Maria Chiras, our guest blogger this week, is an English instructor at an English college in Montreal, Quebec. Her academic and professional contributions at the college include her involvement in curriculum coordination, committee work, and research projects. Her research interests include plurilingual, and translingual theories, discourse studies, writing studies and new literacies. Her research interests emerge from her own educational experiences as a plurilingual student in Montreal, Quebec. She has recently completed her doctoral research at McGill University, Faculty of Education, in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education. Her research focused on the role of plurilingualism in students’ experiences with language education and writing and the implications of these experiences for student persistence in Quebec higher education, in particular, the interaction between cultural identity, language, and writing. https://www.mcgill.ca/plurilinguallab/maria-chiras

As a first blog post for BILD, I would like to focus on my own personal narrative as a plurilingual growing up in Montreal and what led me to pursue my PhD research. I believe that our positionality plays a crucial role in how we approach both our research and our pedagogical practices.

In many ways, I had prepared for my PhD research my entire life, as part of my life-long journey as a plurilingual individual, “learning” to assimilate to a monolingual environment. To be plurilingual in a monolingually mandated landscape is to live in a parallel world: a world that has its own sounds, rhythms, dialects, languages, and its own inhabitants. I am one of them: a plurilingual person who has had to learn how to live in a society that does not reflect my daily linguistic and cultural reality. And so, I learned at an early age how to disappear and how to dissolve into the background, and how not to draw attention to myself, at school and in other social situations. I did so in the beginning out of necessity, because I was unfamiliar with the ways of speaking, writing, thinking, and being that were alien and alienating to me. Later, I did so out of habit, having become accustomed to being in the background—unseen and unheard—and now, having spent most of my life in the dark, so to speak, I am worried about venturing out into the light and publishing this dissertation, concerned that I will no longer cast a shadow.

I grew up in Montreal, Quebec, as a child of immigrants. Aside from attending Greek school, I studied in English during elementary school, French during high school, pursued an English and French bilingual DEC (diploma) in an English-medium CEGEP (college) and studied in English during university. My linguistic criss-crossing across educational institutions is usual among plurilingual people growing up in Montreal. While at home, I was Maria and I spoke Greek. Then, I spent my elementary school years learning how to be “Mary,” an English version of myself, where I had to speak and act like an “Anglophone.” Next, I went to French school, and I became “Marie” and had to begin again and learn how to speak and to act like a “Francophone.” I remember the first days of being in a French classroom with the rest of the students, most of whom were plurilingual with cultural backgrounds from all over the world. Our skins’ different shades and multi-form features were like a multi-coloured and multicultural Cubist painting, made up of a myriad of shapes, sizes, and colours. Every day when I arrived, the blackboard was covered with columns of verbs for us to conjugate. We began with the present tense. The teacher went around the room and asked each one of us questions to answer. My life was reduced to a series of simple sentences: “Je vis à Montréal.” The past tense followed: “Mes parents sont venus de Grèce.” However, the verbs on the board could not describe the diversity and complexity of my linguistic and cultural repertoire. The future tense was even worse. How could I tell my teacher that I could not see myself in the future tense? At the time, I did not have the verbs to conjugate the complicated details of life, and so my life was in the conditional tense. Every sentence in my mind started with “if.” If my parents had not immigrated here…, if I had grown up speaking English …, if I had grown up speaking French … And the most important “if” of all: “If I were not plurilingual, I would feel that I belonged.” So, the verbs and vocabulary words spun around in my head like puzzle pieces that did not fit. I was a fragmented sentence, incomplete, with no one language or grammar rule that could express my thoughts or feelings.

My PhD research was my effort to put all the puzzle pieces together, to emerge from the shadows and to create a space where I feel that I can belong. I cannot change my past; it is always in the background informing my present: how I grew up, my schooling in English and French; then, graduating college, and next, university, eventually becoming an English teacher.

For the past 20 years, I have worked as a college English teacher in Montreal. I am part of the first-generation of plurilingual and pluricultural teachers to enter a predominantly white Anglo-centric teaching profession, teaching English with colleagues who mostly belong to monolingual backgrounds. Teachers like me are in a unique position in that they are a “minority” in their own departments and colleges and part of a “majority” in their classrooms with their students.In addition to my teaching, from 2007 until fall 2012, I held the position of Curriculum Coordinator for the English Department and the position of English Provincial Curriculum Coordinator for English colleges in Quebec. As part of my mandate, I oversaw a revision of provincial ministerial policies for General Education and helped revise English Department policy documents to comply with these revisions. These experiences afforded me insights into the challenges involved in implementing provincial ministerial policy texts for English courses in English colleges in contrast to the reality of teaching language and writing to students in the classroom. I started to question (1) the appropriateness of language, writing, and assessment practices as dictated by provincial, ministerially mandated curricula; (2) the role of these policy texts in shaping teaching practices for language and writing; and (3) academic institutional deficit discourses about plurilingual students’ literacies.

My position as a plurilingual and pluricultural English educator has been a challenging balancing act for me, like joining a traditional “ethnic” dance belonging to a culture other than your own, where you do not know the steps, and so you make all the wrong moves. Over the years, I have listened to colleagues, including colleagues who align themselves with Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) issues and yet complain about students’ weak English language and writing skills. At the same time, plurilingual students have confided in me about their experiences in their English courses: how they are often told that they are unable to write, that they should attend writing workshops, and that they should seek tutoring. The result of such exchanges and experiences, including being placed in remedial English classes and/or failing their English courses, is that these students often felt frustrated and discouraged with their English courses and their college education, in general, and even with themselves as individuals. What has troubled me the most over the years is the fact that while there is a growing interest in incorporating more “diversity” in the curriculum and in the social life of educational institutions, there is little discussion regarding issues of language discrimination among plurilingual and pluriculturalstudents. So, I ask: what purpose does it serve to include “multicultural” texts and “diversity” or anti-oppression issues in our English courses, when at the end of the term we fail these very students because they do not know how to speak and write English “properly?”  

Shortly after I was hired as an English teacher, I took part in placement testing that serves to stream students into first-year English courses according to how they are assessed on the test. During one marking session, I overheard a conversation between two English teachers commiserating about how plurilingual students did not know how to write a thesis for the five-paragraph essay, which is the main form of assessment for the placement test as well as for English courses in English colleges. I looked down at the essay that I was reading, and I realized that the perceived difficulty thatstudents had writing a thesis was because of their different educational experiences with writing; most students complete their primary and secondary education in French, so they learn different writing genres than those privileged in English courses in English colleges. The students had replicated one French essay genre by adapting their prior genre knowledge from the French system to an English genre in the English system. Unfortunately, while this happened 20 years ago, this reality of overlooking and/or devaluing students’ plurilingual and pluricultural competencies is still prevalent.

My experience with placement testing was the first in a series of experiences where my perspective differed from dominant discourses about language, writing, and assessment practices. Feminist scholar Carol Hanisch (2006) states that personal experiences are inseparable from personal politics and that private problems need to be analyzed as political issues. I cannot separate myself from the discourses about plurilingual students that I want to examine, or separate myself from the institutional discourses and structures in which I research. I am part of both, and both are a part of me. How I approach my research, just as how I teach and how I perceive my students, is influenced by my personal perspective, which stems from my own cultural and linguistic background and educational experiences. Essentially, my PhD research is for my students, past and present, and for future generations of plurilingual and pluricultural students. to be recognized as diverse and not deficient. It is dedicated to finding ways for them to speak and write in English, French, or any other language. It is for them to move beyond the margins, to disrupt the linguistic ties that bind them to the myth of monolingualism.

Searching for answers and solutions to my questions and concerns about plurilingual students eventually led me to pursue my doctoral studies and to embark on the PhD research study that I completed this year. In another blog post, I would like to share my research study, its results, and some of the recommendations. Thank you for reading my personal narrative and, in so doing, allowing me to emerge from the shadows and into the light!

Reference

Hanisch, C. (1969/2006). The personal is political: The women’s liberation movement classic with a new explanatory introduction. http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html