Privileged discourses, teacher agency and alternative subjectivities : Analyzing Janus-faced character of English language pedagogy

Abstract

The present study examines English language pedagogy as a Janus-faced phenomenon based on interviews with 40 English language teachers in one province of Pakistan. The study draws on Foucault's writings on power relations and agency. The findings suggest that besides disciplinary techniques of surveillance and examination, states of domination maintained through officially sanctioned discourses and apparatuses, teachers also seem to exercise their agency by engaging in struggles against the institutionalized discourses that underpin the very existential question, e.g., ‘who are we?’. Such a question facilitates learning experience of diverse learners in classrooms and help them negotiate their identities. The study has implications for the similar global contexts where state-led ELT education is often studied in terms of the dominant ideologies obscuring the fact that they are also sites of contestation. English classes thus can be viewed as fields of force relations where teachers exist in a strategic relation with textbook content and diversity of learners subject to the states of domination as well as capable of countering such dominations and social hegemonies.