Racism In EFL (with Asia Martin)

06/03/18 • 15 min

Do teachers of different races get treated differently? Do schools prefer white teachers? Do students care what color their teacher's skin is? We Discuss with Asia Martin.

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Tracy Yu: Hello everyone, welcome to our podcast.

Ross Thorburn: This week, we're going to talk about racism.

Tracy: Wow, that's a really sensitive topic.

Ross: Have you witnessed much racism when you were a teacher?

Tracy: I don't think I experienced or witnessed a lot, but I definitely heard people talking about racism when I became a manager.

Ross: Me too. I did notice at least when I was a teacher, for example, that a lot of schools I worked in, all the foreign teachers were white. Yeah, I agree with you. It's only since becoming a manager that I heard things.

For example, somewhere I used to work, I asked the person in charge of recruitment, "What are companies' requirements for hiring teachers?" The person said to me, "Teaching experience, not black."

Tracy: Wow.

Ross: Today, we can look at this from two different aspects. One aspect is we'll interview Asia Martin, who used to work at Shenzhen about her experiences on the receiving end of racism.

Tracy: The second part, I'm going to basically interview you, Ross, about your research paper and recently published in IATEFL about racism in teaching recruitment.

Interview with Asia Martin

Ross: Hi, Asia. Thanks a lot for coming over to the podcast. How are you doing?

Asia Martin: I'm doing all right. I'm getting over a cold. I may sound a little nasally.

Tracy: Asia, do you want to introduce yourself?

Asia: My name is Asia Martin. It's been about six or so months since I last left China. I had been there for about two years working as a English teacher at a language center. I was stationed in Guangdong Province, China.

Ross: Do you want to start off by telling us before you came to China? What were you expecting from the experience and how did that measure up to reality?

Asia: I did a bit of research. I had a friend, he was black and he had worked in China a few years before I even went. I asked him about his experience. Without me even asking, he did warn me.

He said, "Just be mindful that some of the things that you might hear or see in regards to your skin color is out of pure ignorance. You might just the first person that they've ever seen close up." I said, "OK." I was like, "So what do you mean?"

He told me the story about how he was out of school and he took a drink from a cup. One of the Chinese girls walked up to him, who was a student, and said, "Teacher, your color didn't come off."

When I got there and those things happened, I was open in the beginning. When people were asking, "Oh, can I touch your hair?" It didn't bother me at first. It began to bother me though, however, when certain individuals came up and were very negative about it, and they did make comments.

I no longer was as accepting it being to close up a little bit. I was more so prepared for accidental things, not people who purposely had an issue with my skin color.

Tracy: When I was working in training school, I got involved in those management meetings. I often heard sales staff talking about how much they prefer to have white teachers. When I was allocation manager, that's what my general manager and also the sales manager basically told me very directly, because it's good for our sales.

Have you ever noticed yourself being treated differently by sales staff?

Asia: It became very clear with amongst the staff that there was a slight hints of...I'm not sure if I would say that it is racism, but I would also say that it's a bit of colorism because it's more so based on the paler you are, the farther you can go with selling to students.

The racism did come into play maybe with people watching me and not really wanting to get to know me as much maybe as teachers who were fairer skinned.

Ross: What you noticed and what you experienced in China, how is it different to maybe what you'd experienced with regards to racism in the US?

Asia: You rea...

Do teachers of different races get treated differently? Do schools prefer white teachers? Do students care what color their teacher's skin is? We Discuss with Asia Martin.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website

Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!

Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses

Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Tracy Yu: Hello everyone, welcome to our podcast.

Ross Thorburn: This week, we're going to talk about racism.

Tracy: Wow, that's a really sensitive topic.

Ross: Have you witnessed much racism when you were a teacher?

Tracy: I don't think I experienced or witnessed a lot, but I definitely heard people talking about racism when I became a manager.

For example, somewhere I used to work, I asked the person in charge of recruitment, "What are companies' requirements for hiring teachers?" The person said to me, "Teaching experience, not black."

Tracy: Wow.

Ross: Today, we can look at this from two different aspects. One aspect is we'll interview Asia Martin, who used to work at Shenzhen about her experiences on the receiving end of racism.

Tracy: The second part, I'm going to basically interview you, Ross, about your research paper and recently published in IATEFL about racism in teaching recruitment.

Interview with Asia Martin

Ross: Hi, Asia. Thanks a lot for coming over to the podcast. How are you doing?

Asia Martin: I'm doing all right. I'm getting over a cold. I may sound a little nasally.

Tracy: Asia, do you want to introduce yourself?

Ross: Do you want to start off by telling us before you came to China? What were you expecting from the experience and how did that measure up to reality?

Asia: I did a bit of research. I had a friend, he was black and he had worked in China a few years before I even went. I asked him about his experience. Without me even asking, he did warn me.

He told me the story about how he was out of school and he took a drink from a cup. One of the Chinese girls walked up to him, who was a student, and said, "Teacher, your color didn't come off."

I no longer was as accepting it being to close up a little bit. I was more so prepared for accidental things, not people who purposely had an issue with my skin color.

Have you ever noticed yourself being treated differently by sales staff?

The racism did come into play maybe with people watching me and not really wanting to get to know me as much maybe as teachers who were fairer skinned.

Ross: What you noticed and what you experienced in China, how is it different to maybe what you'd experienced with regards to racism in the US?

Asia: You rea...

Previous Episode

Podcast: Should Teachers Even Talk?!

Teacher talk. It was good, then it was bad, now it's good again. Are you confused? We are! We look at teacher talk from four different perspectives - time, aim, language and quality (or TALK for short).

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Tracy Yu: Hi, everyone, welcome to our podcast.

Ross Thorburn: Hi. Something we do a lot on this podcast is...

Tracy: Talking. [laughs]

Ross: Exactly. Something that teachers are often told not to do is...

Tracy: Talking.

Ross: Yeah, right. I put teacher talk into YouTube and here are the short clips from the beginnings of three of the videos on the first page of YouTube.

[video]

James: Hi, I'm James and this week, I have three tips on how to reduce teacher talk time in the classroom.

Man 1: What percentage of time do you talk in your class? The typical research shows that we as teachers talk somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the time. Maybe we need to reduce that.

Man 2: In this video, we're going to talk about how to reduce your teacher talk time.

Tracy: It's really interesting. Seems the information kind of negative in terms of the teacher talk. Why is that?

Ross: The general attitude in the industry a lot of the time is teachers should talk less so students can talk more. There's lots of other people that actually say the opposite. Penny Ur, who you know I'm a big fan of, she in her book "100 Teaching Tips" says that teachers should talk a lot.

Our friend Dave Weller, he's got a blog post called Why I love Teacher Talking Time saying that sometimes it's really good for teachers to talk more.

Tracy: Instead of discussing three questions, this time we are going to look at...

Ross: Four aspects of teacher talk.

Tracy: They are...

Ross: First one is...

Tracy: Time, and then how much time that the teacher should speak in the class. The second one...

Ross: ...is the aim. Why are teachers talking? Third...

Tracy: ...is language and what language they are using when they are talking. The last one...

Ross: ...is the quality of what teachers are actually saying. Is it things that are going to be useful for the students or not.

Tracy: They are T‐A‐L‐Q, no?

Ross: T‐A‐L‐K.

[laughter]

Tracy: Kwality. TALK.

TALK

Tracy: The first part is time. Like you mentioned at the very beginning, I think a lot of teachers were told, "Reduce your teacher talk time." What will that mean?

Ross: I think before we talk about what it means, we can talk about why people say that. There's a misconception that the less teachers talk, the more students talk and the more students talk, the more students learn. I think that's a massive over‐simplification of what makes a good language class or what leads to language learning.

Tracy: Yeah, because sometimes teachers, they do need to talk more. [laughs]

Ross: Exactly. I remember, for example, observing classes before and marking teachers down for teacher talk because they didn't talk enough. They needed to explain something more to their students, for example, and they didn't talk enough.

Tracy: That's interesting.

Ross: I've heard of crazy policies from somewhere you used to work. Did they not have like, they even made a ratio of how much teachers were allowed to talk in some classes to how much students were allowed to talk, which to me is just absolutely nuts? It's crazy.

[laughter]

Ross: I heard teachers talking about like, "I wasn't allowed to correct a student error because my company won't let me talk more than whatever is 10 percent of the time in class." If you're doing a class that's focused on listening, then I think it's OK if the students aren't talking very much and the teachers' talking most of the time.

It probably depends a bit on the level as well. If I was teaching very young learners, I'd probably end up talking a lot more than if I was teaching advanced level adults.

Tracy: I think you mentioned a lot why teachers need to talk. Also, on the other hand, when you think about when teacher...

Ross: ...need to shut up.

[laughter]

Tracy: Yeah, don't need to talk that much. For example, we also experience the silence. You see the students struggle in activities or learning process. I think teacher naturally want to facilitate and give a lot of support to the students and then move on to the next stage. That few minutes or few seconds are so precious just to let them to ...

Next Episode

Podcast: Context - the Secret Sauce in Language Teaching & Training (with Matt Courtois)

Understanding what people in say from the sounds they make is all but impossible without context, even in our first language. So how can we make more use of this amazing tool which helps prediction, understanding, engagement and application? We discuss what context is, why it’s important and how to incorporate it when teaching adults, teaching kids and in teacher training.

For more podcasts, videos and blogs, visit our website

Support the podcast – buy us a coffee!

Develop yourself! Find more about our teacher training courses

Watch as well as listen on our YouTube channel

Tracy Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast. We've got our regular guest, Matt Courtois!

Matt Courtois: Hey!

Tracy: Hey, Matt.

Matt: How's it going?

Ross Thorburn: As our starting point, I wanted to play you guys a quote from Jordan Peterson's podcast. He's a psychologist. This is from a lecture actually about music, but it's him talking about how human beings can understand the sounds that come out of other human beings' mouths.

Jordan Peterson: ...It turns out that it's very difficult to listen to what someone's saying, and that's partly because all of the information is not encoded in the sounds that they're making.

For example, part of the reason you can understand what I'm saying is that you know, more or less, that this is a lecture about psychology. You know it has a scientific basis. You know that there are certain things I'm not going to talk about.

The entire context within which you sit, informs your understanding of my speech. Every word I say helps build a framework for you that informs your ability to understand each word.

Ross: Basically, just what we say to each other isn't enough, by itself, to be able to understand what's going on. We all have to understand what context we're in to be able to pick up all those clues and decode meaning from sound.

Matt: I had a student years ago, a really high‐level student, and I asked her to quantify how much English she could understand whenever I was speaking. She said it was about 30 to 40 percent.

The rest of it was knowing me and knowing this context and understanding things I probably would be saying, and she's able to fill in all that stuff. In this student's case, the other 60, 70 percent of her language is guesswork.

We're actually talking about how you can do that within a real conversation.

Ross: That's definitely a skill, isn't it?

I had a really interesting example of this a few years ago. I went for a run. It was in Beijing, actually, in the winter. It was really, really cold, but I was still wearing shorts and tee shirt. Afterwards, I went into a 7‐Eleven and bought a bottle of water. The person on the other side of the counter, said, "Are you cold?" and leaned across and touched my arm.

I remember thinking, "If I couldn't understand Chinese, I would be so freaked out."

[laughter]

Ross: I wanted to pay for the bottle of water, and then the person started massaging my arm. I think that's because context causes you to predict what is going to be said, and what's going to happen.

When you go in to a shop and you put something down on the counter, you can say with 99 percent certainty that the thing that the person behind the counter is going to say next is the price.

All these great examples of how we use context in our day to day lives to predict what's going on, but we also need to bring those ideas into our teaching and probably our training, as well.

Tracy: I think what I encountered when I'm training teachers...Usually, teachers, they feel quite difficult to understand the concept of context, because it's basically about where you're going to use a language in real life.

I usually tell them, "In real life, think about, if you're talking to somebody, who the person is. Is it a friend? It's a family member? It's a colleague? Is it a doctor or is it some stranger on the street?

"Why did you need to talk to them? Ask for advice? Ask for directions? Maybe you are paying for something at the cashier? What kind of situation you are, or where you are," and then try to help them understand what context is.

Ross: I would almost say it's like language learning physically happens within a classroom, but you want, mentally, for it to happen in another place.

For example, we'll talk about examples later with kids, but if you're teaching kids the names of some...