Thick description alone does not however totally resolve the question of writer versus informant identity. The third factor which enables me to speak about other communities concerns the autobiographical descriptions of my own professional experience, which not only form a further element of the thick description, but set the tenor for the whole book. What characterizes my email informants as a group is not any sense of being a ‘representative’ sample of World TESOL. What binds them is their relationship to my own professional biography. These are the colleagues and students from whom, because they are different to me, I have learnt to see and at least partially to escape the deep-seated prejudices of a dominant professionalism. The comments of those informants from outside the English-speaking West help me to examine myself and my own practices. In taking an autobiographical stance I speak only for myself, in my own personal narrative of a multicultured international experience. I do not therefore make any claim to be speaking for the TESOL people whom I cite. To do so would be presumptuous. Using Coffey’s terms, the narratives from my informants ‘offer uniquely privileged data, grounded in biographical experience and social contexts’ (1999: 115), which in turn connect with my own ‘experience and social contexts’ and those represented in my other data, brought together by thick description. ‘By incorporating, fragmenting, and mingling these texts’, the ‘intertextuality of ethnography’ is reinforced’; and ‘writing the self into ethnography’ enhances its ‘authenticity’ (1999: 118, citing Atkinson). The autobiographical descriptions of my own professional past also enable me to make new sense of critical incidents which changed my view of professional life and stayed with me as haunting puzzles, to help me unravel the origins of a dominant culture of practice which has now become normalized. While asserting independence from it, if I am an insider to anything it is to the powerful professionalism of English-speaking Western TESOL which is so implicated in the struggle which I describe.
On a procedural note, throughout the text I refer to my email informants by first name. In some cases these will be pseudonyms or code letters. In other cases, where permission has been given, these will be real names. In a few such cases, where they are also authors whose work I have cited, I use full names. In all cases they will have had the opportunity to see and comment on how I use their accounts; and I have changed my text where they have recommended this. I do, however, take full responsibility for the way in which I present and draw implications from their words. The locations of their accounts can be found in the index.
I am deeply indebted to my email informants who sent me 51,800 words of eloquent, profound, unexpected, contrary, and challenging data. They have been patient in reading draft chapters and sending back their comments. These are Ana Maria Aramayo, Andrew Hirst, Beverly Bickel, Bojana Petric, Catherine Wallace, Christine Doye, Corony Edwards, Danai Tsapikidou, David Carless, David Palfreyman, Fauzia Shamim, Jane Andrews, Jasmine Luk, Jennifer Jenkins, Kerry Sykes, Lama Najjoum, Layla Galal Rizk, Lorraine Doherty, Mark Almond, Michael Brewer, Lydia Kasera, Mohammed Al-Ghafri, Mona Zikri, Nadia Touba, Patricia Sullivan, Richard Fay, Satoko Nobe, Ruth Spack, Ryuko Kubota, Sadia Ali, Sarah Khan, Veronicka Makarova, and Vicky Kuo I-Chun. I apologize in advance for any misquotes or misunderstandings of what they said. Where their accounts are not included due to lack of space, their presence remains in the deeper fabric of the book.
Continued discussion and renewed acquaintance with my past colleagues from Ain Shams, Damascus, and Pune Universities, Amal Kary, Mona Zikri, Nafez Shammas, Warka Barmada, Grace Jacob and Maya Narkar, have provided immeasurable inspiration and helped me to completely re-assess my professional persona. More recently, Hollo Dorottya and her acutely aware PhD students at Eötvös Lóránd University, and Doug Goodwin, Ingrid Barradas, Troy Crawford, Martha Lengeling and their colleagues, and students at the School of Languages, Guanajuato University, took me into parts of the world with other stories I had not before experienced. Successive cohorts of students from the Hong Kong Institute of Education have also been influential. Sitting in their refectory on their campus, watching them ‘at home’, has also played a deeply formative role which is detailed within.
Major contribution to my thinking has been made by critical qualitative researchers who have been students and colleagues in Canterbury, Ge Jin, Pat Grounds, Pembe Delikurt, Tom Duan Yuping, Pam Aboshiha, John Kullman, Martin Hyde, Kimberly Brooks-Lewis, Caroline Moore, Oscar Narvaez, Cecilio Lopez, Hiroko Hayagoshi, Jo Chang and Valerie Ainscough. Angela Baxter, Chris Anderson, Jimmy Tong Woonman, and Trevor Grimshaw are referred to at length. Others are among my email informants. I feel we have pushed forward the boundaries of knowledge of TESOL as cultural and political practice. Tony Booth helped me to realize that all experience is data – moving on from Swales’ reference to ‘taking tea in laboratory technicians’ cubby-holes’, hanging out in conferences, noticing things in meetings, classrooms, and departmental corridors. Vivien Zamel, Ruth Spack, Ryuko Kubota, Stephanie Vandrick, and Aya Matsuda helped me to see greater texture in the ideas I had been ruminating over and writing about more parochially for several years. Paul Taylor, a dear friend who was there in many of my sojourns at TESOL, provided a sanity and helped me not to get beyond myself. Chance meetings with Nalina Sutakul helped me to finish the text.
Henry Widdowson, Cristina Whitecross, Anna Cowper, and Suresh Canagarajah have provided the measure of what I am able to say in terms of evidence, audience, and my professional persona. Hywel Coleman has for many years been a co-thinker and confidant in the struggle to achieve cultural continuity. All through my adult and professional life, Mehri Honarbin-Holliday has embodied the ‘foreign Other’ with whom I have been learning how to behave. She has kept me to the quest to understand who we are and to undo the damage that can be done by cultural prejudice. I hope that because of her I might have a slim chance of making sense and getting it right.
1 The struggle for new relationships
This book is about the worlds and conflicts of educators whose professional lives are both enriched and problematized by the teaching of English as an international language in international settings. Their work is complicated and politicized as they struggle to make sense of the indeterminate foreign Other of students, colleagues, methodologies, texts, behaviours and literatures – and of the cultural and political interfaces created by a language which has a colonial past, but which is no longer connected in a unitary way with an English-speaking West or its cultures.
My major focus is on who we think we are as ESOL educators, and how we behave with each other and with our students within a multicultured TESOL world. On one level, we are all, as individuals, engaged in this struggle all the time as we try to position ourselves within the shifting realities and competing forces of everyday life. On another level, the struggle is located within the specific structures and hierarchies of the TESOL profession, built around uneven resources and uneven relationships with English. Embedded in this struggle, and working against its resolution, coming from the deep fibre of TESOL professionalism, is the ideology of native-speakerism, through which, I shall argue, the ‘non-native speaker’ Other is seen as culturally deficient.
ESOL educators: the politics of labelling
An immediate aspect of the struggle to make sense is how it is possible to talk about ESOL educators. Two perspectives are that of one global profession with a rich international character, and that of local professions divided by economics, ideology, and the spectres of colonialism.
The first perspective suggests a coming together and collaboration. I shall refer to We as all teachers, academics, curriculum developers, writers, publishers, and so on, who are involved worldwide in the work of what I shall refer to as World TESOL. The diversity is great. This TESOL world is in fact many worlds with many types of people, comprising educators from every part of the globe in every type of educational institution. We work with English for every kind of reason, from providing important skills for getting on in an international world to teaching English as an academic discipline to train the mind and learn about others. We also work with a wide range of different educational resources and attitudes to language and education, from classrooms without books or walls, to crowded lecture theatres, to very small groups with technically advanced facilities – all of which