Week 3

I was like Parisa in the sense that I wanted to be represented as something else that other people from my culture did not get nor understand. I was at a party at one time and people from my extended family kept asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. As a Filipino, they were expecting me to say I’m going to be a nurse or learning to become a doctor. When I told them instead that I wanted to become a professor of English, they gave me incredulous looks and told me all the ways why being a doctor was such a better idea. They went as far as to say that being a professor wasn’t as worthy as being a doctor would be. All the while, I had to keep my mouth shut because talking back against them would have been considered disrespectful even though I would have only defended my case. However, I was thinking, this is not how I see myself, I want to become a professor who is not only successful in my field but also viewed as one of the reason why others want to become a professor as well. I wanted to be represented as one of the people who made others possible to learn to appreciate English. I wasn’t someone who became a doctor just because my culture demanded it of me. I wasn’t going to have an unsatisfying job just because every other Filipino have chosen to ride that particular bandwagon.

One of the things that I struck me was the quote “America not only promotes stereotypes but in fact constructs ethnicity, with ethnic identification and self-identification being another outcome of the immigrant experience” (Pavlenko 42). In the micro level, if you’ve admitted that you were born in the country, some people will already labeled as a hick. With this labeling comes attributes that people readily associates you to even though it’s clearly not the case. Attributes such as unintelligent, old-fashioned, strict, and naïve will become part of your identity. Without the act of negotiation, those particular sets of attributes will have been part of who you are and it will take years before you break out of those stereotypes. As such, what ends up happening is that not only do you have to fit in as an “American”—and struggle to be one since it’s such an elusive concept—but also break from the stereotypes that others have placed on you. All the while, you have to make sure that the process of assimilation and renegotiation does not take away all the things that make you the person you are.

I also agree with Pavlenko’s conclusion that in the present era, “second language learning was transformed into a painful journey, involving a loss of primary identities linked to the mother tongue” (63). This rings true for me in that my cousins haven’t been taught how to speak Ilocano or Tagalog since their teachers told the parents that my cousins would be confused between their mother tongue and English; that they’d have a harder time learning English if they were bombarded with knowledge from Tagalog. Because of this, my cousins can no longer communicate properly with our grandmother and their families from the Philippines.

Week 1/Week 2

I agree with Baumann in his evaluation that individuals belong to different communities. Sometimes, those communities—at a superficial level—may not be compatible and even seem to contradict each other as well. For example, as part of a university community, I am encouraged to participate in social norms such as being outspoken, disagreeing and questioning professors as well as standing out to be noticed. However, as a member of the Filipino culture—at the risk of exaggeration—I am expected to fade into the background when I am in the presence of people with authority. At a personal level, I belong to a community of friends as well as a community of family. There are practices that I would not perform depending on the community I find myself in. For example, there are some topics I wouldn’t talk about with my family that I would gladly share with my friends such as what happened Friday night. I wouldn’t necessarily talk to my friends the same way I would talk to my parents as well. With my friends, I’m more sarcastic and open. I don’t curse but my vocabulary, in general, is more liberal and less polite. Moreover, there’s also a certain divide within those communities as well. Depending on the friend I’m talking to, I’m either more or less lax. I can act more silly when I’m talking to one roommate than I necessarily would with the other.

One of the things I found interesting in the Kumaravadivelu section was Bourdieu’s idea of “habitus.” He described it as the different ideologies or qualities that an individual acquires from the different environments he/she experiences in. These habituses are also a result of what the individual thinks or believes while in that specific environment. At a point, both individual and environmental factors shape a habitus on certain degrees. These habitus then shape a person’s way of thinking and viewing the world. Depending on how we view a factor’s importance, there’s a certain degree to which we are influenced by that particular ideology, experience or environment we are faced with. As such, one culture might have a more impact on our individualness compared to another. As far as language education and culture is concerned, there are differences from one educational system to another, different sets of social norms from one university setting to another and each is as rich in its political, social and educational complexity. However, when we only emphasize on those differences, we run the risk of Othering as well. We run the risk of polarization and in thinking that one system is better than the other. We might not even consciously think so and it might not even be an overt act.