These chapters reminded me of a research paper I wrote last semester called, "Shortcut Pedagogy: The Incomprehensibly Irrelevant Trainings of BPO Call Center Employees", about the reprehensible corporate use of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and how they chose to instruct EFL to their employees. This except below is specifically relating to Indian call centers:
Finding properly trained trainers is an investment with which these large multination corporations constantly struggle—whether through ignorance or unavailability it is hard to say. Even the best trainers who understand that the intercultural aspects of their pedagogy, “…are not always able to acknowledge the extent to which culture is embedded and reflected in its language(s). Corporate trainers are often in a position where they are teaching cultural awareness without the time, expertise or resources to look at any but the broadest linguistic aspects of the new culture” (Hayman 149). This fissure in the timetable created by the circumstances of businesses’ needs and the reality of proper language acquisition may be an obstacle that BPOs are never capable of overcoming.
What most new hires encounter, as did Marantz, is a trainer, “…reading from a photocopied pamphlet while 100[s] of us took notes…[and for] five hours, we sat stiffly while she recited the entire pamphlet” (Marantz 6)—a pedagogic technique that leaves no room for any student interaction, let alone the trainer presenting the information in an engaging manner.
Perhaps more appalling than the tepid lack of pedagogy exhibited by trainers, might be the poor, inaccurate, and derogatory quality of the information these businesses include in their curriculums. On the second day of Marantz’s cultural training, a twenty-minute lecture was given on “the Australian psyche”, which was described as follows:
“Australia is known as the dumbest continent. Literally, college was unknown there until recently…Australians drink constantly…If you call on a Friday night, they’ll be smashed—every time. Oh, and don’t attempt to make small talk with them about their pets, okay? They can be quite touchy about animals…They are quite racist. They do not like Indians. Their preferred term for us is…‘brown bastards.’ So if you hear that kind of language, you can just hang up the call” (Marantz 11).
How could it even be possible to approach an Australian customer contacting a call center with a single ounce of respect after this officially endorsed, audaciously crude profile has been taught as fact? This type of training is analogous to the use of Pidgin English novels to educate westerners about East Asian cultures. This use of shortcut-stereotype cultural education is a prime example of the danger prevalent for trainers to fall into playing “…the role of the ‘top-down’ imparter of information rather than allowing the participant to learn through a more typical adult learning experience of reflection, exploration and testing of new concepts” (Hayman 153). Where fault lies may be up for debate, but it is hard to argue that corporate heads are ignorant or powerless to change these pitiful excuses for pedagogy.
Subramaniam, L. Venkat. “Call Centres Of The Future.” itmagazine. 2008. Web. 9 Nov. 2012.
Hayman, Jane. “Talking about talking: Comparing the Approaches of Intercultural Trainers and Language Teachers.” Globalization, Communication and the Workplace: Talking across the World. 147-158. London, England: Continuum, 2010. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.
What interests me most in Gaischi and Taylor-Mendes's articles are the examination of the the role of ESL/EFL teachers in uncovering the Biopower (a technology of power, which is a way of managing people as a group. The distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It is thus an integral feature and essential to the workings of—and makes possible—the emergence of the modern nation state and capitalism, etc. Biopower is literally having power over bodies—Foucalt from Wikipedia) at play in the educational materials they use, as Gaischi notes:
It seems opportune to make clear and available to ESL teachers how ideologies are being packaged and presented to them and how they themselves may be positioned: "People internalize what is socially produced and made avail- able to them, and use this ... to engage in their social practice" (35).
If we as teachers cannot recognize the ways in which institutions of power work to remove our agency as individuals, be it through an overt or subconscious implementation, then we also lead our students into a similar state of helplessness. While I do not believe it is our job as educators to become activists, I do believe it is our duty to enlighten our students to the forces that work both for and against them. Images in a textbook may seem harmless, yet unconsciously they work to reinforce essentialist views of culture, gender, race, locality and physicality. And in doing so, they remove agency from a population that already has little.
When we consider English as a lingua franca, and the power that is gained from English fluency, it may become more obvious why those with power would strive to maintain their dominance. Even though, "the number of people affected by the flow of ESL teaching materials from English-speaking cultures" is in a continual and massive growth, "the fundamental link between private industry and an ostensibly philanthropic far-reaching government agency" (Gaischi 32) should not be ignored. In fact I would offer that the subtle gestures made through skewed or misrepresented cultural realities, is a deliberate, aggressive act of biopower to globalize American and British cultural and language under the guise of philanthropic gestures.
