Decentering in English Language Teaching (with Amol Padwad)

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Amol Padwad joins us to explain “decentering” in ELT. Amol tells us about the problem with language teaching having a “center” and how this can cause voices and ideas to be suppressed.

De centering in English Language Teaching (with Amol Padwad)

Ross Thorburn: Hi everyone, welcome back to TEFL Training Institute podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn and this week we're talking about decentering in English language teaching. My guest for this week's episode is Amol Padwad. Amol is director at the Center for English Language Education at Ambedkar University in Delhi.

In the episode, Amol tells us about first of all what decentering is, what counts as being the center of the language teaching world and what are some problems with that. We talk about some concepts and people that are unfairly on the peripheries of language teaching. Enjoy the episode.

Ross: Amol, thank you for joining us. To begin with, what is decentering? What does it mean and where does the concept come from?

Amol Padwad: Well, actually, the roots of this term may be traced back to post‐structuralism and even postmodernism.

In simple words, it means removing something from a central position but it's a very complex notion as you will easily agree. As I understand, it refers to countering any hegemony tendency which comes in form of dominance or influence of a center.

For the purpose of decentering, I would call a center to be any entity which claims to have exclusive ownership of roots or expertise or right solutions and then ends up dominating or suppressing alternative sources of expertise or knowledge or solutions.

For example, a particular entity is saying that, "I know everything." Or "We have the final best possible solutions for any problem and if you want, you must use them. Other solutions are not good." Then, I would call that centering tendency.

When I say this, I think I must also clarify that I am not suggesting a center as a problem per say. In fact, I believe that centers exist to offer some stability to any structure. The center is not a problem, centering is a problem. What is the difference?

Center is an entity, but if that center behaves in a particular way, a way that disregards or disrespects alternatives or the others, that tries to create domination hegemony, that tries to claim exclusive ownership of a particular truth or knowledge or something, then that is a centering tendency.

Any center harboring those tendencies will be a problem. Decentering is against the centering tendencies.

Ross: Great. Just to be clear, are we talking here about the center as in being the center of the English teaching world or we're talking more about the center of the English speaking world or are we talking about both?

Amol: Eventually both, but at the moment all the current decentering, thinking and initiative that is underway and it was initiated by the Hornby Trust in the UK. Hornby Trust was set up by A.S. Hornby especially with the purpose of spending all the money and the resources he has handed out to the trust.

For the third weekend, I'm using a slightly loaded term here, but what he meant was he spent all his life working in those countries and learnt a lot from there. Even Oxford dictionary was an outcome of his work there.

He argued in the trust document that whatever he earned working in those communities should go back to those communities and that's why Hornby Trust is supporting this initiative. At the moment, the focus is on English language teaching world, the ELT world.

In this world, the most prominent, most visible, most easily identifiable center is the West or what Adrian Holiday call the BANA countries, Britain, Australia and North America. That is the most easily identifiable center. In the decentering initiative, we take a more complex and nuanced view.

We assume that globally this may be the center but there are also lots of local centers. There are centers everywhere and decentering has to deal with all centers and all centering practices wherever they happen.

Ross: Do you want to give us some examples of this then Amol? I think the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard this was the idea of sending so‐called native speakers to different parts of the world as "experts" in inverted commas, as being one being symptom of centering, is that right? If it is right, then what are some oth...