Category: Topics

Strong Voices Rocking On

If you’re reading this then you’re probably a teacher. And you’re probably the sort of teacher who is in the habit of questioning. You perhaps question your practice, your methods, your use of technology, your dependence on materials, or your attachment to avoiding materials.  Questioning is not a bad thing, by the way.

Questioning opens pages, or in our case, windows. And when we open these windows, we glide into the self-discovery of reflective practice. We become empowered in admitting that we don’t have all the answers and the act of accepting that often makes our professions come alive.

Our industry has some very strong voices and iTDi is but one platform that hosts some of these voices. They’re so strong in fact, that we now have the force of being ‘an industry’ which we weren’t really about 50 years ago. We were perhaps a ‘field’, and we still are a ‘field’, but we are an internationally established blogging, conferencing, publishing, educating industry… with strong voices. These voices theorize, they debate, they argue, they reveal, they research… and they resound with the eloquence of self-questioning and echo the philosophical values of education.

Over the summer I heard an educator whom I deeply respect describe our ELT industry as one of pendulum swings. I took some time to digest the impact of these words… and yes, I suppose there is a pendulum. It has perhaps swung methodologically from learning by translating to translating learning into real life. It has perhaps swung ideologically from the performing teacher to the autonomous learner. It has perhaps swung economically from investing in learning, to learning to invest of oneself — in our age of technological and information abundance. But what is so fabulous about our industry is that we all ride the pendulum. I believe that few of you who are reading this have not heard an idea or a method or a lesson plan or game at a conference, in a blog post or from a colleague and have not just gone into class the next day and had a go at it. That is why ELT teachers like you and me make up an extra special niche of teachers… because we love the stuff we make and live it with childlike uninhibitedness.

For me, one of the more textured moments on the ELT pendulum’s trajectory was when we all started worrying about motivation and affective processes. When we did this, we started worrying about the meta-perspective of why we do what we do in big way. This texture is for me so rugged and so determined because we yielded the floor to so many other fields: psychology, sociology, philosophy and business. We took so much newness into stride based on the entry-level qualifications of being interested and wanting to be educated. I have colleagues who have embraced Complexity Theory and Regression Analysis with matched enthusiasm. I know peers who read for doctorates alongside full-time careers, without funding. I know teachers who have instigated online debates on the use of technology as their job security is churned through turmoil of a magnitude that they didn’t imagine possible. And I have friends who have rocked my world and then rocked it again a few months later because they’re just so inspiring.

So, what have I learnt in 2012? That our not-so-rugged practitioner voices need to carry on being heard. That classroom stories and the teachers that tell them are ready to take centre stage in the research spotlight. That these stories, the essential accounts and recounts of the magic in our classrooms, will shape the textures of the future. I think we need to capture the magic in as many ways as possible because you and I, the practitioners, are perhaps the real pivots that suspend the pendulum and let it swing.

What have you learnt in 2012? What are you learning?

Undone Business        —      Chuck Sandy                           

All this new stuff goes on top / turn it over, turn it over / wait and water down / from the dark bottom / turn it inside out / let it spread through / Sift down even. / Watch it sprout. / A mind like compost.  — Gary Snyder

Recently I’ve been thinking about my teachers. I haven’t been remembering. I’ve been learning what they taught me, and learning in ways I never imagined I would. Ideas I heard more than thirty years ago rise from the bottom of my mind and combine with what I’m learning now in new ways.

Perhaps it’s my age. I’m 54 and so it’s natural I should think back. Perhaps it’s the year I’ve lived through as I battled illness, resigned from the university where I’d been a professor for almost 20 years, and helped launch iTDi. Who wouldn’t reflect? Or perhaps it’s the season, the darkening winter days when news could make the darkness darker. Whatever the reason, a lot’s come together this year and made sense as I’ve continued the undone business of becoming the teacher I believe myself to be and am becoming.

One of the teachers who helped me on this journey is Winston Fuller.  Although it’s been 35 years since I sat in his poetry workshops, I’ve recently heard him saying:  “All teachers teach what they most need to learn” and “it is only by letting go enough to trust ourselves and others that we finally learn who we are.”

This is why I talk and write and give so many presentations about motivation. That’s what’s been most challenging for me recently. Illness and university stress had gotten me so down that it became a long jump up from where I was to where I needed to be. It’s because I needed to figure this out that I began my public conversations about motivation. This need led me to read widely, reflect on my current and past practices, and not only think about Winston Fuller, but to pull out a folder of my work at 21 that included a long typed comment in which Winston wrote:

“As I read your work, I sometimes hear the voice of a guilty man accusing others of sin. We all do that of course. More often than not I find myself teaching in the evening what I have been telling myself in the morning. You might review your work with an eye to seeing how much of what you say to others amounts to a conversation with yourself. All serious people do this. What’s needful to know is that you’re doing it”. 

All serious people do this? Winston meant me, and he meant me at 21. As I read his words again, I see him in class, pulling a chair close, looking the gathered students over with a twinkle in his eyes as he begins telling us what’s on his mind. As he talked, he’d weave the poetry we’d written and were learning about into what was going on in his life, the lives of the people he loved, and our lives — as if there was no gap between the classroom and our lives – and of course there wasn’t. He asked questions. He listened. He was entirely present as he talked repeatedly about soul making —  by which he meant being a writer, a teacher,  and a person who takes life seriously even in the midst of a culture that does not.

“We must take our lives and the lives of others seriously,” Winston said.  “If we do not do this for ourselves and others, who will?”

I realize now that Winston talked so much about soul-making because this is what he was teaching himself.  It is what I’ve been doing myself this year. It’s why I’m telling you about it now.

Recently I read an essay about how alienation, loneliness, and the lack of community just might be  the root cause of the horrifying world news we’ve recently heard about. As I read that essay, I thought of that circle Winston Fuller built for us in his classes, and of the importance that community still holds for me.

Then, I thought about the iTDi community we’ve been building and the work these teachers do as soul-makers — forming a circle and learning together the steps we can take towards healing each other, our students, and this world. This is what gives me hope on this day as my mind turns it all over and watches it rise up, sprout, and stretch out across the seas.

A year ago I did not even know most of the people I am working with now, and yet we have formed this circle of hope that for me goes back to Winston’s class, where we learned what I’m learning now, what I will be continuing to learn, as I hear Winson’s voice read the Charles Olson poem Maxiumus To Himself that ends without conclusion with these lines:

It is undone business

I speak of, this morning,   

with the sea

stretching out

from my feet.