Who's Asking the Questions? an attempt to research race, ethnicity and teachers

Barbara Kamler

Deakin University

Jo-Anne Reid

University of Ballarat

Ninetta Santoro

Deakin University

Paper prepared for AARE Annual Conference

Brisbane

December, 1997

It all seemed very straightforward. We knew the rules of the game. In

August 1996 we applied for a small Australian Research Council grant.

The aim of our project was to understand the ways in which

overseas-born-and-educated non-native English-speaking teachers are

positioned by their colleagues, and the factors which contribute to

their success or failure as teachers within the Victorian education

system.

Our idea for the project emerged from an earlier mentored seeding grant

where Santoro (1997) examined the experiences of two

Chinese-born-and-educated student teachers on their three-week

practicum in Melbourne secondary schools. Her investigation of the way

student teacher identities were constructed by their supervising

teachers linked student teacher performance with ethnicity, status as

non-native speakers of English, and gender. What we saw and understood

as the racist attitudes of one supervising teacher, in particular,

raised serious concerns for us about how far racist discourses might

extend beyond this particular student teacher/supervisor relationship

and the wider implications for teacher education.

Using this study as a pilot we developed the small ARC application. In

institutional terms, we were performing to task. Mentored seeding

grants have as a condition of funding the promise that they will be

developed into small ARC grant applications. Having met this demand,

we endured the usual period of waiting and in November 1996 received

notice that our ARC application had been successful. The $20,000 we

had requested, however was reduced to $12,000. We were later told this

was because the demands for funding were high, and the pool of money

accrued from Large ARC grants, too small to meet that demand. The

university committee, in its wisdom, elected to distribute less money

to more people. Disappointed, but thankful our $20,000 had not been

reduced to $5,000 like some of our colleagues, we began to imagine how

to reduce the scope of our study to meet the funds we now had available

to us.

The next step was to develop an ethics application for both University

and Department of Education approval, as all funding would be withheld

until University ethical clearance had been completed. Our first

application (to the University) was lodged in February 1997 ÐÐ and

while we awaited approval, we began to develop the questionnaire that

constituted the first part of our study. As the period of funding was

one year only, we felt under great time pressure to get started as

quickly as possible in order to achieve our multiple goals.

We received ethics clearance in April, however, this was conditional

on amending the Plain Language Statement and Consent Form for

Principals. It appeared to the University Ethics Committee that our

Principals' Questionnaire was slightly problematic. Our research

design, now constrained because of the reduction in funding, was

revised to make the questionnaire serve a purpose which, in the

original design, would have been obtained through interview. On paper

now, it appeared as if we were asking Principals to assess the

competence of our target group of teachers. Consequently we spent more

days amending these statements to satisfy the Committee's concerns,

resubmitted our amendments, and were granted final clearance in May.

Having received both financial support and ethical clearance, we now

assumed that we were finally able to work with our planned research

design. But this was our mistake.

At the time of writing this paper (November 1997), we have still not

yet commenced our project. The necessary approval from the Department

of Education has still not been received and our access to government

secondary schools has been denied. The protracted period of

correspondence between ourselves and the Department of Education, their

continued demands for more and different information ÐÐ and the final

rejection of our proposal, has been followed by an appeal and on-going

in-person negotiations to gain access via the intervention of our Dean

and Head of School. Our competency as researchers has in the meantime

been called into question by a recent letter from the Deputy Vice

Chancellor (Research), reminding us that expenditure must occur in the

year of the grant and that our failure to do so raises 'difficult

questions' which 'relate to adequate planning of the project and even

whether the grant was necessary or appropriate.'

In this paper we open our own research practice to scrutiny, as we

attempt to evaluate the practical and theoretical tools of our research

trade. The paper will document and elaborate our experience of

attempting, ethically, to research politically 'sensitive' issues in

the current political and social climate. We present it as a

cautionary tale for other researchers, and as an indication of the ways

in which we think that research ground rules may be shifting in an

increasingly conservative climate. This leaves us asking ourselves and

our colleagues in the wider research community: Who's Asking the

Questions?

Why were we asking the questions?

There are a number of reasons why we see our project on the issue of

racism in Australian society as particularly significant for

educational research at the present time. Recent Victorian government

policies on teaching Languages Other Than English (LOTE) have created a

demand for teachers who can speak and teach Asian languages in

particular. However, the effects of this demand are not simple, and

the LOTE policies have to be seen, post-Hanson, as susceptible of

criticism from within the mainstream teaching profession in Victoria.

Criticism of the employment of LOTE teachers and the funding of LOTE

programs has begun to be voiced in some school staffrooms, especially

given loss of employment in the mainstream school sector as a result of

concurrent government policy moves towards school closures. Most LOTE

teachers, particularly teachers of Asian languages are overseas born

and educated non-native speakers of English. When Rong and Preissle

(1997: 282) note that "[i]mmigrant minority teachers are more likely to

be convenient scapegoats in political and economic crisis when nativist

feelings are high", they point to one of the problematic factors that

does characterise the experience of overseas- born-and-educated

non-native speakers of English in many schools in these 'hard times'.

This is that the 'naturally acquired' language skills of native

speakers of some Asian languages are more desirable in members of the

teaching profession than the skills and knowledge of many English-only

speaking teachers whose teaching 'range' is therefore much more

limited.

However Asian-language speaking teachers form only part of the group

upon which our study focuses. While overseas-born-and educated

non-native English speaking teachers are increasingly entering the

Victorian teaching service, anecdotal reports suggest that there are

also significant numbers resigning from the teaching profession each

year. In the interests of our own work as teacher educators, we want

to find out why. We are therefore interested researchers, as all of us

are increasingly working with overseas students, and supervising them

in teaching practice situations.

Mills and Buckley (1992) point to a number of 'sensitive areas' for

educators who need to accommodate cultural diversity. These include

areas such as culturally-defined perceptions of, for instance: dress,

beauty, respect for authority, maturity, communicating acceptance and

rejection, and showing authority. These are areas which our study will

investigate in relation to the experience of overseas-born-and-educated

non-native speakers of English in the professional settings of schools,

rather than in the pre-service training institutions in which Mills and

Buckley’s research was carried out.

We have also taken account of the need to investigate the differences

between the experiences of overseas-born-and-educated non-native

speakers of English in different cultural-geographical settings.

Zimpher and Ashburn (1992), highlight the extent to which many people

who chose to enter the teaching profession ÐÐ and thus the colleagues

of overseas-born-and-educated non-native speakers of English ÐÐ are

often 'culturally insular", and claim that this "may be a function of

limited access to diversity and little tolerance toward difference'

(p.44). As well as addressing the social culture of schools as

workplaces, though, we consider that our project may be significant in

terms of an associated need to 'look as well to the nature of the

teacher preparation program as a way to broaden the learning and

awareness of our current students, particularly since they do not

reflect the diverse teacher population that we ultimately seek to

establish' (Zimpher and Ashburn, 1992:44).

Although Zimpher and Ashburn (1992) are speaking from a North American

context, where it is to be expected that concerns such as these have

been raised for several decades now, it is still surprising that here

in Australia there is so little information available even about the

numbers and demographic characteristics of overseas-born-and-educated

non-native English speaking teachers. Their presence therefore remains

largely `invisible' as a proportion of the teaching population. This

lack of attention may be read as simply implying that the individuals

comprising this group of teachers make a successful transition to the

Australian education system, and that 'there is no problem here'.

However, Santoro's (1997) findings suggest otherwise. They suggest

that teachers who are overseas-born-and-educated non-native speakers of

English may be positioned within racist discourses in our schools and

may well be regarded by colleagues as ineffective and incompetent

because of this. As the numbers of overseas-born-and-educated

non-native speakers of English who are graduating from Victorian

universities are increasing to meet the Victorian education system's

increasing demand for LOTE teachers, the need to investigate and make

visible the experiences of this particular group of teachers is made

all the more urgent.

Our focus on a minority group of teachers, many of whom are also

members of racial groups which have become a political target for

disempowered and disenchanted mainstream minority groups, it seems to

us, also raises a number of questions about the rules of the research

game in a post-Hanson Australia. As one commentator writes:

When we know that researchers have played a key historical role in

legitimating biological racism through the way they constructed

scientific concepts, this awareness should present a challenge to us to

critically examine our own present concepts too, so that we know who

stands to benefit from our theoretical work in constructing tools for

our own trade and from our empirical work in using these tools.

(Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990, p.98)

The Howard government is embarrassed at home and overseas by growing

international condemnation of the apparent violation of Human Rights

argued by supporters of the Aboriginal land rights issue post Mabo.

Increasingly, it has had to endure even more embarrassing condemnation

regarding the poor health, housing and infant mortality rates among

Aboriginal Australians. It is therefore concerned to downplay any

public accounting of the sensitivity and origins of these issues.

Howard's inability to provide the public apology so clearly necessary

in the wake of the Stolen Generation inquiry and his blind eye towards

the content of Hanson's explicitly racist agenda in this country are

all indicators of the extent to which the New Times in which we are

living are very much a sorry product of our history. As,

historically, both research and researchers in the natural and social

sciences have been deeply implicated in constructing and authorising

racism in its many forms and realisations, we must be particularly

concerned with the need to ensure this does not continue into the

present time.

How were we framing our questions?

Our study specifically aims to collect data on the scope and nature of

the population of overseas-born-and-educated non-native English

speaking teachers in Victorian state secondary schools. It seeks also

to examine the experiences of current overseas-born-and-educated

non-native English speaking teachers in regional, rural and

metropolitan schools, and make visible the extent to which social,

cultural and personal factors contribute to any resignations from the

teaching profession. Finally, our project aims to establish

theoretical frameworks which contribute to understandings of racism and

multicultural education.

Accordingly, we designed our study in two parts. The first is a

demographic study of the population of teachers in Victorian state

secondary schools who are overseas-born-and-educated non-native

speakers of English (we soon began using the acronym 'OSBENS' amongst

ourselves). The second is a Case Study of twelve teachers from rural,

regional and metropolitan areas, both male and female, both currently

and formerly employed. In what follows, we first discuss the

demographic study, and then the case study, in a chronological account

of our progress. The two aspects of our research design are clearly

related, in that the demographic study provides the ground against

which particular case studies can be read. It would also assist in

identifying potential participants for the Case Study, although this is

not its main purpose. The information collected from the survey is

designed to serve a mapping function, and to make visible the

diversity, location and characteristics of this group of people.

We believed, as researchers, that our survey asked questions, the

answers to which would be useful not only to inform educational policy

but also to ourselves as teacher educators, and to one of us as a

teacher educator of LOTE teachers. As this demographic information is

not currently available, we assumed it would also be of interest and

value to the Department of Education. This was our second mistake.

The process of developing the survey made visible to us the

complexities of examining and reporting on the experiences of

representative members of this group of overseas-born-and-educated

non-native speakers of English without essentialising and positioning

them as 'other'. Even the acronym we adopted to refer to them ÐÐ

'OSBENS' ÐÐ a shortcut for a long and unwieldy term, creates a sense

that overseas-born-and-educated non-native English speaking teachers

are a definable and homogeneous group. In the initial design for the

Case Study we intended to interview eight 'OSBENS' , and each of their

principals and subject coordinators in order to get a detailed and

triangulated perspective on the nature of the teachers' experiences.

These twenty-four interviews were to be audiotaped and systematically

transcribed, and returned to participants for verification and

approval. While such methodology was principled, systematic and

'approved', we realised, after University ethics approval had been

granted, that such a design not only made 'OSBENS' objects of a

potentially racist discourse, but at the same time positioned

principals, coordinators, and ourselves, as the (re)producers of this

discourse.

We abandoned this design, but yet we did not want to lose the

opportunity to obtain some qualitative sense of how 'OSBENS operated in

the school context and, more particularly, were viewed by colleagues

and school administrators. Accordingly, we reduced the number of

interviews to twelve ÐÐ OSBENS only ÐÐ, removed the principals and

coordinators as people we would interview, and attempted to build into

the quantitative survey, a set of questions about teaching performance.

Thinking we would work within familiar discourses of Victorian teacher

effectiveness, we elected to use questions based on the Standards

Council of the Teaching Profession (SCTP) Dimensions of Teaching

(1995). A secondary principal who was asked to evaluate this

questionnaire found it "comprehensive". He "liked the format" and

"[w]ould find it easy to fill out or delegate".

However, in practice, this is the aspect of the questionnaire that was

found by many others to be problematic. It had been called into

question by our own University ethics committee in their request for us

to amend the Plain Language Statement and the letter to principals. We

needed to clarify that our intention was not to ask principals to

assess individual teachers. When the Department of Education also

raised questions about our 'intentions to assess', it became clear

that it was difficult for the Dimensions of Teaching guidelines to be

seen as anything other than an evaluative instrument, despite our

intentions.

What questions were we asking?

There were two parts to the demographic survey which we planned to send

to the 400 state secondary schools in Victoria. The first part was

designed to determine factual information about:

¥ the number of teachers currently working who are

¥ the countries of their birth, education and professional

¥ the length of time they have worked as a teacher,

¥ the length of appointment in their current school,

¥ the subjects they teach,

¥ positions of responsibility they hold in the school, and

¥ the number employed by that school who had resigned in the last five

The second part was based on the STCP Dimensions of Teaching (1995),

and called for comment about teachers' performance in the areas of:

subject area content knowledge, programs and curriculum; knowledge of

teaching and classroom management strategies; assessment and reporting

of student learning; effective communication skills within the school

community; and knowledge of professional policy and professional

development opportunities.

In developing our questionnaire for principals, we sought consultation

from a professional statistician. As we refined and developed

questions to maximise the efficiency of the instrument, we became aware

of the complex range of issues pertaining to this investigation of

difference. In particular, we found it extremely difficult for us to

speak about the 'objects' of our inquiry without, quite literally,

objectifying them as a group with particular shared, and 'problem'

characteristics. It seemed that the norm of the native

English-speaking Australian born and educated teacher had become the

standard against everything 'Other' was to be judged. For instance, we

asked questions phrased in the following terms:

¥ What is the age range of these teachers?

¥ What are their teaching subjects?

¥ How long have they been in Australia?

¥ How long have they been teachers in your school?

¥ How were they recruited to your school?

Our questions appeared to be representing 'these teachers' as a

homogeneous group who were identifiable as a group by their 'OSBENS'

status. In this way, our questions were presupposing a difference that

might not actually exist in the mind of the principal reading the

questionnaire. As Troyna notes:

In the very act of treating ethnic minority groups as a unit of

analysis in a research undertaking, the researcher may be culpable of

unconscious racism. That is, he [sic] may actually create a difference

associated with ethnicity that might not have occurred to those whom he

is researching (1993, p.112).

We became aware that we were asking about the working situations and

histories of teachers who are overseas-born-and-educated non-native

speakers of English in a manner which tended to homogenise and

essentialise them across race, ethnicity and gender. These are the

very differences that we were trying to highlight and represent. In

fact, the very nature of the shorthand acronym for our focus group,

OSBENS, like its parallel terms, LOTEB and NESB, clearly produces such

homogenisation in and of itself. Such terms speak a description of

this minority group's deficiency in terms of an assumed

English-speaking 'norm', as Skutnabb-Kangas notes:

Minority groups are seen as possessing integration-preventing

characteristics which cause their problems. They are treated

negatively, in terms of what they are not, do not have or do not

represent (majority-language-speaking middle-class majority members).

Terms like LEP- or NEP- children in the United States (Limited English

Proficiency, or No English Proficiency) [...] reflect this (1990, p.

87).

'These [OSBENS] teachers', as we were producing them in our questions,

were a group who were markedly different from other (non-OSBENS)

teachers ÐÐ not in terms of 'race' explicitly, but none the less in a

clearly racialised relation. As we set about the process of refining

these questions, we were anxious to account for our concerns about the

construction of racial difference in our own language as much as

possible. The dominant discourse was producing us in ways that were

anathema to our intent ÐÐ and in spite of our 'best intentions'. The

politics around naming and speaking about other people, let alone other

racial and cultural groups of people, is centred on the construction of

self and self identity:

In differentiating between groups we start from ourselves, and compare

with others, ie. differentiation presupposes images about the Others

that are possible only when we also have images about Self

(Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990, p.78, original emphasis).

As white, middle-class academic women, we were suddenly able to see

ourselves as particularly compromised in this regard. Current

scholarship on whiteness as a racialised position raises a number of

issues about the taken-for-granted of the mainstream researcher.

Whiteness has, at least within the modern era and within Western

societies, tended to be constructed as a norm, an unchanging and

unproblematic location, a position from which all other identities come

to be marked by their difference (Bonnett, 1996, p 146).

Our whiteness locates us all within the mainstream of the Australian

teaching population. And our gender as researchers is, in the late

1990's, not a problem for us in any categorical sense. However we

realise that we are also privileged in this regard. We do not face the

devaluation of our work that occurs for some feminist minority group

researchers who have focussed on other minorities. These researchers

are often placed in a 'double bind', when, as members of a minority

group, they focus their work outside of that group. Their work is

devalued because it is not based on the features which "are defined as

making them different" (Bhavnani and Phoenix, 1995, p.295). We must

therefore be concerned that our work is not based within our own

cultural identities. We are researching Others, the experiences of

whom we do not directly share. We have drawn significantly from the

work of Skutnabb-Kangas (1990) in this section, as she shares with us a

concern that the research endeavour around race and racism may often,

unreflexively, serve as much to legitimate and perpetuate forms of

racism as much as to resist and expunge them. Her solution is to

challenge educational researchers to "live up" to ethical criteria

recommended for practice by an international conference on

Intercultural Education over ten years ago. These are difficult

criteria for us to meet.

In a research economy where "survival of the fittest" makes it

difficult for all members of dominant ethnic groups to "see the

ideology in our own work", one precondition for the ethical conduct of

anti-racist research is

for majority group researchers to work in the interests of migrant

minorities and escape from ethnocentricity ... [They must] have

first-hand experience, affectively and cognitively, of using the

language and living in the culture of the minorities (Skutnabb-Kangas,

1990, p. 97).

Clarification of key concepts across languages is also necessary, she

claims, as is "a need for research to be done for and by the minorities

themselves" (p.98). As Rizvi (1990, p.7) shows, too, racist discourse

"is continually changing, being challenged, interrupted and

reconstructed" and "often appears in contradictory forms". The work of

Henry and Brabham (1994) focussing on the racism inherent in much

ostensibly 'well-intentioned' educational psychology and measurement

around Aboriginal children, for instance, provides a clear and telling

illustration of this.

Questioning the questions

While our ethics application to the Department of Education was being

processed, we were revising the questionnaire so that we could arrange

distribution of the forms to principals as quickly as possible. As we

noted earlier, although we were acutely aware of our obligations as ARC

researchers to expend the allocated funds within the one year of

funding, almost nine months later, the questionnaire has still not been

distributed.

During these nine months we have engaged in an extended series of

letter exchanges and conversations with representatives of the DOE,

trying to negotiate access to schools. Without engaging in detailed

analysis of that correspondence, we highlight in this section, both the

nature of the delay and the nature of our different views of research

legitimacy. Below we present a time line to capture the central points

of negotiation.

4 April Initial request to undertake research in DOE Schools

13 May DOE requests more information about case study (selection of

interviewees, nature of interview questions, why LOTE teachers should

be interviewed, why it is not possible to generalise from a small

interview population) and questionnaire (rationale for studying

secondary not primary, state not non-state schools, why questions from

SCTP have been omitted or included, why principals should make

judgments on teacher performance)

28 May Reply

8 July DOE requests more information about how interviewees will be

selected, why LOTE teachers are being interviewed; raises concern about

imposition on principal's time, ethics of asking principals to judge

teacher performance using STCP guidelines; recommends study be

reformulated to interview 6 teachers from the 22 Deakin partnership

schools (rather from a statewide survey) about their professional

development needs with respect to SCTP

2 August Reply (SCTP questions are dropped)

4 September Approval denied. 'Thank you for the additional information.

The Department of Education remains unconvinced of the value of this

research to the Department. Primarily we are not convinced that the

study, as proposed, will provide reliable data on which to base changes

in pre or in service for teachers. Consequently I cannot give approval

for this proposal.'

23 October Letter to Senior Manager DOE from Deakin University Senior

Manager requesting reconsideration, with documentation of above

correspondence

6 November Approval denied again

Phone message conveying review committee decision to deny access, with

request to return phone call

13 November DOE Senior Manager meets with Deakin Senior Manager and

Research team

17 November Research team faxes one page summary of project

18 November Research team and Deakin Senior Manager meet DOE Senior

Manager and three DOE staff to revamp survey questionnaire

25 November Revamped questionnaire submitted for DOE approval

The refusal of the DOE to engage with this project gives rise to a

number of possible readings as to why we have been unable to continue

with the project in the way that it was designed:

¥ a concern for workload for principals

¥ a fear of our uncovering racist practices in government schools

¥ unfamiliarity with a research project of this nature - the fact that

¥ mistrust of our professionalism as researchers, the implication being

Certainly, we now see our initial approach to the DOE as naive ÐÐ as

inextricably intertwined with issues of genre and political context.

Having received University Ethics approval in April, we were advised by

the DOE that our University Ethics application would also meet their

needs. Our initial letter on April 4 therefore, simply asked

permission from the DOE to conduct the study, and allowed the attached

university ethics application to speak for us. But it seems that was

also our mistake.

When we received the first DOE request for clarification in May we were

surprised, as it seemed to us the information requested was clearly set

out in the ethics application. When the second set of DOE requests and

suggestions were made in July, we began to read these as delaying

tactics, as it seemed from our perspective that every request for

information, was information we had already documented in our previous

letter. Further, we considered that the suggested DOE modifications

were not only reductive, but inappropriate to the research as it had

been funded by ARC.

In retrospect, it may well have been the case that we did not consider

the reading practices being employed by the DOE ÐÐ and the way these

were being shaped by the genre of ethics applications and the

post-Hanson political context in which we were all now operating.

Reading practices are dependent on the political and cultural contexts

in which texts are situated. The ethics application we submitted to

the university was taken from our small ARC application. The rationale

and methodology were copied exactly and as few modifications as

possible were made to save time (common practice for busy academics

negotiating increasing workloads). The application itself, however,

foregrounded issues of race and ethnicity and there was little

subtlety in our ways of expressing our aims. Our project title, 'Race,

Ethnicity and Survival: A Study of Overseas-Born-and-Educated Teachers

, our reference to the racist attitudes documented in Santoro's pilot

study and our stated goal of analysing race and ethnicity in the

teaching profession may not have been the most appropriate way of

selling our project in the context of a conservative state agenda and

what was at that time, a developing national tide of Hansonism. We

did not stop to consider that a study of race and ethnicity framed in

August 1996 (when we first made our ARC application) would of necessity

be read differently in April 1997 (when the DOE received our ethics

application). Nor did we consider that the need to theorise practice

for an ARC application in terms of issues of difference might be

inappropriate in an application to the DOE.

It may also be the case that we got the genre wrong. University ethics

applications are a genre peculiar to university settings, which may or

may not be read accurately by government agencies interested in

research for more pragmatic reasons. It takes time to learn how to

write university ethics applications and those of us who have had to

master the genre during the past five years, no longer see its demands

as peculiar. Having learned the conventions of the genre, its

strangeness becomes invisible to us and we assume it can be read

transparently. The categories of that application, however, do not

necessarily mean the same for government departments where the memo and

briefing paper are more common genres - and the expectations about the

utility of research may be different than the ARC funding body for whom

our initial application was written.

It is clear that when we were asked to summarise our project for our

meeting with DOE representatives on 18 November, we constructed a very

different genre: a single page summary of succinct prose, utilising

bold headings, highlighting the two parts to the study (questionnaire

and case study interview), the background, purposes and attaching a

copy of the questionnaire. This genre, more in keeping with the

institutional context of the DOE, then became the basis of discussion

and re-negotiation of the proposed survey questionnaire. It must be

said that this discussion was useful to us in revising the

questionnaire to incorporate DOE terminology more familiar to

principals. The addition of a few questions about the languages

spoken by the overseas-born-and-educated teachers, which were seen to

be useful to the DOE, was also useful to us, thus reinforcing our

belief that the survey could be beneficial to us both.

At the time of writing this paper. however, we are still answering

questions. Most recently it is the Director of Research of our

University who has written to us, demanding to know why it is that we

have not yet expended the allocated ARC funds when the period of

funding has almost expired. The two meetings with the DOE in November

have led us to revise and resubmit our questionnaire. Pending approval

we hope to send it to schools for return in April 1998. And so one year

after we believed we were commencing the project, we may finally be

positioned to ask the questions. The access for case study interviews,

however, has still not been granted.

The players and their positioning

As many of the DOE requests for more information centred on the case

study and the kinds of questions we would be asking teachers in the

interview, we decided to trial the questions we sent to the DOE (in our

letter of 28 May) to see if they were productive. We used existing

social and professional networks to arrange meetings with five teachers

working outside the state school system, one of whom had left teaching,

and four who remained working as teachers.

While we have not conducted any official interviews as yet, we are

already able to refine our interview questions on the basis of these

pilot interviews, and we are able, tentatively, to offer a provisional

mapping of the positions available to these teachers in relation to the

school system and the dominant mainstream culture. In the diagram

below, we are attempting to delineate two overlapping discursive fields

or domains of practice: the field of 'secondary school teaching in

Victoria', and the field of 'cultural difference'. That these are

discursive fields is important for our analysis: they are not fixed,

or physically marked. The boundaries, norms and truths of each

particular field remain provisionally held settlements at any

particular point in time and space. The subjects of these discourses

are constituted differently depending on their particular location

within each field, and, relationally, as they overlap.

This diagram represents the school system as a discursive field of

practice in which all these teachers are positioned as more or less

powerful subjects. A speaking subject of any discourse is one who has

taken up a position of some power so that she or he may be heard as an

agent for change and reform. These five teachers have all been

prepared to talk to us about their experiences as teachers marked by

ethnic difference in secondary schools. However, we suspect that

changes in education policy, the increasing insecurity about continued

employment, and the pressures against speaking out, prevent the four

LOTE teachers who are currently employed from naming, or claiming their

experiences as those of a culturally marked subject within the

education system.

None of these four teachers explicitly names their workplace

experiences as racist although three of the interviewees make claims of

racist treatment out of a school context. Elizabeth, a teacher of

Chinese background, believes that the taunts directed toward her by

students are the result of their ignorance or a misguided attempt to be

humorous.

At times you do have people ching-chonging you ... doing that eye

gesture. The student they don’t mean anything, right, but they just

think it’s very funny you know, in the classroom they can move their

eyes and things like that and they think it’s very funny. They don’t

realise that, that is not the right thing to do, right, but I don’t

think it is harmful. (Elizabeth, 1997)

Elizabeth also excuses her colleagues’ reluctance to participate in a

multicultural day organised at the school as the result of a demanding

workload. A staffroom suggestion that Pauline Hanson be called in to

address the staff as guest speaker is also dismissed by Elizabeth as an

attempt at a joke. Similarly, the reluctance by colleagues, other than

those of "ethnic background", to sign a petition calling for government

intervention in Pauline Hanson’s racially motivated claims, is

dismissed as apathy. She says:

They couldn’t be bothered. They couldn’t care less. Not that they are

supporting Pauline Hanson. (Elizabeth, 1997)

Marie, a teacher of Lebanese background, talks about harassment from

students that she has experienced in a teaching context, but does not

name it as such. She explains the razor blades put on her seat by

students, and the condoms hanging from the ceiling in one of her

classroom, as nothing more than a 'first week prank'.

It was my first week. And I feel, why not, it’s their privilege to try

and daunt the teacher? Sometimes they’re cute, but in that case it was

rather rude. (Marie, 1997)

Such treatment by students would seem to go beyond the limits of

acceptance for a first week prank and might be seen to reflect student

attitudes towards Marie as a woman and, or, a woman of cultural

difference.

All four teachers, including Mohammad, a teacher of Turkish descent,

and Tung, a teacher of Chinese background, have developed strategies to

minimise and deal with accusations of poor English language skills.

These strategies range from avoiding situations when they must speak

English, to writing most of what they say on the board.

I try while speaking French not to speak much English. It has worked

for me. I never say 'Take you shoes off', because the way I pronounce

it would sound like something else, and they would laugh. I don’t say

'Sit down' because if you happen to mispronounce it, we have laughter

everywhere. (Marie, 1997)

Even though the teachers do not name their experiences as racism and

prefer to explain them in other ways, three of them say they are

happiest in schools with high student and staff cultural diversity.

However each of them claims to have numerous teacher friends who have

experienced racism in their own schools.

I wouldn’t say there’s racism, right. Not at all.... but there are

others you know, who can say there’s racism (Irene 1997).

I’ve never felt that (racism) but your heart goes out to these young

Chinese teachers and so on ... there’s an adorable young Malay who

comes from Singapore. She used to come in tears and then the vice

principal would interfere. Too sweet to confront the arrogance of our

Australian students (Jeanne 1997).

I have one friend. He’s a maths teacher, the kids laugh at his

pronunciation (Mohammad 1997)

He told me that a student in his class told him "you’re not a teacher,

you’re too stupid" to his face (Tung 1997).

Due to increased demand for teachers of languages other than English

and the shortage of teachers who can fill these positions, particularly

Asian languages, it might be expected that the LOTE teachers we

interviewed would be in powerful and secure positions within their

schools. However, this not appear to be the case. Elizabeth speaks of

staff resentment at the expansion of the LOTE department at her school

while other departments are downsizing. Apart from teaching their

particular LOTES, and being seen to be important players in

multicultural days, the teachers feel the schools they work in do not

recognise the contribution they can make. Marie feels her ethnic

difference is valued only as an "element of curiosity" and Mohammad

feels insecure in what he can offer a school with a decreasing

population of students who are likely or able to choose to study his

particular LOTE. Elizabeth feels her most valuable role is to downplay

cultural and ethnic difference.

That’s how I see it right, like an ambassador, like cross culture you

know. We’re all the same in fact, right. We’re all the same although

you know our habits are different. We eat different foods you know.

We have good people we have silly people, we have dumb one right, So, I

just like people to know we’re all the same, you know. I like to help

out wherever I can. (Elizabeth, 1997)

There are parallels between the views expressed by the volunteer

participants in our pilot interviews and the findings of Van Dijk

(1992) in his work on discourse and the denial of racism. Van Dijk has

found that those involved in perpetuating racism often adopt a number

of strategies to downplay its significance or deny its existence.

These are strategies such as blaming the victim, reversing accusations

of racism, and attempting positive self representation in negative

discourse about minorities.

Our pilot interviews with the four teachers who are still practising

reflect a tendency of these particular teachers to accept

responsibility for the treatment they receive. They seem to believe

their success in the school as workplace depends on them minimising the

cultural difference between themselves and their students and

colleagues. According to Tung, the overseas-born teachers who have the

greatest difficulty in Australian schools are the ones who are not

Australian enough. He claims that it is important for minority group

teachers to 'be' more like the majority: to be able to take a joke, to

forgo old values for new. While this, in fact, may be the key to

survival for many overseas-born teachers, this assimilationist view

flies in the face of all we value in multiculturalism. However, we

suspect that teachers’ reluctance to name their experiences as racist

stems from their position as players on the research map we have

depicted above, in Figure 1. As well as being insiders to a discourse

of cultural difference, they are also positioned as insiders to the

discourse of secondary teaching. We have placed only one of the pilot

interviewees, Noel, a former science teacher of Indian background,

outside the mediating relations of multi discursive positioning. Noel is

certainly an insider to politics of

cultural difference but he is now an outsider to the education system,

having resigned from teaching some years ago. Of all the interviewees,

he is the only one prepared to name his experiences as racist, giving

examples of his own experience of racial abuse from students, examples

of overt discrimination from school administrators and colleagues. He

is now outside the discursive field of teaching, and from the 'safety'

of this position has named what he sees as several instances of racist

practice within that field. Yet he is unwilling to allow us to

interview his wife, a teacher still employed as a teacher, and still

an `insider’ to the system.

These pilot interviews have raised numerous questions for our study as

it waits to begin. Is it their status as insiders to the educational

system which produces in the practising teachers a reluctance to name

their experiences as racism? Are they fearful of accusing those they

teach and work for, as racist? Or are we, as researchers, interpreting

their experiences from a different perspective? Is our understanding

of racism different from theirs? And who are we to play the shots?

Who are we to be asking these questions?

As majority group researchers attempting to find ways of working and

teaching in the interests of migrant minorities, how can we hope to

have the 'first-hand experience, affectively and cognitively, of using

the language and living in the culture of the minorities' that

Skutnabb-Kangas (1990, p. 97, cited above) claims is essential for an

ethical research practice in this area. Should we take the advice of

the DOE and give up on our project? Is it all too hard? Are we making

too many mistakes? Our focus for this paper is on 'who's asking the

questions': and thus on our own research practice. We have indicated

how our own positioning as 'questioners' in relation to the object of

our inquiry needs to be examined. Feminist theory generally reminds us

of the obligation to scrutinise the position from which the subject of

research is observed and the norms of any analysis.

It is only after reflection on these issues that we can place ourselves

into the research relationship as interested participants in the

questioning process. Our own histories and investments as teachers,

teacher educators and researchers have clearly shaped and will continue

to shape our interpretations of the data, just as much as they have

shaped the methodology. Indeed, much of the motivation for the project

itself has sprung from our own different positions within these same

discourses, in their relation to a third discursive field, the

discourse of research itself. As we have demonstrated above, our

constitution as powerful speaking subjects of the university research

(and ethics) system, is neither absolute nor transcendental. In

relation to the discursive field of secondary teaching in Victoria, our

position as a research team is clearly not at all powerful ÐÐ we have

not even been able to gain access to the field on our own terms. And

it is clear from the small samples of correspondence we have provided

above, that, on our terms, we will not .

In Figure 2 (below) we attempt to extend our research map to include

ourselves, and the 'images about Self' that Skutnabb-Kangas (1990, p.

78) claims are originary to our images about Others. We have done this

in relation to the three discursive fields we have currently

considered. There will be others, of course, most notably the

discourse of gender, which has already emerged clearly as an important

aspect of all these relations, and which we anticipate will become

clearer as we are able to begin the research. Indeed, our interests

suggest that we will be looking for it!

Figure 2. Relations and Positioning in Discursive Fields

As we attempt to place ourselves on this research map, the complexity

of the discourse of academic research its relation to other fields

becomes immediately more apparent. Suddenly, in our 'ethical' efforts

to make explicit our own images of self, more complications arise.

Like all our research subjects in the pilot to date, for instance,

Ninetta and Barbara are clearly not disinterested academic researchers.

Both position themselves as also (simultaneously) subjects of

discourses of cultural difference. Ninetta, as a first-generation

Australian, marked by her name as of non-Anglo-Celtic background,

continues to experience the feeling of being culturally Other within

her life history. Barbara, whose American accent marks her with what

is mainly an exotic difference, feels herself less 'critically'

culturally marked in Australia than does Ninetta. After all, these

fields are themselves situated in mainstream discourses, media, and

other fields of social practice that, in 1997, value markings of

'American' culture quite differently from those of other cultures.

Jo-Anne (as a fourth generation Anglo-Australian) has experienced none

of this ethnic marking in Australia, yet she is also an interested

researcher with her own investments in this field. She has lived as a

young woman in other cultural settings where her Anglo ethnicity,

English language and pale skin colour clearly marked her as other than

mainstream. In spite of this difference within the research team,

however, we are, as a group, positioned as relatively powerful speaking

subjects in the research and university system in Victoria. Our

university Ethics committee, for instance, condones our practice. In

the field of secondary teaching, though, we are powerless to speak at

all: we may not even ask our questions.

Who'll answer the questions?

Even though our project has not yet begun, we have already journeyed a

great distance, and learned a great deal. Our inability to move

forward, to negotiate and deal with government instrumentalities in

this case, suggests that, in contesting the discursive norms and truths

of that field, from within our own, we may have constituted ourselves

as Other (and dangerous) within that field. We don't know who was

reading our submissions, we don't know how they were able to read them

from their own positions, and we are certainly only beginning to get to

know the relational space from which we might be able to gain a

speaking position in the institutional discourse of Victorian secondary

schooling. We want to ask our questions. We think they are important

questions to ask, and we will continue to try to address this as a

problem. In a pilot interview, Elizabeth warned us that silence, and a

lack of critical questioning much more comfortable for many of those

who are inside the teaching profession at the present time.

And the more people talk the more people get upset, the more people get

agitated, and the whole place actually not get happy, and the whole

situation change,

(Elizabeth, September 1997)

But her words also remind us that if the problem of

under-representation of ethnic minorities in the teaching profession in

Australia is to be addressed effectively, then people have to talk, and

the questions do have to be asked.

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