminism which is threatening someone or something else.

In ii) our focus is on the with a knife phrase, which can be adjectival, qualifying man; or it can be adverbial, modifying kill - each rendering quite different in sense.

iii) Forces us to look at the verb more closely: is it the ordinary verb turn with the adverbial to, expressing a preference; or is it the phrasal verb turn to, which conveys that those who drink milk are undergoing metamorphosis to a pile of dust?

Ambiguity was used very effectively by the Delphic oracle!

b) Implicature:

 This is a delightful device in that what is not said can actually be understood!

I may say: ‘That’s a lovely outfit you’re wearing today’ and that is clearly complimentary.

However, by laying stress on the word today, I am immediately implying that your dress sense usually leaves something to be desired.

A further comment, ’I’ve always liked you in that’, with the appropriate emphasis, can convey my opinion that you wear that old rag much too frequently!

 c) Connotations: Here we refer to associations we make with words and images. Below the Dior poster promotes a fragrance for men.  The word sauvage conveys a sense of the suave, the manly; the handsome, edgy actor, Johnny Depp, further strengthens that image.   But a prankster, by adding the letter ‘s’ and an image of a banger on a fork, has ruined that cool component and completely changed our perception.       

We need to be aware of how language use can greatly affect our understanding of things.

B.  Perceptions and Attitudes

                              

 

 These images go some way to showing how our view on things may be distorted as do the following concepts.

Perception: how we understand information received from our senses - what our eyes tell us about the world.                                                           

Perspective: the cognitive framework through which we see the world around us - our ‘glasses’ filtering what we see.

Attitude: this is a mental and emotional construct; it’s the ‘colour’ of lenses through which we interpret the world.

 Our perception of the world is like a huge mosaic, and we continually work on it to maintain coherence.

Cognitive Dissonance: the psychological stress felt when holding simultaneously contradictory ideas, values, etc. – when our mosaic loses cohesion.

In the 2014 Referendum, the question being voted on was, Should Scotland be an independent country? As someone then firmly in the NO camp, I was upset to see the YES group had purloined the saltire as their symbol. There it was, the St Andrew’s cross, representing for me nationality, culture, identity, being associated with a set of values contrary to mine.

                Finally we look at Polarisation: the movement of views towards the opposite extremes. It is rather like the Marty Feldman, eyes-wide-apart image, but refers to beliefs at the level of the group rather than the individual.

               This device is greatly used in advertising, politics and the social media whereby jingles, slogans and algorithms repeat the message to gain commitment and group affiliation. Brexit is an example of a determined effort to polarize political positions. An extreme position is the reductionism that if not black, then white.

C. ISSUES

An issue for us is something important, something we care about.  But issues can easily be clouded by emotions.

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was set in the conservative backdrop of a private school for girls in 1930’s Edinburgh.  Brodie, the main character, is iconoclastic: smoking, embracing Mussolini’s fascism and imposing her beliefs on her young students. And it ended in tears: the student she modelled on herself joined a convent while another, embracing Franco’s cause, was killed in Spain.

This exemplifies my point that it is an arrogance to see our perspective, our personal mosaic, as the right one. In addition, imposing that on our students is emphatically not our role!

 D. WHAT TO DO?        

1) Raise awareness – students can research selected issues for class presentations, either in groups or individually.

2) Extend knowledge  - students can design current-affairs quizzes for  each other, take part in Model United Nations conferences, in public speaking contests, etc..

3)  Develop analytic and oral skills - students debate well-supported, contrasting opinions on topical themes. They can have guided discussions after watching Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, films which differ on how to face global warming.

4)  Humour can be incisive and memorable. Students can enjoy rich language practice in unpacking Its semantic complexities.

In our first example learners can discuss what they understand from Mr Tyson’s response to a frequently-asked question.       

 

Students can explore what is wrong Stephen Colbert’s  cross-eyed, inward-looking perspective.

  To comprehend the cultural content of the climate cartoon, students need to know the Humpty Dumpty rhyme. Here the composer shares an omniscient perspective with the reader – we know there is undoubtedly going to be a great fall!  We can ask what they think this is an allegory of; is it political in nature; could it relate to poor decision-making, false promises, etc? While I don’t condone the ‘livable’ spelling error in the final one (L), that is one for you to work on yourselves.

       

 

My final point is that as teachers our role is to guide our learners to become informed, contemplative, articulate citizens of the future.                                                                                                                     But in doing so, we must take care not to perpetuate the crime of Miss Jean Brodie!

Hope you enjoyed it!

Last week someone ‘informed’ me that then the Catholic Easter was being celebrated (What about us Proddies,then?) and that this week Greeks would be celebrating the religious Easter – hmmm! 

Anyway, for those celebrating the other, the Orthodox Easter:       

                                              Kalo Pascha wherever you be!