Author, Miles Iton, presenting the first pitch for Lo-Fi Language Learning in Taipei, Taiwan.
I took an L back in my 11th grade Pre-Calculus class that I should own up to before mounting this high horse:
It was 2017, and I was a high achieving - not to mention high maintenance - student with far too many opinions on the way the world should be. Our teacher, Ms. Adan, had her back turned to us students; we chatted idly amongst ourselves as she drafted equations on the board. Star student Leslie was excitedly sharing her plans to utilize dual enrollment options at the local community college with us: get some credit requirements out of the way before enrolling in an undergraduate teacher education program. From the perspective of my shortsighted teenaged rationale, I was perplexed: one of the smartest students in our class is about to invest their future into becoming a… regular daytime teacher? My exact response was, “Why would you want to become just a teacher? You’re actually pretty smart-” unlike young me, who assumed Ms. Adan’s earshot had the same limits as her eyesight. Needless to say, she taught me a lesson in English as well as Math that day.
I approached Ms. Adan after class under the sheepish subtext of “Please don’t fail me, I was just playin’.” I knew she deserved more than the standard, disingenuous “sorry” after saying what I said. Thus, in keeping it as real as my limited life experience would have allowed me to, I asked her, “Why did you want to become a teacher?” Granted, it wasn’t the most remorseful choice of words. I didn’t intend to debate her own life decisions, but I just couldn’t understand how she dared to encourage us to go to school for teaching in the same breath as all the timely advice she used to put forward on avoiding student debt. As a soon-to-be high school senior fussing with college applications, career anxieties and constant unsolicited insight from adults telling me to choose a major my mother could retire at ease with, I saw no worthwhile reason at that time in my life why anyone would pursue teaching. Ideologically I was flawed as hell, but statistically I had a point - albeit a point that rested where youthful precocity met its own ignorance.
--
That exchange occurred in 2014, when the average ‘Ms. Adan’ in American public high schools earned about $55,120 annually by the end of the school year. Accurately pinning that figure to any given teacher hinges on several lurking variables: level of education, state of residence, years of experience, summer payouts, etc. So it’s important to note that the average entry level teacher’s salary around that year was $41,620. In my state of Florida specifically that salary averaged out to $48,992 for all teachers and about $38,000 at the entry level. By 2018, that Florida average declined to $47,721 for all public teachers and $37,636 at the entry level. If the average Florida public school teacher today has a Master’s degree in their necessary field, their starting annual salary is likely to be within $2000 of equaling the total tuition and fees paid for a year of their degree program. The interest rates on their loans are also likely to increase sooner than their pay grades unless Gov. Ron Desantis keeps his word.
If you’re an American even remotely aware of our Betsy DeVos-led education system - either because you’re working in it, putting kids through it or just left it yourself - you needn’t read all that numerical vomit to gauge how deeply concerned public school teachers are about their financial futures. You are also likely up to speed on how some perpendicularly posited problems in our education industry balloon themselves by parasitically feeding off these financial insecurities. One of these problems that many are fraught to diagnose is how black males are criminally underrepresented in our school systems. In hindsight, it was probably my incipient understanding of this phenomenon playing out before me that contributed to why I felt so free to speak so flippantly about Ms. Adan’s profession.
The nature of population distribution in the United States makes it such that a student is a lot less likely to have a black male teacher in any school district where black people are not a significant majority. Growing up around the many multicultural and multi-ethnic communities of Miami-Dade county, I’ve seen exactly two full time black males teaching between the two schools I attended there. That’s not to erase the black male teachers who are doing their thing out there though: literally (and I do mean literally) every black male teacher and administrator I encountered went out of their way to encourage or support me in some way at John A. Ferguson Sr. High. I was just never assigned one.
Naturally, then, I didn’t see teaching as a place where someone who looked like me should attempt to thrive professionally. I was too focused on leapfrogging the income level I was raised in. At the time I’d unfortunately only seen (read: noticed) that dream realized in the black men I saw doing sports or entertainment. Never mind that my father, once a teacher throughout his twenties himself, was a C-level executive in the financial sector of the Caribbean island he called home. Here in the United States, though, that influence didn’t matter. It was assumed this black boy with a single mother and did not have a paragon of virtue to build towards. So whenever administrators in the primarily white, Christian-conservative K-8 institution I attended (that the father they assumed didn’t exist paid for, ironically) repeatedly impressed upon me that my grades showed more promise than playing ball or playing beats, they really thought they were saying something. To eighth grade me, however, the only teacher I wanted after suffering their afternoon special was one who could teach me how to rap like the black male teachers I learned game from on my mp3’s.
I never quite found that teacher for myself, so I became that teacher for someone else.
Thanks in part to several of the educators I would encounter after transferring into Ferguson Sr. - shout out to Ms. Reynolds, Ms. Foster and of course Ms. Adan - I eventually embraced my ability to do with the English language as I pleased. I rapped my way through undergrad into a Fulbright award to study at a graduate design program in Taiwan. I specifically became interested in the design of Taiwan’s massive sociopolitical initiative to integrate English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learning into every student’s curriculum in order to increase their competitiveness in the global job market.
My research soon collided into my side hustle when I founded Lo-Fi Language Learning: a hip-hop based EFL curriculum design network between Taiwan and the United States. We’re far too early in our infancy for this to be a flex, but becoming a part of the education industry in Taiwan has taught me how to revalue and reassess what I thought I knew about a system I struggled to believe in back home. Thanks to these very necessary shifts in my personal and professional values, about 111 Taiwanese sixth graders can now say they’ve had more black male classroom teachers than I’ve had in the United States.
Curious sixth grade students of Lo-Fi Language Learning’s hip-hop class at Sheng-Li Elementary.
--
In many ways, Taiwan’s relatively young democracy has progressed more similarly to Western countries than its Asian counterparts in recent years. Though their economy has slowed and wage growth has stagnated in recent years, national reforms and government initiatives have kept them very much relevant to globalist news and markets. One of these initiatives is the somewhat infamous “Blueprint for Developing Taiwan into a Bilingual Nation by 2030,” which aims to induce English proficiency requirements into the Taiwanese school system within the decade. Since Taiwan’s colonial history consisted of little-to-no English influence, their current progress should be considered a feat in itself. I was not required to be proficient in Mandarin (the dominant language spoken by most Taiwanese citizens) per the conditions of my Fulbright grant, and a sizeable chunk of the English speaking population living in the major cities of Taipei, Tainan or Kaohsiung get by without ever acquiring conversational Mandarin skills. As a result, the island’s English speaking proficiency has dramatically skyrocketed in the past two decades. Their English speaking population count is projected to do the same.
My research is largely concerned with how the EFL system in Taiwan will likely intersect with their “creative economy” - an admittedly vague amalgam of their creative and cultural related industries. Western(ized) subcultures permeate a good portion of their pop culture products in music, dance and film. A lot of this influence is claimed by hip-hop; because of this, many Taiwanese youth are likely to see “blackness” on screens, stages and streetwear before they see a black person in the flesh.
Though I was warned from many sources to expect a special breed of everyday racism in Asia on my way out of the United States, this wasn’t the roughest sea of misunderstanding to cross. Many in my circles projected upon me their fears that the past several generations of Western miseducation surrounding black bodies had spread across the pond quicker than any rectification of it ever will. Yet from my arrival in 2018 to the present day, I’m mostly perceived as either an African or an American with really cool hair. My experience might be different than most, though, as the usual route taken by American expats who move here is to transition directly into teaching English. I just happened to receive an institutional co-sign from the Fulbright program before daring to do the same as a “hip-hop” English teacher.
“But teacher,” I’d once heard from a student after I whipped out the Vestax VCI-300 DJ controller on them in class. “You’re not a DJ, you’re a teacher!”
“為什麼我不能同時有那些工作？“ I responded in what was probably laughably broken Mandarin before translating: “Why can’t I have both of those jobs?” I wasn’t about to explain the gig economy to a 12 year old in their second language. Still, a big premonition I’d been putting forward in my research is the effect that this constantly expanding population segment with disposable income could have on the creative economic sectors that operate in their language. For many of the expats I’ve befriended since my arrival, teaching English is merely a day job. That might not always play out best for the children we teach at first glance. It very well could if creative education, a la Sir Ken Robinson’s matter-of-fact thesis, becomes a priority for the EFL system rather than a merely tolerated side effect of globalizing the education system.
—
Author, left, during a teaching demo of Lo-Fi Language Learning.
As part of my studies, I conducted a free half-semester module of a hip-hop English class for sixth graders at Tainan, Taiwan’s Sheng-Li Elementary School. Rather than grading them with tests, I assessed the course’s effectiveness by modeling their curriculum after the Living Lab service design model. I treated the students as users of the system they were testing and gave them the autonomy to explore topics under the many subgenres of hip-hop that would make them interested in using the English they learn. Unsurprisingly, they much preferred having fun with games and hardware over typical classroom procedures, but they also discovered how much more valuable they found their regular English courses once they had an interesting arena to display their skills in. This was a significant find considering Taiwanese students at large continue to display a noticeable gap between their speaking/listening and reading/writing skills. My students also engaged astoundingly well with cultural contexts of English speakers they hadn’t normally seen in their textbooks: black musicians, poets, and other fast talking Americans who spit the cool words they end up learning from Mandarin pop/rap stars such as Leo王, LilKrake小章章 or 9m88.
I’d done nothing new under the sun with this manner of curriculum prototype testing. In fact, I based the design of this experiment on Angel Lin & Vicky Li’s similar study of a hip-hop EFL program on post-secondary students in Hong Kong. They touted similar benefits of the program on learners’ experiences while outlining the importance of decolonizing the image of a “proper” English speaker. As they provided detailed profiles of students who participated in their study, it was noted how each subject often measured their speaking skills against the kind of English speaker they wanted to sound like: a reporter, a writer… maybe even a rapper! What better way is there for teachers to speak to the motivations of their students than through the art the motivates themselves? Teaching the cultural aspects of one’s language use abroad could unleash a Renaissance in creative language instruction. Within whatever spoken language one uses exists a portal to acquiring proficiencies in the universal language of aesthetics.
Unfortunately, there remains somewhat of a stigma in the continental American job market against English speakers who move to Asia to teach EFL - probably because a pulse and passable social skills are all it takes to get hired in the buxiban/cram school network if you look the part. It doesn’t help that the EFL licensure process has diluted itself to respond to demands for quick and easy proof of experience. To those who hold that stigma, I’d say: don’t let the realization of the worst possibility dictate your perception of the profession as a whole.
Demand drives markets, and perhaps we’re just all too unfamiliar with such a national demand for youth education to understand where Taiwan is coming from. In the face of all the uncertainty and criticism surrounding it’s 2030 Blueprint, the very first reason outlined by the Executive Yuan for projecting success with the initiative states: “it will be demand-driven supply that forms the substance of the bilingual nation policy.” This comes from a system where illegal English teachers are a larger underground market than illicit drugs; I think they’ve proven their point.
--
The average full-time English teacher in Taiwan can make well above a Taiwanese middle class wage. The possibilities for future development of the profession become endless once teaching can be seen by more native speakers as suitable means to earn a living wage as a creatively engaged educator. I do dream that Lo-Fi could welcome MCs from street corners to Soundcloud into this realm for exhibiting the transferable skills of one’s craft. There need be no more horror stories of rappers drowned out by the entertainment industry in an era where the education industries are finally turning their ears to the strength of street knowledge. Hip-hop has been the greatest arbiter of a descriptive English language since Shakespeare, and taught listeners like me that word is bond. I want students and rappers from Taiwan to Tacoma, FL to share their words and make more bonds with loc’d up teachers like me: Mr. Irie. If they could see themselves in English speakers like me, I could see myself forgiven by Ms. Adan.
I don’t exactly predict this venture will flood classrooms across the world with black male teachers all of a sudden. Nonetheless, it’s worth showing any artist - black or otherwise - that the capital worth of teaching within one’s creative craft can have a value far above what any single school system may say. ‘Tis just a shame it might take moving halfway around the world for that second appraisal.
Author, right, with the English department at Sheng-Li Elementary School
About the author
Miles Iton is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and arts administrator. He is the founder of Lo-Fi Language Learning as well as n.e.Bodied Entertainment, both outlets for his endeavors in hip-hop multimedia. He is currently a Fulbright MA grantee to National Cheng Kung University, where he studies at the Institute of Creative Industries Design. For more information, he can be contacted at mw.iton@nebodiedent.org