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The Language Teacher | |||
When I heard that the theme of this year's JALT Conference was to be Crossing Borders, my heart sang. The idea resonates at so many levels and in so many ways: the physical, the cultural, the political, the geographical, the psychological, the social, the personal -- and that is without even beginning to consider what might be seen as the core, professional borders of language and pedagogic style which we cross daily in our necessarily cross-cultural TESOL activities. One challenge, then, when responding to the theme, is to find a constant -- something to hold onto which will give coherence to one's ideas as one crosses so many borders. I have attempted to do this by focusing specifically on what I have called the development parameter. In the next section of this paper, I want to say more about how I mean these two key terms to be understood and what I see as the significance of the overall concept in our work. I then look at two examples of activity along the development parameter, and also offer some thoughts on the ethical bases of such activity. These three, central sections of the paper introduce the sessions I shall be offering at the JALT 1996 Conference in Hiroshima. Finally, I close with a comment on the development parameter as it plays its part in the long-term life span of teachers. The Development ParameterBy development, I mean a continuing process of self-directed movement towards becoming the teacher which one wishes to be. I am differentiating this from teacher training and teacher education in the sense that both these latter terms refer to transitive operations which can be performed on someone else. That is to say, someone else can train me and someone else can educate me. In the sense in which I am using the term, however, only I can develop myself. I do not wish to suggest that training and education are in any sense unimportant. They are, simply, not the focus of this paper. I have used the term parameter, because I do not want to suggest, either, that there is a simple, chronological sequence of education, followed by training, followed by development. My contention here is that one aspect of becoming a teacher is the growth of a commitment to continuing self-development, and that this aspect can be viewed as a constant feature of the process from its beginning. Nor, as I understand the concept, are teacher educators, university professors, directors of studies, or school administrators in any way outside the demands made by a focus on the development parameter (see Hargreaves & Hopkins 1991; Zuber-Skerritt, 1992; Fullan, 1993; and Zeichner, 1993 for work on these other facets of educational development). If the purpose of any educational enterprise is to encourage and facilitate various kinds of intellectual and social growth, these growth processes are most likely to take place in an environment in which all the key players are not merely involved, but are explicitly committed. Let me take a moment here to expand slightly on that last distinction. I first heard it from the tennis player, Martina Navratilova, who was asked, towards the end of her career, whether she was still sufficiently involved in the game to maintain the necessary levels of fitness and motivation. "I am not involved in tennis," she replied, "I am committed to it." "What's the difference?" asked the interviewer. "Just look at a plate of ham and eggs," said Navratilova, "The hen is involved -- the pig is committed." The development parameter which runs through our profession (or trade, or craft -- that's a whole other set of issues) is not properly concerned with teachers giving their students lessons in learner autonomy, teacher educators holding seminars to introduce teachers to reflective practice, or directors of studies organising programmes for teacher development, although I hope it is clear that I have nothing against any of these activities. No, the development parameter is about students, teachers, teacher educators, directors of studies, administrators and all the others asking themselves these fundamental questions: "How and what am I learning from my practice, and how does what I am learning get re-invested in my practice, with what outcomes?" To be involved in such a process, at whatever level of expertise we have reached in our respective roles, we need to be sensitive both to the data we create by acting in our environment, and to the nature of the next step -- natural and fulfilling to ourselves -- which is to be taken in response to that data. As far as necessary starting and finishing points for development are concerned, there are none. The only place from which development can begin is the place in which a person or an institution finds itself. There is no endpoint, because any situation in which we find ourselves will be susceptible to a process of reflection and action through which we can discover more about that situation and about ourselves. Based on this understanding, we can offer a further characterisation of the concept development itself. Development comprises two essential characteristics, awareness and direction: awareness of where one is, and movement in a direction which one has identified as desirable.
Now, we are not short, in TESOL, of directions to move in, of suggestions for how we should teach in ways which are more functional, or communicative, or lexical, or collocational, or task-based, or, on Friday afternoons, perhaps also comical-pastoral-historical. What we are short of is an awareness of how we as individuals, or as groups of colleagues, actually do teach. Even if we do recognise a goal for ourselves as teachers, how can we plan to get there if we don't know where we are starting from? And how many attempts at innovation in teaching (and heaven knows we have had enough of them in TESOL) have foundered on this very issue of not being clear where we (variously) are starting from? Development can only start from where we actually are, but how many of us have a clear and coherent view of ourselves as teachers? And if we do, how many of us have checked that self-image with the image that others have of us, either our students or our colleagues? Let me put my conclusion from all these annoyingly rhetorical questions quite starkly. We have had enough of new ideas about language teaching to last us a good while. There will doubtless be more to come, but they won't do us any harm so long as we don't take them too seriously. What we have to take seriously is not other people's ideas about how we should teach, but a proper, continuing exploration of how we do teach. We have to pay serious attention to ourselves. Once we start to do that, the next step will make itself apparent. Once I focus seriously on my teaching of my students in my context, once I pay careful attention to what is happening in my classroom, the chances are that I will discover something that I want to change, or something that I want to do more of, or less of. Teaching that is appropriate for each one of us in our own situations will emerge from this (potentially never-ending) process.
All this is only common sense. How can someone else tell me that I should, for example, correct less, or more, in my teaching, when not even I have tried to investigate how much I do correct in my own eyes, or those of my students or my colleagues? Nor does anything that I am saying here absolve us of the responsibility to be informed about what wider options are open to us. As well as investigating our context of experience, there are books and articles aplenty for us to use, to the extent that we find them useful in helping us understand what we are doing. Nunan (1989), Edge (1992) and Allwright (1993) provide three very different, but all practically feasible, approaches to the area. (If you didn't believe that they might be useful, you probably wouldn't be reading this, but one of the great barriers to growth along the development parameter is, for some people, an embarrassment about being seen to have a weakness for "theory," in its everyday meaning of "impractical abstraction." Conversely, if we redefine theory to mean something like "statements which help us make sense of the data of our experience," then there are few more liberating rites of passage than that of "becoming theoretical.") The professional outcome of these deliberations along the development parameter is both empowering and demanding. The most appropriate way for each one of us to work is exactly the way that we do work -- provided only that we are committed to an ongoing investigation of just what it is that we do, with a view to enhancing the processes and outcomes, for our students, for our colleagues and for ourselves. Most of my work these days is in TESOL teacher education, and I should like to exemplify the ideas I have been discussing so far within the outlines of two workshops which I shall be offering at the 1996 JALT Conference. The first is concerned most specifically with teachers as participants on teacher education courses. The second concerns tutors teaching on such courses. I hope that others might find the two sessions of interest, but those are their particular addressees. Crossing the Borders of DevelopmentWhen we attend teachers' courses as participants, it may well be the case that demands are made of us which put us under various kinds of intellectual and emotional pressure. In one sense, after all, that is why we go on the courses in the first place! Nevertheless, creative pressure can sometimes lead to destructive problems, and individuals can suffer badly. A colleague, Keith Richards, and I wondered if there might not be a pattern to some of the difficulties which course participants encounter. If this were to be the case, some participants might think that they had an individual problem when, in fact, they were going through processes quite normal for many people: the processes of growth and development. Our pedagogic purpose, therefore, became
We approached this task by adapting Curran's (1972) model of personal development in learning and language learning (see La Forge, 1983), and presenting it as a metaphor for the experiences which participants go through on their courses. The bare outline of the metaphor is one of birth, identity, childhood, adolescence and maturity, with their attendant characteristics. There are then three basic questions:
At the Hiroshima JALT conference, we shall look at the metaphor in more depth, and I shall report back on responses to its use so far, as well as collecting your reactions. One thing that I am quite sure of is that the purpose behind the work, the idea of helping people get in touch with their development, and not confuse necessary pressures with personal trauma, is one which is worth pursuing in this work along the development parameter. Crossing the Borders of ExperienceThis workshop aims to offer a self-development opportunity to colleagues involved in teacher education, where we like to emphasize the importance of learning from experience. The work here draws heavily on a paper by Boxer (1985) in which he makes the initially obvious point that experience, in itself, is a seamless and generally undifferentiated flow of data. When we say that we are going to learn from experience, we start by isolating some incidents from their context, as though we were putting a frame round them to make a picture we can look at. This framing move is already based on an evaluation of what is important. When we have done that, we need to interpret the picture we have made of the past in order to make of it some kind of sense which is relevant to our present. Framing and interpretation -- both moves are necessary. But we have a choice as to who makes them. If the teacher educator says to course participants, "Watch this video clip and notice how the teacher gets the students to work out the meanings of the words they don't know," then the teacher educator is in charge both of the framing and of the interpretation. As a style of teaching, Boxer calls this "Instructional." By manipulating the ownership of the two moves, one can develop the idea of four of these teaching "styles." Each style has its appropriate use, and each has attendant risks. Overuse of the instructional style, for example, can lead to a feeling of alienation on the part of the course participants, who may react by thinking, "I can learn all this stuff, but what has it got to do with me?" The specific developmental opportunity for teacher educators is to use the framework as a way of viewing their own practice, in order to reflect on the extent to which they are deploying their use of experience-as-input-to-learning in varied and appropriate ways. Or are they over-representing a certain style of work because it suits their own unconscious preferences? These are the areas which we shall investigate in the Hiroshima workshop. Crossing Borders: Some Values to DeclareIt is not, of course, a coincidence, that I am presenting ideas here, and offering workshops for the JALT Conference, which involve a style of individual, group and organisational development such as is central to the culture in which I myself have been educated. To those of us who see value in this type of social organisation, there is a paramount need to re-enact its interlocking sets of rights and responsibilities in a process of ongoing learning which reaches all across our education systems. From the standpoint of a teacher in my society, we see this same need for development reflected back to us in whichever direction we look: whether towards our students, towards our teacher educators, or out into the society in which we live. This is not to say that I have the right, as I cross national and cultural borders, to insist that other people accept this set of values. Nor, more insidiously, do I have the right to encourage teachers towards the use of the professional techniques which I find effective, without drawing their attention to the underlying values from which they arise. Who is better placed than the border-crossers of TESOL to validate the following comment from Hamilton (1993, p.96)?
But because I cross borders, because I am happy to live between borders and want to live in a world of cross-cultural respect and inter-cultural creation, this does not mean either that I, myself, am some kind of value-free, cultural neuter. For example, I hear in my own words and thoughts a frequent emphasis on the individual. I always mean that to be understood as the responsible individual-in-society, but that is not the emphasis which I usually manage to make explicit, and I know that I respond very positively to such sentiments as are found in Kolb's (1984, p. 209) acknowledgement:
If that attitude does not fit the weft and warp of another culture (and I am familiar with the proverb about the nail), it must be good that I express it openly, so that appropriate elements of what I say can be interpreted in this light and, perhaps, discounted. The point is not to decide whether or not I am right or wrong, but whether or not I have anything to say which can be of use. Similarly, when underlying values are expressed, I am in a better position to become more aware of myself, and more able to see that self in the light cast by the responses of others. This transparency is the only basis on which respect for the values of others can be real. And this enhanced awareness is also, as I have argued at some length above, the only position from which genuine self-development can proceed. Nor is it all sunlit uplands out there. There is always shadow, too. It is now more than five years since Professor Hitoshi Igarashi, Professor of Comparative Literature at Tsukuba University, was brutally killed for having translated the novel, The Satanic Verses, into Japanese. No arrests have been made, and the political and spiritual leaders of those responsible continue to call for more such killings, presumably regarding them not as crimes, but as expressions of their underlying values. I see no alternative to making an issue of this. I cannot respect ethical values which seek to justify the killing of a translator for translating a novel nor, to shift continents and cultures, can I respect the values of people who purport to be committed to helping people learn English, but do so only as a means to evangelise their religious convictions in search of converts (Brown, 1996). To be involved in TESOL these days is to have a role in the vast cultural/commercial enterprise that TESOL has become, and in the issues of industrial, political and military hegemony which underpin that enterprise. In one sense, we are all being used as pawns towards other people's purposes. On the scale of operation at which we each work, however, we have a right of response. Each teaching act realises statements of social value (Stevick, 1993; Edge. 1996). It is up to us to be clear and transparent about the values which motivate our actions. I shall pursue these themes further in Hiroshima. ConclusionI should like to close by bringing the development parameter home, so to speak, into the mainstream of our lives as teachers. One of the most significant findings of Huberman's (e.g., 1989) research into the life cycle of teachers is that those teachers most likely to avoid burnout or cynicism, and who come to the end of their careers with the greatest sense of satisfaction, are those who have been consistently committed throughout their teaching to small-scale experimentation, or to "tinkering," as they put it, with the details of their own pedagogy. This is what I understand emergent methodology to be about. When we speak of the development parameter, we have to remember that to be a teacher is to remain in a state of becoming, and that our goal is to remain on that path. In fact, the path is the goal.
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