Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

[Conor Quinn]

Dia dhaoibh, a chairde!

One of the harshest aspects of language endangerment that I've seen is that
each generation gets slapped with shame no matter which way they go.  The
speaker generations get made to be ashamed for speaking their supposedly
inferior (etc.) language, while the non-speaker generations get made to be
ashamed for not being able to speak their heritage language.  And people
who are somewhere between completely fluent and completely non-speaker get
shame(d) for not speaking it well enough.

The first kind of shame is the one that gets the most attention in language
revitalization circles, but the latter two are just as pervasive and
painful for those who experience it.  And it's quite possible to experience
all three at once, and/or in different combinations.

The last two strongly influence learner success and persistence.  If you
feel that (despite all the historical, social, etc. pressures outside of
your control), you somehow "should" already know language, then it puts an
enormous amount of pressure on you: "If I don't learn the language, I won't
be [fill-in-the-blank] enough...AND it will disappear."  This makes every
stumble in learning the language even more fraught than it already is for
any second-language learner.  Which very often can be overwhelming, and
drive people away completely.

So it's probably helpful to have these three kinds of shame brought up and
out front, so that everyone  can feel a lot safer.

Particularly since these feelings are most often experienced very
individually.  That there's something wrong with ME, that it's MY
deficiency.  Having that public/group acknowledgement that all of us are
also going through one or more of these shames can help a lot.  We're no
longer individually isolated in them, and can work together to help each
other find good ways to keep them from holding us back.

This also helps these three different groups work together better.  If I'm
a speaker with shame type #1, and you are a learner with shame type #2, we
both might not fully understand what's worrying the other person when we go
to speak the language.  Since what holds us back might be really quite
different.

This public acknowledgement is perhaps most important for
intermediate-status speakers.  It gets mentioned, but it still doesn't
really get addressed nearly enough how often people who are not 100%
perfectly fluent get shamed and scared out of speaking by the more fluent
speakers.  Not just the really harsh language policers---who very often
call those speakers lazy/inattentive, not realizing that they were never
given the same degree and quality of exposure to the language---but even
people who just let themselves laugh at these speakers' errors.

These reactions terribly reliably drive great potential speakers back to
the safer space of the dominating language.  We can't ask all the fluent
speakers to "please be nicer to and less judgmental of the less fluent
speakers", but precisely because of that, it's that much more crucial to
set up and constantly work to maintain safe places for them to speak what
they can.

Public/group discussion of this range of feelings---helping people work
their way to finally feeling that they really do have nothing to be ashamed
of, and in fact plenty to be proud of---is, as far as I can tell, probably
not just a good idea, but really essential.

Till later, keep safe and sane.

Slán,
do chara






On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 12:19 AM, Tanya Slavin <tanya.slavin at gmail.com>wrote:

> Ben, thank you so much for the links. I'm definitely going to suggest this
> documentary to the workshop participants.
> Tanya
>
>
> 2014-03-01 14:20 GMT-05:00 Ben Levine <watchingplace at gmail.com>:
>
> Hi Tanya - We made the documentary *Language of America* (
>> languageofamerica.com) with just this use in mind. We show the film (
>> it's 80 minutes divided into 12 minute chapters) or parts of it and use it
>> to trigger an emotional response which then let's students own their family
>> and tribal experience and identity.  We facilitate the discussion which is
>> to say give the responder the support they need whether it be encouragement
>> or connecting their experience to an other's or even balancing conflicting
>> responses, basically creating a safe space where the fragmented pieces of
>> experience can come together. There's more on the web site and also more
>> about our work at speaking place.org.
>> Please be in touch if you wish more information.
>> Ben Levine and Julia Schulz
>>
>> On Feb 28, 2014, at 8:24 PM, Tanya Slavin <tanya.slavin at UTORONTO.CA>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> [I just sent this message to another mailing list, but I figured I'd send
>> it here as well, apologies if you're getting it twice!]
>>
>> We're having a local workshop on indigenous language teaching at the
>> University of Toronto, an event organized for school and university
>> language teachers to share ideas on some of the challenges specific to
>> native language teaching in an urban setting. One of the topics that we
>> hope to address in some way (perhaps as a roundtable discussion) is the
>> question of how to deal with emotional consequences of historical trauma in
>> the language classroom. One of the biggest obstacles for aboriginal
>> students wishing to regain their language is the painful history of their
>> relationship with it (e.g. their parents were forbidden to speak the
>> language, they may have grown up discouraged speaking their language or
>> feeling that their language was somehow inferior). All that baggage
>> influences negatively their success in the classroom: they either reach a
>> certain plateau or can hardly progress at all, or are unable to start
>> speaking the language. As a result, the drop-out rate of native students in
>> a university language classroom is much higher than that of non-native
>> students wishing to learn a native language. I witnessed it myself when I
>> was teaching Ojibwe in a university setting, and I'm seeing it now teaching
>> it in a community setting. The question is how to deal with that and help
>> these students succeed (also keeping in mind that they don't necessarily
>> have the support of their community in an urban setting). Is it a good idea
>> to actually raise this issue in the classroom, in order not to ignore the
>> elephant in the room, so to speak? Would having separate classes for native
>> and non-native students help the issue?
>> So I wanted to ask if anybody had any ideas about this they would be
>> willing to share, or experiences they had, or any stories they have about
>> students that were dealing with this obstacle. If that's ok, I'd love to
>> share your ideas and experiences at the workshop (obviously, giving
>> everybody credit for them), which would also hopefully generate a
>> productive discussion. I would appreciate any ideas you might have, and
>> thank you in advance!
>>
>> Tanya
>>
>>
>>
>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/algonquiana/attachments/20140302/c22f374c/attachment.htm>