Can I Have a Voice in the Nation’s Classroom?

Abstract

This article utilizes a reflexive ethnographic approach in the form of a “layered text” consisting of academic argument, literary criticism, biography, autobiography, and fiction. The dimension of academic argument involves “critical applied linguistics”; the dimension of literary criticism, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, Blake’s “The Tyger,” and Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; the dimension of biography, the African American activist Malcolm X; autobiography, an account of my elderly father’s visit with me in my city of residence (Oaxaca); and fiction, the story of me in an urban classroom teaching a group of students that includes Malcolm X as well as the authors of and characters from The Great Gatsby and The Man with the Golden Arm. This diverse “layered text” intends to perform its theme involving the “critical”-minded teacher in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom as one who regulates her/his personal “political” awareness in order to foster a “critical” classroom accessible to all students.