Abstract
In this article I will describe how personality was mobilized during a Dutch language course that prepared job seekers for the care sector. I show how more than language competences, what was valued was who someone was as a person. While the emphasis on job seekers’ personality in the context of a language course that prepared for an education and subsequent job in the care sector, is, on the one hand, in line with the general attention for the worker as a person and more specifically for what is generally referred to as soft skills, I show that the understanding of personality in the course also differs from how soft skills is generally understood: personality was seen as a stable essence, where potential for improvement was deemed to be limited. This view on personality can be associated with the history of care work and the morality attached to it, for which selection of workers is deemed necessary. Moreover, as I have shown, while personality is thought of as an abstract term that can be applied to categorize individuals separately from the specific context or from cultural or political influences, the type of personality that was required for a care worker was coded as feminine and associated with certain types of people along racialized lines. As such, there is an unequal distribution among which people are deemed suitable for care work. By demonstrating the effects of this specific understanding of personality, I also argue that it is important for language scholars to pay attention to such notions themselves, rather than to focus merely on their communication.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Being/becoming better people: personality, morality and language education
- English and ‘personality development’: the hyper-individualization and de-politicization of social mobility in India
- Personality as technology of self: MBTI and English language learning in South Korea
- Becoming/being a care worker: personality in a language training for migrant job seekers in Flanders
- Caring and loving teachers online: personality in the feminized labour of Filipina English Language teachers
- “Looking like a boarding school student”: the construction of unequal personhood in language policy in education
- Discursive formation of personalities: life trajectories of a transnational doctoral student between the UK and China
- The “pedagogy of personality”: becoming better people in the English language teaching and learning space
- Varia
- Collaborative autoethnography in applied linguistics: reflecting on research practice
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Being/becoming better people: personality, morality and language education
- English and ‘personality development’: the hyper-individualization and de-politicization of social mobility in India
- Personality as technology of self: MBTI and English language learning in South Korea
- Becoming/being a care worker: personality in a language training for migrant job seekers in Flanders
- Caring and loving teachers online: personality in the feminized labour of Filipina English Language teachers
- “Looking like a boarding school student”: the construction of unequal personhood in language policy in education
- Discursive formation of personalities: life trajectories of a transnational doctoral student between the UK and China
- The “pedagogy of personality”: becoming better people in the English language teaching and learning space
- Varia
- Collaborative autoethnography in applied linguistics: reflecting on research practice