Ethics and teacher practices in linguistic minority classrooms

Abstract

This paper draws on a theoretical framework informed by the philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas to examine pedagogical responsibility for minority language students in elementary school classrooms. After making the case that ethics is extant in the literature around minority languages and mainstream education, the paper elaborates the Levinasian-informed ethical framework and suggests a point of analysis for examining pedagogical practices in minority language classrooms, namely, the extent to which teacher practices break with the sameness of a dominant language formal learning context and open to the alterity of minority languages. This point of analysis guides the interpretation of findings of an empirical inquiry into the pedagogical practices of eight teachers in their publicly-funded, mainstream Anglophone school. A corpus of in-depth interviews with and extended observations of the teachers in their teaching contexts reveals five core pedagogically relevant phenomena into which ethics can be read. The article concludes with an ethics-informed litmus test for present and possible educational practices in linguistic minority classrooms.

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