STATE OF EMERGENCE (Y)

Teaching is a job that, for anyone who realizes its gravity, is never easy. Inspiring, rewarding, edifying, yes, in so many ways. Easy? No. Teaching in an emerging nation adds to this a whole new set of challenges.

The seemingly impossible challenge of taking learners from false beginner levels in English to tertiary study within one year is one of these. Since the greater majority of our instructors are foreigners, and often westerners at that, there are many things about our students that we simply do not, will not, cannot understand, no matter how hard we try.

We simply cannot understand why our students do not read. We cannot understand why they do not do homework. We cannot understand why they believe it is their duty to “help” their friends cheat on exams, the blind merrily leading the blind into the abyss. We cannot understand why they are not intellectually adventurous.

Today I had an unusually successful outing to the capital – enough so that the usual annoyances didn’t disturb me too much: the rest-centered working hours, the lateral driving strategies, the shopgirls who seem to think that I am the one responsible for providing a service, the job creation candidates who pack my groceries with their appetite for destruction (especially when I can convince them to use ONE bag- and that alone is a breakthough). Because today I saw that all this incongruence is simply the most up-to-the-minute response of a nation that has had to wake up so rapidly to a time of such radical change in the world.

If English is a suitable alibi to take my students by the hand and show them other options, not as being better than their own way of doing, but as mere alternatives, then I am grateful for the chance.

PEDAGOGY AND PARABLES

In the parable of the sower, among the many seeds sown only a very few meet the right conditions to grow. While the parable did not refer to education, I most certainly believe it does apply.

As a teacher’s practice broadens and deepens, and a principled, personal pedagogy takes shape, it is easy to place so much faith in our philosophies that we expect perfect results. I am particularly guilty of this, and I am likely to refuse failure as an option: if students do not understand, it must be my fault.

Today a dear colleague and friend, who has invested faith and heart and lifeblood in my students, withdrew from teaching the course. Despite her tireless creative endeavours to inspire and educate them (and she certainly inspired me in the process), she had witnessed no progress during students’ classes.

The parable of the sower could be interpreted to mean that some of the seeds of learning will never sprout. Yet later this afternoon, one of these students actually asked for extra homework to improve his English. Another initiated a casual conversation when I passed him on campus. Four weeks ago these students would not talk to me without an interpreter.

Perhaps some seeds just take longer than others. And I have my colleague to thank for even sowing that seed. Where there is learning, we all reap the fruit.

A WONDERFUL THING IS A WIKI – BUT IS IT NEW?

Wikipedia defines a wiki as “a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.” Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.”

Etymologically, “ “Wiki" (/wiːkiː/) is a Hawaiian word for "fast. "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication. "Wiki" can be expanded as "What I Know Is", but this is a backronym” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki).

So wikis have been big news for several years – but are they really so new?

Recently I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with a number of inspired professionals to enrich my practice, study and life at large. It is, in essence, an offline wiki. The sparkstorm of ideas that often ensues is one that simply cannot be tied down to one member of the group. Who is the author when an idea when it is built on contributions of different people?

This is social construction of knowledge at its finest. In fact, it is construction of knowledge that often does not yet exist. Construction at the very last outposts of knowledge.

Collaboration and the exhilarating synergy it brings is not new. But wikis have reminded us that the whole can be so much greater than the sum of the parts.

NEW BEGINNINGS FOR FALSE BEGINNERS

Although this is a teacher-research blog, there hasn’t been all that much research to report on so far. But as the time to do my critical study is approaching, my awareness is moving in that direction. My new course is a prime candidate for research, and today’s first class was a little breath of serendipitous grace.

This semester I am scheduled to teach 11 hours of Reading and Writing to the only three students in our college who failed their first semester in the Foundation Programme. Thanks to discussions with my wonderful colleagues, allies and friends, some very exciting ideas have emerged. I am also considering compiling the activities that are effective in getting these students motivated and helping them learn as part of my critical study. Maybe…

The students, however, have been pursuing me all over campus for days to persuade me to raise their marks so that they can stay with their group- with the use of an interpreter, since they can’t even express this idea in English. Clearly, raising their marks will not help them, but a healthy mix of empathy, discipline and creativity just might. I have arranged that they can attend any classes they wish with their former classmates, while their classmates can attend certain of their sessions, which will be dedicated specifically to language learning strategies.

The miracle happened today, when only one student, Ayman, showed up long after I had given up on seeing any students. Ayman’s lone and late arrival shook me completely out of “teaching mode”, and into genuine interaction, which involved uncovering the language for choosing and requesting a fruit juice to drink using the bilingual labels on three bottles of juice. Although like all Omani students, Ayman has studied English for over a decade, some interesting features of his language showed up:

1. His vocabulary and collocation repertoire is extremely limited.
2. He does not understand the connection between sounds and symbols (letters), and has no grasp of the short vowel sounds. This has drastic implications for his spelling.
3. He writes letters using the movements he would in Arabic, starting from the lower left.

I handed Ayman the student “lucky dip”: a folder containing a pen, pencil, post-it booklet, notebook and portfolio. Some time after he worked out and wrote the words on the whiteboard and we practiced the pronunciation and request collocations, he wrote these down in the notebook, which students will also keep as language learning scrapbook journals. The first thing written in the book was the semester, week, day, and date with a basic entry starting “Today I feel…”. Although I modelled this exercise, he could not find the basic words happy, sad, angry, scared to complete his sentence or put together the reason why. After some cajoling he gradually built up and wrote down the full sentence, which he then read back to me. He also asked the words for certain meanings, like “a little” and “a lot”.

We also set up contact groups on our mobile phones and sent a text message to the absent students. One of them even replied!

Towards the end of the lesson, two senior female students dropped in to see what was going on in the classroom. Ayman had a chance to offer them some juice, practicing his new knowledge in a practical way. I was stunned to see that the lesson time was over, which is how the expressions “Time flies” and “Time flies when you’re having fun” landed on the whiteboard.

Where a day ago Ayman was refusing this course, this non-lesson may have been one of the first chances he has had to use English for an actual purpose. All that because a “lesson” was out of the question.

There will obviously be considerable ground to cover beyond today’s practical nuts-and-bolts, and it won’t always be this effortless. But a glimmer of hope is a precious, precious thing and deserves to be cherished.

The photo is of the whiteboard at the end of the session. Vocabulary is on the left, writing practice in the middle and collocations on the right.