Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The centering of whiteness in English Language Teaching (ELT) renders the industry callous, corrupt and cruel; or, antisocial. Using the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder as a rhetorical device, this book examines major issues with the ideologies and institutions behind the discipline of ELT and diagnoses the industry as in dire need of treatment, with the solution being a full decentering of whiteness. A vision for a more just version of ELT is offered as an alternative to the harm caused by its present-day incarnation. With a unique linkage of discourse on whiteness, language and ability, this book will be necessary reading for students, academics and administrators involved in ELT around the world.
Brimming with insights from research, practice, and personal experience, Gerald makes a passionate case for demolishing the status quo in English language teaching. In witty and refreshingly candid prose, he integrates critical perspectives on racism and disability justice to imagine a different system – one that is more prosocial, inclusive, and above all else, honest.
Combining key insights from critical race theory and disability studies, JPB Gerald provides a stunning overview of how racial ideologies shape language teaching in ways that consistently privilege whiteness. Weaving personal narratives with astute theoretical insights, Gerald provides a guide for creating a more just system of language learning.
Using the APA’s criteria for antisocial personality disorder to ‘diagnose’ ELT as suffering from a medical condition is, in my view, a very effective framework for presenting Gerald’s thesis. It allows Gerald to turn the tables on ELT, by presenting something that is usually regarded as healthy and innocuous as being, in fact, seriously unwell and very destructive [...] there is still relatively little published literature that is concerned with the concept of whiteness in ELT, which makes this an important book in terms of its contribution to the wider discourse problematizing deeply embedded structures and ideologies [...] the author’s account of his own course, ‘Decentering and Decoding Whiteness’, provides a useful template that teacher educators can follow to bring anti-whiteness education into their own practice. The syllabus and overall approach are very informative, and could perhaps be adapted and used in a wider range of contexts.
It may sound like a cliché to declare that everyone in a specific discipline should read a particular book in that field, but it really is the case that every English Language Teaching (ELT) practitioner should read Antisocial Language Teaching by JPB Gerald. It will inspire a range of reactions, some of them quite strong, but that is the point precisely. Given the challenges it raises, this book is essential reading.
JPB Gerald is an adult educator and theorist, and a 2022 graduate of the EdD program in Instructional Leadership from CUNY – Hunter College, USA. Through his writing, teaching, podcast and his public scholarship overall, he seeks justice for the racially, linguistically and neurologically minoritized.
Prologue
Introduction
Part One: Disorder
The Great Pyramid Scheme
Justified
A Dark Projection
Dis/abling Blackness
Ability, Intelligence and Language
Bad at English
Language Teaching as an Instrument of Pathologization
Part Two: Symptoms
Criterion 1
Criterion 2
Criterion 3
Criterion 4
Criterion 5
Criterion 6
Criterion 7
Part Three: Treatment...?
The Ezel Project
Prosocial Language Teaching
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References