The “pedagogy of personality”: becoming better people in the English language teaching and learning space

This paper interrogates how English language teaching and learning spaces become a locus for a “pedagogy of personality”: spaces where ideal forms of personhood can be transmitted, taught and learned. We draw on ethnographic accounts of moments produced in a municipal English language teaching programme in Rionegro, Colombia, and in the English language class of an elite international school near Barcelona, in Catalonia. We explore discourses mobilised by teachers, students, and school administrators that glorify personality traits that should enable students to become “good community members”, “good citizens” and to reflect on the ways in which language learning spaces are imagined to have an effect on learners’ personalities. We claim that it is not necessarily the English competence acquired in these spaces, or the act of speaking English itself, which is imagined as automatically triggering the enactment of ‘better’ forms of personality. Rather, we believe that our ethnographic data point to the fact that language curricula provide the space to construct, spread and normalise moral values which are associated to idealised forms of subjectivity, and desired forms of being. The discourses circulated through landscapes and classroom interactions show how the mere act of being in an English language learning space is expected to raise students’ awareness of the moral duty to become better, more responsible individuals. We make a key contribution to critical sociolinguistic research by placing a focus on how “good personality” is informed by the pedagogic trajectories of each space, beyond neoliberal projects of self. Moralising catholic discourses, values and ideologies, and broader humanist educational discourses inform ideas about personality and personality development in these spaces. Thus, we call for a slower sociolinguistics, that takes pause before reaching for the explanatory power of neoliberalism and makes room for the complex, historically sedimented logics of our research sites.