The Heart of the Matter

" This is the end of the Innocence" or coming up against the constraints of the profession on a initial teacher training course
Lou Spaventa, Sta Barbara, California, US

"Offer up your best defense.
This is the end.
This is the end of the innocence."
~ Don Henley

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Introduction
The bureaucratic need for systematization of instruction versus the individual need for self-expression
Cultivation of career versus the cultivation of curiosity
The pressure to specialize versus the desire to experience different contexts
The need for credentials versus the need for renewal

Later this summer, I will begin another training course with people who are completely or nearly completely new to teaching English to speakers of other languages. They will bring with them their eagerness, their desire to learn, their need to achieve some sort of competence, and their earnest searching for a place that welcomes them. I love working with such people, yet, I feel, as Don Henley sang, "This is the end of the innocence." Because it is the end of their innocence to the field and to the politics of the field, it becomes a special time for me. For them, their first experience in this field will have a great impact upon their later development, for we pay attention to what came first and what has just come. These are the psychological principles of primacy and recency, and I have found them to hold true. What these neophytes will come to grips with are the following:
1. the bureaucratic need for systemization of instruction versus the individual need for self-expression
2. the cultivation of career versus the cultivation of curiosity
3. the pressure to specialize versus the desire to experience different contexts, and
4. the need for credentials versus the need for renewal.

As most teachers can attest from experience, a school is a bureaucratic entity. That means that it relies on specified roles in a hierarchy in which any one person can be replaced by another having the same described qualifications. A bureaucracy's main function, which is never stated outright, is to preserve its own existence. Its secondary function, which is usually encoded in catalogues, charters, and other documents, is its educational purpose. This can create some very difficult and contradictory situations for a teacher. For example, you know someone who has become a very good teacher by virtue of self-education and experience. Yet, that person cannot apply for a position at your institution because s/he does not have the qualifications stated for the position to be filled. The teacher eventually learns that, in a bureaucracy, the documented and explicit take precedence over everything else. Rules must be adhered to and regulations followed. Or else? Or else in this country, the USA, law suits follow.

The new teacher may be in the field for the psychic reward of being himself or herself in front of an audience of students, being able to express his or her gifts through the medium of a teaching/learning relationship. There are few cases that I know of where such an individual has gotten along well in a bureaucracy, and once again, all schools are bureaucracies. I can only think of a couple individuals, such as my friend, Mario Rinvolucri, who have remained true to themselves by keeping a chary distance from total involvement with bureaucratic structure.

Finally, bureaucratic need for regulation filters into classrooms, which become divided up by time: semesters, quarters, months, weeks, periods of instruction, and by ability levels: beginner, elementary, intermediate, advanced. Do these have anything to do with the reality of learning? Certainly, not the learning of every person in a class. This then is one dichotomy that ends innocence for the new TESOLer.

I can remember thirty years ago at the beginning of Pilgrims Language Courses when the excitement of so many new and motivated teachers made our summer programs both fun and educational for us all. From there, all of us have gone on to build careers in the field. We look for the next best position: the one offering more money - go to an oil-rich country; the one offering more prestige - work for the British Council, the one offering intellectual recognition - get a PhD and teach at a university. We follow career paths. ESOL was still a relatively open field in the seventies, but it soon became a very career-focused and structured field, similar to most other fields of work.

The curiosity which pushed many of us into the field of ESOL gradually gets replaced by striving for a career. What did that curiosity do for us anyway? It took us to out of the way places, places we'd never go otherwise. I lived on an island in the South China Sea. I taught in Prishtina, when it was a provincial capital in the former Yugoslavia. I learned from the differentness of other people and other cultures. Teaching English allowed me to explore the curiosity I had about the world. I did it first alone, then with a wife, and then with a wife and one, two, three children. Now I am tied by tenure and financial responsibility to a teaching position at a U.S. community college. My curiosity suffers. My career continues.

When we start out as TESOLers, we think our job is to teach English wherever and in whatever way necessary. Go to Saudi Arabia? No problem, just don't expect to drink Coca Cola. The Andes? Great. There's Machupichu to explore. China? How can you not go to a place that holds one fifth of the people in the world? Teach reading? No problem. Grammar? Likewise. Beginners? That's fun. Advanced? Wow, I can finally say anything and they'll understand me. Administer a standardized test? Never done it, but I can learn. In sum, we are open to the needs that exist.

However, soon things begin to change. We start to specialize. We specialize in geographic parts of the world and language groups. We become invested in our expertise of teaching certain groups. We become experienced at teaching certain levels and certain skills. We build a reputation in the field, perhaps by writing a book or perhaps by giving workshops. In the ESL Department at the college where I teach, instructors have taught the same levels and skills for years and years. In the end, we become identified as beginning reading specialists, testing specialists, advanced writing teachers. That beginner's feeling of willingness to do and experience it all fades away. Too bad for us.

So you spend five or six years globe-hopping or getting to know Italy or Spain very well. Then it dawns on you that this is what you do and you like it. So, it becomes time to get some training. How much? A certificate? A credential? A master's? A doctorate? Ronald Dore wrote The Diploma Disease about the competition for educational credentials in post-war Japan. However, it is pretty much the same the world over now. As the number of individuals in a given field increases, the perceived need for more and more credentials increases as well. We spend our time getting certified and licensed. Even programs which ostensibly exist to renew our energies, both intellectual and spiritual, become transformed into units to be applied to our careers. When we go to graduate school, we quickly learn to find someone who will mentor us, and in turn, we accept his or her specialization as potentially part of our own future.

Renewal is always subordinate to credentialing. The idea of looking at something as new again even though we may have a lot of experience is an important one, indeed, a necessary idea for a healthy human life. Shunryu Suzuki wrote of the beginner's mind in Zen Buddhism. This is what we need to cultivate as teachers. Unfortunately, not many of the lectures, workshops, and programs we attend occupy themselves with this need as a priority.

So, the many new and hopeful teachers I will shortly see before me, I believe, will come to struggle in time with the dichotomies I have enumerated above. I hope that one day self-expression, the cultivation of curiosity, the desire to experience difference, and the sense of always becoming new will become part of the teaching paradigm. I regret their loss in all of us, but especially in those of us who teach others who speak different languages and come from different cultures because the qualities of self-expression, curiosity, appreciation of difference, and the desire to be always new are part of the necessary conditions for humanistic teaching.

References

Dore, Ronald (1976) The Diploma Disease, Allen & Unwin Publishers.
Suzuki, Shunryu (1973) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Weatherhill Publishers.

Please check the Skills of Training course at Pilgrims website.