Why Do Teachers Attend Conferences?
Neil McBeath, Oman
Neil McBeath served as a uniformed education officer in the Royal Air Force of Oman from 1981 to 2005. During that time, he took two Masters degrees and was awarded the Omani Distinguished Service Medal. Refusing to renew contract, he taught at the Technical Service Institute in Saudi Arabia for two years. He has now returned to Oman and is teaching at the Sultan Qaboos University. E-mail: neilmcbeath@yahoo.com
Menu
Introduction
Tourists
Job-seekers
Looters/hunter-gatherers
Presenters
Salespeople
Reflective practitioners
COnclusion
References
The stimulus for this paper comes from Borg (2015) who recently published an article entitled “The benefits of attending ELT conferences” in, appropriately enough, English Language Teaching Journal. Borg’s conclusions are entirely rational, but the title itself automatically carries the assumption that conference delegates do actually benefit from their attendance, and as Smith (2015; 206) has indicated, Borg’s conception tends to be “highly academic”. Little attention is paid to factors that are not directly related to teachers’ professional development, and some of those factors will be considered in this paper.
What follows is a “narrative of personal experience” (Patino-Santos 2015; 220) based on some 20 years of attendance at teaching conferences as both a delegate and presenter. The evidence offered is subjective, but it is rooted in observation and tempered by reflection. Put simply, at many conferences, delegates may be sub-divided into the following categories: tourists; job-seekers; looter/hunter-gatherers; presenters, salespeople and reflective practitioners. These divisions are not water-tight, and individual delegates may change role during a single conference, but at nearly all conferences, at least some of the behaviour associated with these descriptions will be on show.
This is a small category, which primarily includes those delegates whose fees have been paid by outside bodies, and who have only a limited commitment to ELT. They may be important stakeholders in the educational process, but they seldom set foot in a classroom. Examples of these people would be the senior representatives of major publishing houses, who move from one conference to another with the principal aim of monitoring the performance of their local sales teams.
A second example would be the quartet of Arab expatriate ladies whom I once saw at a Current Trends in English Language Testing (CTELT) Conference in Dubai. They arrived by taxi, stormed the reception desk, collected their conference bags, their free stationery and their certificates of attendance, and then returned to the still waiting taxi and drove off. Clearly, someone, somewhere, had paid their conference fees, but whoever that was had wasted the money. The ladies, on the other hand, had carefully covered their tracks.
As true tourists, however, the supreme award must go to the two senior officers from the Royal Saudi Air Force who were given all expenses paid trips to the 2007 IATEFL Conference in Aberdeen. In the course of a four-day period, they fitted in trips to the village of Tomintoul (round trip 200 miles), Loch Ness (round trip 240 miles) and a car boot sale. The teacher who they accompanied was then tasked with driving them, and their purchases, overnight from Aberdeen to Heathrow (single journey 600 miles). When he returned to the Kingdom he was unable to give a coherent account of his experiences.
This is a second minor group, except at TESOL Arabia Conferences, which host job fairs that run parallel with the conference itself. Recruiters obviously go with the express aim of hiring new personnel, and are allocated specific rooms for this purpose. Almost certainly, much of the on-line carping that follows every TESOL Arabia Conference can linked to the posters having failed to obtain a new position. More fortunate applicants, by contrast, may go on to enjoy the rest of the conference, reporting everything through the rose-tinted spectacles of their own success. At other conferences, however, it is not unknown to see some nervous delegates frantically networking with anyone who they think can get them out of their present teaching post. Their air of mild desperation often gives the wrong impression.
These people are generally out for what they can get. Unlike tourists, they attend the conference sessions, but they also keep a weather eye open for anything that is going free. Looters, moreover, are exactly what the term suggests. At an Omani Ministry of Manpower Conference, I once left my conference bag unattended on a chair, while I served myself from the lunch buffet. After lunch, I found that my bag had been joined by three other, identical bags. Opening one to see if was mine, I found a very large bunch of bananas that could only have come from the same buffet. Now for delegates who have traveled long distances, taking one piece of fruit as sustenance for the return trip might be acceptable, but an entire bunch of bananas is clearly looting.
So too was the action of a delegate I saw at a TESOL Arabia Conference at Sheikh Zayed University. Arriving in the early morning, she spotted a cut-glass salad bowl full of boiled sweets, and promptly tipped the entire contents into her handbag. I can only assume that she left the bowl because she did not like the pattern.
Hunter-gatherers, by contrast, tend to focus on literature. Assiduous collectors of handouts (including PowerPoint presentations for sessions that they have not attended) they demonstrate a touching faith that every scrap of paper has value. In many cases, hunter-gathers are first time delegates. They desperately hope to find material that they can take straight into their own classes, and use with instant success.
It is also only fair to admit, however, that some hunter-gatherers may be driven by real need. At IATEFL Conferences in the early 1990s, it was not uncommon to find delegates from the new democracies of Eastern Europe, who had paid what were, to them, large sums of money in travel costs and conference fees, and they were determined to get full value. For these teachers, even a handful of complementary publishers’ ballpoint pens were precious, as they could be used for class prizes, and free copies of textbooks were like gold dust. A delegate from Latvia once confided to me that she had recouped her entire conference fee in free books, but as her haul included three copies of the same, newly published, desk dictionary, she faced some problems with transport.
Presenters are free of such difficulties. Most presenters, it must be said, either regard their own session as the highlight of the conference, or more realistically, as just another session where they, for once, take centre stage. There are, however, the more driven delegates, who regard their presentation as the only thing that matters. Indeed, I have known of a case where an academic flew from the UAE to a TESOL conference in Florida, presented, and then left the venue to fly straight back. The motive for this was that the presentation was another line on a CV. It was the key required to apply for a position at a university in Britain. And it opened that door.
Again these are what the name suggests. They can either be literal salespeople – representatives of publishing houses, or authors linked to publishers who have a new textbook that is the answer to every ELT teacher’s prayers. In many cases they can assure themselves of an audience (at least of hunter-gatherers) by offering free copies of their latest masterpiece, and to be fair, the books on offer often have genuine merit, even if they never quite meet the exact requirements of individual teachers.
Less obvious are the salespeople for different approaches. These are the enthusiasts for authentic reading/listening materials; those like Storch (2012) who urge the value of collaborative writing, as opposed to any other form; writers like Dudney, Hockly and Pegrun (2013) who advance the claims of digital literacies. Again, each of these approaches may have its own merits, and there may be much to say in favour of them all, in certain circumstances, but it is only the last category of conference delegate who can determine quite how valid the claims are.
What Borg ignores is the power that informs the thought of the reflective practitioner. This is the true benefit of attending conferences, as regular delegates learn to sift the grain from the chaff, and distinguish the gold from the dross. In autumn 2015 I attended a presentation about problem-solving learning. It was an excellent presentation. It was informative; it was delivered with a lightness of touch and it was beautifully supported by Prezi (see Sharma 2016). It proved conclusively that problem-based learning is used in many different locations. However, as Maley (2015; 16) reminds us, the last half century has been marked by a “plethora of theories, movements, approaches, methods, trends, fads, foibles and fantasies.” A similar presentation, based around the virtues of grammar-translation, dogme or the silent way might have been equally impressive.
This is not just a debating point. The presentation demonstrated that problem-based learning has been employed in places as far apart as Australia, Sweden and Finland. That claim was also supported by members of the audience, but it remains questionable whether this is of any real consequence. In Australia, to begin with, there is no federally mandated system of education, and the individual states implement their own policies. In the early 1990s, this freedom allowed New South Wales to introduce the teaching of systemic-functional grammar in primary schools. That policy was unpopular with pupils, teachers and parents, and was criticized by some academics (Collins, Hollo and Mar 1997). Officially, New South Wales continues to use Hallidayan grammar, but Horan (2002), suggests that its impact has been lessened by teachers, who simply continued to teach traditional grammar. Clearly, this is not an initiative that is likely to be repeated.
Similarly, in Finland, the 1990s saw the endorsement of immersion courses (Bjorkland 1987), but within a decade, partly as a result of enthusiastic claims made by Tarja Nikula (Dalton-Puffer and Nukula 2006) that approach had been replaced with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) (Mehisto, Marsh and Frigols 2008; Linares, Morton and Whittaker 2012). I have suggested (McBeath 2009a; 2009b) that CLIL is little more than ESP given a new name, and in the last decade, education in Finland has fallen foul of a new climate of enforced austerity (Crouch 2015). The country has an aging population; its productivity has fallen from a 2008 high, and unemployment is rising. As a result, education budgets have been cut. If we accept that curriculum changes do “not take place in a cultural, educational or political vacuum” (Spratt 2010; 210) then we ought also to accept the possibility that current enthusiasm for problem-based learning in Finland is no more than a passing phase.
The same is true of Sweden. The friskolor, or Free Schools, that were established in the early 1990s have had the adverse effect of increasing both social inequality and segregation, enrolling the more affluent, easy-to-teach, city children and leaving the poorer suburbs to municipal schooling. A second consequence has been a drop in Sweden’s ranking in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) between the years 2000 and 2012. The most important effect, however, was that in June 2013, “JB Education, one of the biggest providers of free schools in Sweden, declared bankruptcy” (Foster 2015; 8). The result of that fiasco was that in the summer of 2013, just over 10,000 Swedish children were suddenly looking for new school places. This would suggest that Swedish education is hardly a model to be emulated.
The above analysis demonstrates that a reflective practitioner generally has what Richards (2003; 2) characterizes as “an inquiring mind”. Reflective practitioners possess the ability to synthesize information from different sources, and reach conclusions that are based on both a breadth and depth of experience. This is not easy. It may take years to achieve and not all teachers will be capable of sustaining the effort that is required. With this in mind, attendance at conferences may indeed confer benefits on the delegates (there would be no return business if it did not). Even so, while Borg’s analysis has much to commend it, I would suggest that many of the benefits may be personal rather than directly linked to professional development. The reflective practitioner gains in professional acumen, and has the opportunity to meet members of the same community of practice, but the application of additional insight may, or may not, transfer into professional life. For the rest, the tourists get a trip; the job-seekers may, or may not, advance their careers; the looter/hunter-gathers acquire a collection of free artifacts, and the presenters and salespeople may enhance their status – if only in their own eyes.
Only the reflective practitioners, however, take away anything that can be regarded as being of lasting benefit.
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