The Reflexive Teacher Educator in TESOL

Roots and Wings

Julian Edge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136839511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book Julian Edge explores the construct of reflexivity in teacher education, differentiating it from, while locating it in, reflective practice.

Reflexivity is the key concept underpinning a view of teacher education that binds together the orientations of action research and personal development in a way that establishes common ground, common purpose, and common experience between teachers and teacher educators.

Augmenting the field in important ways, The Reflexive Teacher Educator in TESOL:

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• develops the concept of praxis as it resolves the usual theory/practice dichotomy of teacher education
• introduces a framework (Copying, Applying, Theorising, Reflecting, Acting) that allows present and prospective teacher educators to become reflexive individuals
• uses a narrative, autobiographical voice that explicates the concepts involved, while also offering practical methodological procedures for teacher education.

Written with clarity and style, scholarly yet personal, dealing with reflexivity in an accessible yet non-trivial way, this book – a first in the field, distinctive in terms of what the story is and how it is told – is a gift to the profession of TESOL teacher education.

1

OF METAPHORS AND MYTHS, VOICES AND VOCABULARIES, AIMS AND ADDRESSEES

‘Just one last job, and then I’m going to quit for good.’

Whenever you hear that line in a movie, you know that something is going to go wrong, badly wrong. Whoever says it is about to take one chance too many, probably for a good reason as far as they are concerned, but we know that there will be some vital factor that they have overlooked, or not taken proper account of. Perhaps things generally have become more complicated than they used to be, or everyone moves a little faster, or the technology doesn’t give you the leeway, or maybe it’s just good old human error, or a skipped beat of the heart. The mood, anyway, drifts into the elegiac and, as the very word elegiac collocates most strongly for me with a certain genre of westerns, I find such titles as The Wild Bunch and The Misfits rolling through my mind. Like tumbleweed.

They are not bad titles, in fact, to sum up certain perspectives on a working life in TESOL where, just like the teachers interviewed by Johnston (1997), a series of jobs has replaced the concept of a career. The Wild Bunch might represent the out-there TEFL years of bright new mornings: sunrise crackling through the giant pillars of Karnak in Upper Egypt; sunrise from the summit of Mt Kinabalu, lighting up a view of the South China Sea washing in on the north coast of Borneo; sunrise over the fallen stone giants of Nemrut Dag in remote eastern Anatolia; sunrise over the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan, whose ruins were already mysterious to the Aztecs when they discovered them; and dreamily watching another sun come up over the hills of magic, tragic Lebanon, seeing the light creep into the folded valleys around Ba’albek, turning their purple, opaque hollows into endless, rolling slopes of smoky marijuana.

Equally well, The Misfits might represent the later, more academic years of trying to establish a niche in university systems where, while some of us who made this journey have been eminently successful, some of us have failed to come to terms, and some of us have done a little of both.

But oh my, what opportunities there have been to articulate ideas and possibilities that had not occurred to any of us until we looked out through the windows that TESOL had opened and found that our initial questions of What? had shifted into When?, and that our understandings Why not?, challenged by In whose interests? Who would have thought that being an English teacher had so much heart and mind and spirit and blood in it?

Rather than jump from the practical to the theoretical when shaping this shift from the schoolroom to the seminar room, some of us discovered the attractions of becoming theoretical in our practice and, striving for the sunlit uplands of such praxis, found ourselves camped out along the marshy borderlands of action research: too theoretical for the practitioners, too practical for the theorists, but at least frequently in interesting company as we constructed our representations around the campfire.

It is perhaps this sense of a working life comprising a series of dislocations and peripheral positions that prompted me to saddle up once more. One more book. One cover to bind them all … No, perhaps not. No, I really don’t believe in that sort of thing.

Anyway, here we are, however it pans out. A scene is coalescing, for better or worse. The old grey mare has been saddled up for one last job. She’s not the fastest anymore, but at least I know she doesn’t shy if the action gets noisy. The sun rises one more time. The leather creaks. It begins.

And then, without transition, we are down the road apiece. The saloon is poorly lit. Cards slide rhythmically over the green baize surface. Which scene is this? Is this early or late in the story? Which of those upturned cards is significant here? The Queen of Hearts? The Jack of Diamonds? The Ace of Spades? One needs to know whose symbolism is framing the action. Well, sometimes you do know, sometimes you think you do, and sometimes you haven’t a clue. And still you have to act. One is always called upon to make decisions in the face of incomplete information. That doesn’t mean, though, that you have to rush in.

‘You learn to draw fast,’ I remember one character saying, ‘so as to give yourself time to shoot slow.’

But then, I remember another one who said, ‘The most important thing is to get off the first shot. Just the noise of that will unnerve most people.’

Yeah, the world’s full of folks who know best.

* * * * *

OK, before we go any further, two things: One, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Two, what makes you think that we need another book on TESOL teacher education?

‘Need’ is a hard call. I don’t know that I’d argue that anyone ‘needs’ it. If anything, I might say that I ‘needed’ to write it.

Ah, you mean it’s just another ‘publish or perish’ thing? That’s not …

No, no, I don’t mean that at all. I mean that I have been working in TESOL and teacher education for a long time and writing is one of the things that I have come to see as a part of what I do. But more than that, I have recently come to think that I have a few more things to say that might be useful to colleagues, and I have identified this thematic link, reflexivity, that I think can allow me to bring those things together in a way that is coherent. And yes, I want to do that.

It sounds as though this book is much more about you than it is for anyone else.

I don’t see that those two things need to be in opposition. The kind of …

Well, let’s say this isn’t exactly a ‘how to’ book for people wanting to get involved in teacher education.

Yeah, in simple terms, I’d go along with that. It’s not a book of instructions, nor does it try to cover a teacher education syllabus, or anything like that. That’s not the kind of contribution I’m trying to make or the kind of impact I would like the book to have. Nor, come to that, is that the only kind of reader interest that needs to be addressed, I think.

OK, so you just talked about ‘contribution’ and ‘impact’ and ‘addressing’ certain readers, and you even used the word, ‘need’, that you baulked at before. Do you want to say more about those things?

Fair enough. I’ll work backwards through your list and I’ll try to keep it brief. Yes, I said ‘need’ in the sense that I think that we need a variety of types of book to keep us motivated and engaged and thinking and developing and healthy. A good ‘how to’ book is a fine thing, but only ‘how to’ books would be a thin diet.

As for my addressees, at its broadest I hope to address any fellow TESOL professional with an interest in his or her own continuing development, as well as administrators, researchers and policy-makers who see the professional development of teachers as a focus of their interest or responsibility. But most particularly, as you can tell from my title, I have written this book with those colleagues in mind who work in teacher education.

Well, that’s the usual pretty wide net! Did you miss anyone out?

OK, more specifically yet, I want to address those teacher educators who continue to see their endeavours in teacher education as a form of teaching in its own right, in the straightforward sense of helping others to learn, and who remain keen to continue their own self-development through their work.

I write for colleagues who are comfortable with (or at least prepared to entertain) the idea that professional development is a part of personal development: that we do not simply amass bundles of pedagogic functions separate from who we are, but rather that we are whole-people-who-teach and that a continuing exploration of what that means in terms of individual congruence is an appropriate companion to the learning of, for example, how to use new techniques and new technologies. This relation between the personal and the professional is one strand of reflexivity that the book explores.

Is this what you call ‘brief’?

Listen up, I’m just getting going. I have written the book for teacher educators who share my perception that, while it is now common to emphasize the need for teachers to pursue their own personal development, to explore and theorize their own experience, as well as to evolve their own style of context-sensitive teaching, there is a serious danger of these topics becoming just that: topics on teacher education courses. I believe that we need lived examples of teacher educators themselves operating in these ways, and that this relationship of compatibility between the ideas that we espouse and what can be seen in our practice represents another element of reflexivity to investigate.

By emphasizing this common interest in exploring and theorizing, it is my intention actively to contribute to a sense of shared purpose and mutually beneficial process between teacher educators and teachers. And if such a sense of common purpose and process is to be established, it falls to teacher educators to take the lead. To put that another way, I want to look at how the experience of teacher-learners working with a reflexive teacher educator is taken forward in their own professional lives. This sense of teacher educator/teacher continuity is another of the meanings of reflexivity that the book takes up.

As I intend to mine my own experience and tell my own stories in the writing of this book, I am writing for readers who are sympathetic to the idea of a narrative truth that does not always boil down to general principles, rules, or instructions. You will need, then, to be prepared to put up with old men’s tales, to extend sufficient trust to believe that they are not told without serious purpose, and to challenge yourself with the question, ‘What is the significance of this for me?’

To be quite honest, apart from not being at all brief, this is starting to sound a little overambitious and/or narcissistic.

You may be right. In fact, in a way that completely exposes you as simply a presentational device of mine, you bring me very neatly to my subtitle.

Uh-huh. I’m blown. Do tell.

My mother used to say that parents need to give a child roots and wings. Perhaps your mother used to say the same thing. Or you might have seen the saying on an embroidery sampler in a gift shop. It’s not original. But it is powerful. That is probably how clichés get to be clichés. If you can put up with that clichéd reading of the phrase, I think it’s fair to say that that is what teacher educators hope to do for the teachers that they work with: help them establish their roots in educational values that are important to them, and help them grow the wings that will enable them to explore their environments and continue discovering new possibilities for themselves in helping others learn. That should not, of course, be confused with the idea of teacher educators taking on some kind of parental role towards teachers. The point that I want to make is that, in order to be effective in helping teachers empower themselves, teacher educators need to be explicitly and overtly engaged in modelling these ‘roots and wings’ processes.

And you see ‘roots and wings’ as being connected with being overambitious and narcissistic?

Let’s say that I’m prepared to take the risk. But I have to admit to having another agenda in mind here. That phrase, roots and wings, has become evocative, for me, of two well-known Greek myths: the Narcissus myth and the Icarus myth, albeit with unorthodox readings. Indulge me?

Why stop now? I see you have a very battered copy of Graves (that’s Robert, not Kathleen) to hand.

Yes, indeed. Well, Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the master craftsman who was imprisoned on the island of Crete by King Minos (because of his designer role in activities involving Queen Pasiphaë and a holy bull that we do not need to go into here). In order to escape, Daedalus created wings from leather, wax and feathers for himself and Icarus. In the telling by Graves (1960:312):

Having tied on Icarus’s pair for him, he said with tears in his eyes. ‘My son, be warned! Neither soar too high, lest the sun melt the wax; nor swoop too low, lest the feathers be wetted by the sea.’ Then he slipped his arms into his own pair of wings and they flew off. ‘Follow me closely,’ he cried, ‘do not set your own course!’

The effectiveness of this last injunction from parent to child rings down through history. Graves (ibid.:313) continues:

They had left Naxos, Delos and Paros behind them on the left and were leaving Lebynthos and Calymne behind them on the right, when Icarus disobeyed his father’s instructions and began soaring towards the sun, rejoiced by the lift of his great sweeping wings. Presently, when Daedalus looked over his shoulder, he could no longer see Icarus; but scattered feathers floated on the waves below. The heat of the sun had melted the wax and Icarus had fallen into the sea and drowned.

The story is usually recounted as a cautionary tale about disobedience and, especially, a warning of the punishment that awaits overweening pride. But in Wilson (1998:5), I came across a reference to the myth in terms of its celebrating a defining element of what makes us most excitingly human:

And so the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar could pay tribute to the spirit of his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, by saying: Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.

And then, when reading Levin (1965), whose study of the works of Christopher Marlowe is entitled The Overreacher, and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Of metaphors and myths, voices and vocabularies, aims and addressees
• 2. In praise of reflective practice
• 3. In search of reflexivity
• 4. Copying and becoming methodological
• 5. Applying theory and becoming technical
• 6. Theorizing practice and becoming theoretical
• 7. Reflecting and becoming intellectual
• 8. Acting and becoming pragmatic
• 9. Shadows
• 10. So what?
• References
• Index