(Re)Contextualizing English language teaching in Thailand to address racialized and ‘Othered’ inequities in ELT

Abstract

‘Race applied to human beings is a political division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations’ (Roberts, 2011 Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal invention: How science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century. New Press/ORIM. [Google Scholar], p. x). Foregrounding our racialized histories, we show how our lives intersect in a doctoral seminar in Thailand. Combining traditional academic structures and collaborative autoethnography, we describe the context and share our stories. Using intersectionality and raciolinguistics as theoretical lenses, we argue that in Thailand, and throughout Asia, culture/ethnicity and class are often proxies for race or color, and as a result English language teaching (ELT) reflects institutions that fail to challenge the hegemonies of whiteness, Europeanism and Americanism, and English. To contextualize ELT and our role in it, we overview Thailand’s racialized/colorized past and present, linking this to globalization and thirst for English. Our stories provide a framework for discussing our racialized selves and let us get to the culture of race in Thailand and ELT. What emerges is our advocacy for using critical pedagogies in ELT that reflects the contextual realities of teachers’ and students’, their ethno-racial and socio-cultural identities, and as well, their socio-historic lives. (188 words)