Introduction

As I write this chapter in the summer of 2020 in Lawrence, Kansas in the United States, I cannot help but thinking about the current xenophobia and racism explicitly endorsed by the Trump administration with the recent order against international students in higher education.Footnote 1 On July 6, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released a directive regarding fall 2020 enrollment for F-1 students in the Student and Visitor Exchange Program (SEVP). The directive made it clear that if all of an international student’s fall 2020 classes are online, they cannot remain in the U.S. and must leave the country.

As a former F-1 visa student, I was deeply concerned about the ramifications of this directive on the future of the colleges and universities in the country. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many higher education institutions, including my own, were attempting to address the numerous questions and concerns among the international student community by holding virtual town hall meetings. Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology took further actions by filing a lawsuit against ICE. On July 14, a federal judge declared the order rescinded, but its negative repercussions of the policy continue to impact international students and faculty. Despite the Biden administration’s significant shifts in immigration and federal higher education policies, the illegitimization of “foreigners” in U.S. society and schools persists through with the rhetoric of the mutually exclusive notion of “us versus them” (Aneja, 2016; Flores, 2013). In general, public discourse and sentiment regarding immigrant populations, both legal and illegal, is highly racialized and negatively charged in the United States.

Research Objective

This chapter discusses the challenges I have encountered in my professional trajectory as a “foreign” teacher educator in U.S. higher education. By using a critical autoethnography, this chapter also illustrates ways in which I enact and perform my multifaceted identities as an international faculty member in the U.S. teacher education context where I work with teacher candidates in the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program. Despite being recognized for my scholarship in the field, I have still encountered linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2012), historically dominated in English-only U.S. higher education settings. By unpacking the dominant discourse in relation to linguicism, such as native speakerism (Holliday, 2015), this study provides a nuanced understanding of the lived experience of a "non-native English speaking teacher (NNEST) (Kumaravadivelu, 2016) in higher education. Ultimately, the chapter aims to raise critical questions about academia and the education of future teachers. As an educator and scholar advocating for social justice, I believe that it is of utmost importance to problematize the taken-for-granted assumptions about power imbalance inextricably inherent in education and academia.

Conceptual Framework

The following section briefly discusses the two theoretical constructs that undergird this chapter—linguicism and performativity. While the first represents the ideology deeply drenched in academia and society, the latter foregrounds my enactment of teacher identity to challenge such linguistic discrimination in U.S. higher education.

Linguicism

Linguicism refers to “ideologies, structures, and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, regulate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on the basis of language” (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988, p. 13). This linguistic discrimination, profoundly coupled with racism, is prevailing not only in K-12 education through the form of deficit thinking (Valencia, 2010) but also in higher education in the United States. Phillipson (1992, 2009) conceptualized this phenomenon as ‘linguistic imperialism’ in which English had been imposed as the primary language of communication, including the dissemination of knowledge in the academy through publications and presentations. Language proficiency or background is often “used as a euphemism to mask race-based” (Mahboob & Szenes, 2010, p. 348) discrimination among its members. As Da Costa (2020) asserts, linguistic racism is exacerbated when a speaker is bi/multilingual and shuttles between languages because her ability to translanguage (Li, 2018) is seen as a liability, rather than an asset.

I would concur with Kubota and Lin (2006) that language must be a focus of investigation in the discussion of racism as linguicism and racism are inherently intertwined. In particular, linguistic and racial discriminations permeate as leading orientations to language and race in teacher education research and practice in the United States (Milner et al., 2013).

Performativity in Language Education

Drawing on Butler’s (1990) performativity theory of identity from a poststructuralist perspective, Morgan (2004) has called for teacher identity to be reconceptualized as a pedagogy in language education. This poststructural perspective views that language is interconnected with power relations marked by race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and sexual orientation in ways that result in social inequity (Luke, 2009). It also recognizes the fluid, dynamic, and discursive nature of identity. Morgan argues for the contingent and relational processes through which teachers negotiate their varying roles and identities in the classroom. From this view, teacher identity should be used for pedagogical purposes by harnessing her personal and professional lives in classroom instruction to disrupt ascribed beliefs and assumptions about language learning and teaching. In other words, the multifaceted, dynamic, and relational nature of teacher identity is highlighted as a strategic performance of a teacher.

Context of Research

As Yoo (2020) poignantly described in her autoethnography as a struggling mother-researcher in higher education, a neoliberalist university culture makes academia into an increasingly unwelcoming space in which “workers” are forced to comply to a hectic productivity schedule. Central to understanding how social justice and diversity are manifested in institutions of higher education are the experiences of female faculty from racial groups underrepresented in higher education. Furthermore, due to the hegemony of English in the geopolitics of scholarly publishing (Canagarajah, 2002), faculty members, particularly at a research university, have no choice but subscribe to the culture of “publish or perish” entirely in English (Curry & Lillis, 2018).

Methodology

Autoethnography as a Research Method

In this chapter, I use autoethnography with a critical event focus (Webster & Mertova, 2007) to address linguicism in the U.S. higher education context. Autoethnography is an established qualitative research method to analyze a researcher’s own life as data. Autoethnography as a research method can shed light on the personal nature of the intersection of language, race, and gender that is institutionalized across society including teacher education (Zuniga et al., 2019). It centers “the researcher as a site of cultural inquiry within a cultural context, breaking open the dichotomous notions of the self/other within empirical traditions (Hughes et al., 2012, p. 210). Further, Richards (2008) views autoethnography as emancipatory discourse since “those being emancipated are representing themselves, instead of being colonized by others and subjected to their agendas or relegated to the role of second-class citizens” (p. 1724).

In a similar vein, Yazan (2019) asserts that autoethnography allows a researcher to assert agency to narrate his or her own lived experiences and enact identities without allowing others’ interpretation (Canagarajah, 2012). This approach contests canonical ways of conducting research and representing others (Spry, 2001) and treats research as a socially-conscious act (Ellis et al., 2011). Critical autoethnography aims to make unheard voices heard and invisible faces visible by revealing the lived experiences of the minoritized people from their own perspectives (Marx et al., 2017a, b). Critical autoethnographers are interested in positionality that requires researchers to recognize both marginalization and privilege through reflexivity (Boylorn & Orbe, 2017). A critical take on my autoethnography allows me to tell the typically inaudible story to the audience while acknowledging my own privilege as a tenured professor at a Research One university in the United States. The primary data source for this chapter is my reflective journals that I have recorded throughout my academic journeys, both in Korea and the United States.

Findings and Discussion

My Language Background

Born in Busan, South Korea’s second largest city, I was a monolingual speaker of Korean until I learned English when I entered middle school. At that time, Korean students officially began to learn English language from the first year of middle school (i.e., grade 7) and continued it through the last year of high school (i.e., grade 12).Footnote 2 Unlike many of my classmates who learned the alphabet and basic greetings in English before middle school, I had no prior knowledge in English. Korean teachers taught English vocabulary and grammar exclusively in Korean in decontextualized manners. I still remember repeating the teacher mindlessly, saying “I am a boy. You are a girl” in class. With much ‘drill or kill’ practice and rote memorization of endless lists of vocabulary without any accompanying example sentences, English was not a tool for communication but a subject matter to learn by heart for tests. My middle school English teachers made students memorize the entire textbook to get ready for the midterms and finals with multiple-choice items. There were no speaking and no writing tests. Things were not that different at my high school until I joined an English Conversation club where we were introduced to a few basic ‘communicative’ games, such as bingo and jigsaw activities.

I had never had a native English-speaking teacher until I entered a private university in Seoul which was well-known for English language education in the country. Despite my initial excitement about having a native speaker for the first time as an instructor, I was soon disappointed by the lack of opportunities to interact with him partly because of the class size and his teaching styles. He taught a class of 35 students in “English Communication” where speaking and listening were supposed to be taught. My biggest disappointment stemmed from the fact that his teaching was not different from the Korean teachers I had before. In my imagined classroom with a native speaking teacher who presumably speaks “perfect English,” I expected to have ample opportunities to use English as a communication tool, not merely to memorize words and phrases from the textbook. Communicative activities were minimal not just because of the class size, but his lack of teaching experience with EFL college students.

Admittedly, I subscribed to ‘native-speakerism,’ a term coined by Holliday (2006, 2018). It refers to a widespread ideology perpetuated in the English Language Teaching (ELT) profession whereby those perceived as “native speakers” of English are considered to be better language models and embody a superior western teaching methodology than those perceived as “non-native speakers” in the periphery. Native speakerism, underpinned by the assumption that privilege and marginalization are categorically experienced across contexts, has served as the dominant paradigm in applied linguistics and TESOL (Phillipson, 2009). This idealized native speaker serves as “the universal linguistic and cultural target for acquisition, use, and instruction regardless of language teaching and learning context” (Rudolph et al., 2015, p. 28). The “ideal native speaker” norm continues to reify monolingualism and the competence of monolingual speakers (Ricento, 2013). The binary notion of native speaker and non-native speaker and the privilege of native speakers have been normalized in the field.

When I was junior in college, I decided to study abroad in Australia for 4 weeks to attend an extensive language program over the winter break. It was my first time traveling outside Korea and I was thrilled to use the English language in the “real-world” with native speakers. Despite my concern about the lack of my English proficiency, I did not have much trouble getting my meaning across with other international students and Australians around me. Despite a few miscommunications due to the phonological differences between Australian English (“Aussie English”) and American English that I was accustomed to hearing during my schooling in Korea, this short-term study abroad experience improved my confidence, making me think that my English from grammar-based textbooks was not completely useless after all. Before graduation from the college of education, I passed a highly competitive national exam to become a public-school English teacher in Seoul. During my teaching in secondary schools, I enforced the English-only policy in my classroom because of the TESOL knowledge I gained from my BA studies in English language education. I was instructed to provide my Korean students with the maximum exposure to the target language as they do not have much exposure outside the classroom in an English as a foreign language (EFL) environment. Although I taught my classes entirely in English with some codeswitching to Korean, I felt my ‘non-nativeness’ would not facilitate my students’ progress in English. I had a sense of inadequacy, a feeling of being ‘imposters’ pretending to be what I was not (Bernat, 2008; Llurda, 2015). As with Yazan (2019) who described his life story as an EFL teacher in Turkey, I have grappled with the notion of “nativeness” in my English learning and teaching experiences.

Another instance of native speakerism was from my English teaching experience at a middle school in Seoul. As the youngest (and probably most proficient) teacher at school, I was assigned to work with a native speaker who had no teaching credentials and experiences. She was a white female in her mid-20 s and studied piano at a college in Canada. Under the name of globalization in the mid-1990s (Jeon, 2009), the Korean government hired native speakers from the so-called “Inner Circle” countries (Kachru, 1990) and assigned them to teach English in K-12 classrooms with no to very little training in teaching (Jenks, 2017). The ideology of the native speaker as “the ideal English speaker” and even “the ideal English teacher” was readily adopted by the Korean government and the public (Jeon, 2009). As a result, all the NES teachers I worked with had no knowledge and skills necessary to teach EFL in the secondary classroom. Although I loved teaching middle school students, I was thirsty for more advanced knowledge in ELT while aspiring to the level of legitimacy of native speakers (Llurda, 2015). I studied TOEFL and GRE after work and during the weekends and applied for several graduate programs in the United States after teaching for almost 6 years in Korean schools. To my delight, I was awarded a U.S. federal government scholarship to pursue my graduate studies at a university which was known as the top program in applied linguistics.

My Experience in U.S. Higher Education

I was beyond excitement when I first entered the United States to pursue a master’s degree in TESOL. I felt as if I was in the right place to be, finally. However, my initial excitement was soon replaced with distress and anguish due to my struggles in the graduate program. Despite my prior teaching experience as an EFL teacher and my educational background in English language teaching, I was rendered inaudible (Miller, 2003) during my MA studies. I found that the cultural capital afforded to me did not necessarily translate into positive learning experience in the graduate program. I took endless pages of notes before class while making sense of the SLA theories, mostly from cognitive perspective. It took me a much longer time to get ready for class discussion than my native English-speaking classmates. I even recorded my voice to prepare for class discussion so that I could rehearse it before class. My notebooks were always filled with what I wanted to say to the class related to the topics at hand. However, it was a daunting challenge for me to compete for the floor as native speakers dominated the class discussion. It was more challenging for me to contribute as a legitimate member in the classroom when some white professors in the program did not acknowledge my previous EFL teaching experience and discounted my experience as anecdotal and not evidence-based (Cho, 2018). This was the first time in my life that I felt marginalized. Even when I was in a graduate seminar with other students from East Asian countries, it was my perceived lack of English proficiency that inhibited my full participation in class discussion. Some professors in my graduate courses did not even remember my name although each class size was relatively small. Again, I felt invisible and inaudible.

The significant turning point for my academic identity was my first conference presentation at an international conference, where I discussed the challenges of Korean EFL education from a teacher perspective. To prepare for the presentation, I wrote an entire script for my 20-min presentation and practiced it for countless hours and days. I even rehearsed it in front of my faculty advisor so he could give me feedback not only on the language choice and tone but on non-verbal communication skills, such as eye contact and hand gestures. It was a major milestone for me because it was my first-time conference presentation in my life. I had never made a presentation in my schooling even in Korean, so it was an undoubtedly memorable moment in my professional life.

Despite this successful, well-received presentation during my master’s program, I felt that I was not ready to teach a class full of native speakers in my first year as a doctoral student in teacher education in the U.S. Midwest. I felt nervous about teaching white, native English-speaking undergraduate students. I spent numerous days to prepare for class and even recorded myself to find any mistakes in the video. In retrospect, what made me feel nervous and insecure about teaching was not only my perceived lack of English proficiency but my lack of knowledge about U.S. school systems and educational culture. As I did not have any teaching experience in the U.S., especially in the Midwest, I lacked the tactic knowledge that my preservice teachers were learning from their education courses.

Academic writing was another challenge for me as with many other international students from Kachru’s (1990) “Expanding Circle” countries, such as China and Japan. The cultural deficit theories suggested by L2 writing scholars has been engrained in my mind that I do not possess the linguistic resources that are required to construct abstract academic texts. While reading numerous journal articles and books, I learned to appropriate the academic writing that I needed for research papers and class presentations. My confidence about academic writing grew thanks to my fellow classmates with whom I studied for our first doctoral seminar in the Ph.D. program. They assured me that my writing was clear, even powerful, during our study group. With this affirmation of my writing ability in English, I kept writing but adhered to the conventional academic writing that appeared in most journal publications. As Maguire (2011) observed in her graduate seminars with international students, I experienced conflicts derived from the power imbalance between the authoritative discourse of scholars and my own internally persuasive discourses as an authoring self (Bakhtin, 1981).

After I was hired as a new faculty member in TESOL, I taught teaching methods for graduate students. Once a linguistics graduate student in my TESOL methods course was surprised that I corrected his grammatical errors in his paper and did not hide his surprise in the office hours when we discussed his draft. However, the most disheartening experience in relation to linguicism in my work environment was from interactions with a colleague in faculty meetings. They did not acknowledge what I had to say several times until another colleague, who was a native speaker like them, reiterated my comments. They turned to me and said, “Was that what you meant? Oh, I am sorry. I did not know that.” It did not feel like an apology to me. Rather, it felt like covert discrimination based on my language background although I had more experience in teaching and research than that colleague. Oftentimes, linguicism is manifested in a more subtle manner. Another colleague complimented my English in a meeting, saying “Sometimes, I forget you’re not a native speaker” and another asked me, “How come you don’t have accent?” as an ostensibly compliment. These anecdotal instances have become naturalized in me as they often occur in my interaction with colleagues in the department as well as across campus.

Performing my Identities as a Teacher Educator and Researcher

As Yazan (2019) argues, teacher educators leverage their teacher identities for their legitimacy as teachers of preservice teachers by constructing their identities through their prior experience. Because of my previous experience as an international student with a difficult first name to pronounce for my white professors (Cho, 2018), I wanted to use naming practice as an icebreaker activity in my first day of class. Names are elements of one’s identity that has complicated social implications (Thompson, 2006). I did not change my Korean first name, Hyesun, to an American name which is not uncommon for Korean immigrants to position themselves as a “cosmopolitan” as De Costa (2011) described in his case study of a Korean woman, Joanne (“Hye Ran”). Alternatively, I use my name as a means for engaging my students in a conversation about the value of naming practice in the education of emergent bi/multilingual students in school (García, 2009). My first day of class typically starts the meaning of my name both in Korean and Chinese.Footnote 3 I tell the class that my name based on the Sino-Korean means “to benefit others” and “offer help to others” and that’s why I become a teacher. And then I ask my students about the meanings of their names. What I find interesting was that my white preservice teachers usually do not know the exact meaning of their names while my students of color, including international students, are aware of the meaning of their names and eager to share them with the rest of the class. These identity-maintenance efforts impact my investments as an integral part of my teacher educator identities.

Using my identity as a mother of two bilingual children in my TESOL courses is another way to “claim desirable subjectivities” (Mirzaee & Aliakbari, 2018, p. 34). I often take my experience as a parent of children in U.S. public schools as an example in class discussion. For instance, I shared my daughters’ frustration with the state standardized testing for English language learners they had to take because I wrote Korean as a home language in the survey when they first entered the elementary school. As with Marx (2017) for her Hungarian-American bilingual children, I did not know until later that that a non-English language listed on the home language survey mandates English language evaluation. I considered (still do) their Korean as an asset, not a liability, something that I am proud of rather than a point of concern.

Not only did I express my concern with the English placement test and the home language survey, but I also shared both optimal and inapt practices that my daughters’ teachers showed in the elementary classroom. As an immigrant parent, I did not have K-16 schooling experiences in the United States, but possessed the cultural and linguistic capital as a college professor who specializes in bilingual education to express my concern and ask questions during parent-teacher conferences, something that many other immigrant families do not have. My children’s schooling experiences have allowed me to recognize the pitfalls of English service provided by school districts as well as the predicaments that immigrant parents encounter without appropriate bilingual support for them to communicate with their children’s teachers throughout the school year.

Another way that I perform my identity as an immigrant mother of Korean American children is to promote Korean as a community language in the local community where I reside. In collaboration with a few Korean mothers, I developed Korean Storytime at the public library in the community. Korean and non-Korean families participated in this monthly event where children and their parents learned about Korean language and culture, read Korean picture books, and created Korean artifacts such as traditional fans and cards. Furthermore, I conducted research regarding Korean mothers’ practices and beliefs about heritage language maintenance with a colleague who was the principal of a Korean Saturday school in the community (Cho et al., 2019b). Using my networking in Korea, I also co-founded a faculty-led study abroad program for American student teachers to teach English in high schools in Korea over the summer (Cho & Peter, 2017).

My research interest in teacher education made me conceptualize my practices as a teacher educator inseparable from my research. I share my take on language teacher identity with my students that NNEST advocacy efforts need to use a conceptual lens that views privilege and marginalization as fluidly experienced by teachers without positioning them as categorically and universally marginalized or privileged (Rudolph, 2016). The majority of my preservice teachers in a TESOL methods course are white, most of them are women who admit that they do not have much experience with bilingualism or multilingualism while growing up. In my graduate courses, I have a more diverse student body which includes international students from China, Korea, Japan, and the Middle East.

My teaching in a teacher education program also incorporates the use of autoethnography in two main ways: First, I have students write their language/literacy autobiography in the beginning of the semester to reflect on their first, second or third language learning experiences. The goal of this course assignment is for them to reflect on their own language/literacy learning experiences while exploring in some depth their attitudes and assumptions about language learning and teaching. This is also my attempt to center experiential knowledge in the course where students expect to learn content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge in TESOL. Second, I have them interview an English language learner or emergent bilingual (EB) (Garcia, 2009) to better understand their experiences in and outside of the classroom. By listening to EB learners’ stories, teacher candidates have developed empathy and self-efficacy thereby becoming advocates for EB students (Cho & Guelly, 2017, Cho & Adams, 2018; Cho et al., 2019a).

With a critical awareness of linguistic discrimination in higher education, I purposefully give the floor to language minority students in class by asking them about their experiences pertaining to the topics at hand. By sharing their experiences and perspectives, I acknowledge them as creators of knowledge rather than merely recipient of knowledge from the western-based literature. I often share my struggles as a former international student who did not learn academic literacy until the MA program when I first learned how to cite references in APA format. My minority students frequently mentioned to me that my story resonated with them. For instance, a female Native American graduate student in my Language and Identity class stated in her final reflection that she was constantly encouraged to get her voice heard in my seminar, rather than remaining silent like the way she chose to do in her graduate program. A Fulbright scholar from India who audited my class wrote a letter to the Dean, stating that “I really applaud the personal touch Dr. Cho lends to her class, how she uses her own experience as once a foreign student in the USA to connect with her foreign students. Personalized examples, I feel helps a teacher bond with her students better and this is exactly what Dr. Cho does: she builds a rapport with each leaner, making the learning experience so meaningful.”

My passion and advocacy for international students in teacher education has led me to form a student group that focuses on the issues and needs of international students in the school of education. I collaborated with a few international students to conduct research on the topics of socio-academic identities of international graduate students in teacher education programs. My positioning as a former international student put me at an advantage because of my familiarity with my students and our shared lived experiences as students of color and bi−/multilingual scholars. This common ground facilitated our discussions and assisted our understanding of ourselves. Rather than the deficit mindset of international students regarding academic literacy, we as co-researchers embraced the multifaceted, fluid, and dynamic nature of international students’ social identity that was afforded by our intercultural knowledge and experiences. In the cognitive research paradigm of second language acquisition, non-native speakers still remain inferior to the “native speaker” as the norm. Despite the current multilingual shift that has given way to the emergences of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives, such as translanguaging (Garcia & Lin, 2017; Li, 2018) and translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2013) in applied linguistics and TESOL, the status of bi−/multilingual scholars in the English-dominant U.S. high education context is lower than the monolingual, monocultural white faculty. Codemeshing in academic writing (Canagarajah, 2011) is not widely accepted in publications and standardized English is the desired medium for all scholars regardless of their language backgrounds.

Conclusion and Implications

Using a critical autoethnography, this chapter has illustrated my journey within ideological discourses that attempt to frame “linguistically qualified” against the intersectionality of race, gender, and country of origin. The amalgamation of privileges possessed by native-English speaking faculty members in the United States is often taken as a given and their “foreign” and “non-native English speaking” counterparts have not been closely examined in the literature. This chapter particularly elucidates the dissonance I have experienced in navigating the academy that imposes the English-only policy on faculty and students. This chapter sheds light on the hyphenated identities minoritized faculty members from other countries in the U.S. higher education context inhabit. Recently, systematic racism has been intensively discussed both in the public and education in the United States and around the world, but linguicism has not been the focus of such discussion. A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is one of the top priorities of American higher education. Yet, it must be much more than simply having a token representation of faculty of color, particularly in teacher education.Footnote 4

Linguicism is so entrenched that pedagogical changes alone will not challenge the linguistic hierarchies among members in U.S. higher education (Austin, 2009). By providing a space for faculty and students to critically reflect on their own language learning practices and identities that challenge the universalizing rhetoric of linguicism, faculty and students can become part of a larger institutional critique of linguicism, along with racism. As a Korean-mother-former EFL teacher-researcher-teacher educator, I view the world from the nexus of my multifaceted identities and negotiate the hyphenated identities on a daily basis. It is a struggle to challenge and destabilize the idealized, static, and monolithic constructs of ‘language,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘identity’ (Rudolph et al., 2020). I hope this story will resonate with some scholars and educators in higher education who are interested in learning more about the ways subtle linguistic discrimination can serve to incrementally disadvantage “foreign” teachers and ways in which teacher educator identity can be performed to contest such discriminatory practices.