Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
In our previous post, Divya Madhavan shared her thoughts on coaching and mentoring in ELT. Here, she shares stories of inspiring educators from around the globe.
I am going to talk about how we show up for each other by sharing the stories of four teachers whose work I’ve leaned on at different moments of my career- these four teachers aren’t my best friends, or work colleagues or my former teachers- they’re just people whose work inspired me and made me look up and look forward at different points in my journey.
They’re people who showed up for me without necessarily knowing that they were showing up for me, because these are people whose legacies are in the collective spaces, who have worked to change their worlds without necessarily being the ones who changed their worlds. They are people who lean on others and are leaned on. I interviewed each of these teachers about coaching and mentoring and I’d like to invite you to reflect on them with me under these philosophies of trust, confidence, courage and perseverance. Let’s dive in, with our story of trust.
Story of trust: Vicky Saumell, Argentina
Vicky is one of us- she is so emblematic of what keeps ELT environments running- she teaches while questioning teaching environments, she adopts new technologies while ensuring their sustainability and she trains teachers by standing alongside them as opposed to above them.
Vicky’s version of showing up is reflected in her critical dialogue with adapting learning technologies and working differently with different groups of teachers as she implements large scale change.
What I learnt from interviewing Vicky is that change is implemented by creating new habits, and getting us teachers to do anything new, can only work if we are trusted to do it. People tend to talk about trust in the workplace like it’s one thing but it’s layered and not everyone gives it the same importance. Trust, among teachers, doesn’t quite work the same way as in a collocations dictionary, where it’s simply “built” or “broken”- these actions are maybe too precise, too instantaneous. Trust is cultivated, it’s demonstrated and it’s prolonged once it’s been earned
– these are the messier realities in which we need to work.
Trust is the essential ingredient for habit-building in educational environments. James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits reminds us of how incremental a process habit-building is: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.” Vicky reminds us of it too when she describes the trust negotiation she plays in the mentoring process. Now let’s turn to our story of confidence.
Story of confidence: Barb Sakamoto, Japan
Barb is also one of us- to me, she has always been someone who makes a lot of magic in the margins. Barb is the muscle behind iTDi, which functions in a similar way to IATEFL. It’s a space that provides professional development that is affordable and accessible with ideals and objectives like teacher empowerment and community building.
For me, Barb’s story is inseparable from the role she’s played in building a sustainable teacher development model – through a community of highly-skilled contributors, who provide a space for teachers to lean on.
What I learnt from interviewing Barb is that these frameworks of coaching and mentoring are built, they’re built with purpose, and built on purpose. And they need to be given space and recognition in order for them to work, because cultivating new habits requires space. We do sometimes have a tendency to see our classrooms as having two sides- a teaching side and a learning side, and the cool teachers are maybe the ones who identify as learners first but what if we were to consider more nuanced versions of the teacher’s role itself- as Henry Giroux has had us questioning for decades whether teaching is about being “sage on the stage” or the “guide on the side”.
As we reflect on how confidence is built, I think it’s also important to reflect on where confidence is built; it’s built in the social environment of a classroom- with all its complex human mechanisms. And while critical pedagogy is no stranger to ELT, in many education management contexts we need reminding of its lessons in questioning the social mechanisms we take for granted. Speaking of taking things for granted, let us now let’s turn to our story of courage.
Story of courage : Patricia Angoy, Eswatini
Patricia is a school leader who worked in the UK in the 1970s, and then in South America and more recently in Southern Africa, she’s amazing, please Google her. I met her about ten years ago as we were both students on a course and I was very impressed by her capacity to zoom out, and to always see the big picture of what was really happening. So, when I found myself on the journey of preparing this talk I reached out to her. Her last role was as principal of Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa. She is the first woman of colour to have headed this school.
What I learnt from interviewing Patricia is how much we all need courage when we show up. Having courage shapes our every decision; the battles we choose to fight, the ones we choose to lose, the ones we bring back to the table later and the ones we leave behind. These are all decisions and actions that are rooted in courage. Courage is speaking up and courage is also acting up when it’s necessary.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed taught me everything I know about what matters about being a teacher, I have read it again and again and each time found a little more meaning in this one-hundred page book written by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in the 1970s; it’s the book that has helped me recentre and reprioritise when things get too busy or too blurry. And where are things recentered and reprioritised? It’s in our collective critical consciousness, which is the whole point of this beautiful mess that is education, the point is that each of our students should leave our classrooms a small step closer to being a change agent in society.
Because the English language is a language, an international culture but it is also a very powerful currency in the world today and as English language teachers we shape its exchange rate. So we need courage to choose the right kinds of change that will move us all forward one step small at a time.
Story of perseverance: Maggie Doyne, Nepal
The final interview I’d like to share with you is of a high-school leaver in 2005 on a gap year who met a young six year old child who had to do hard labour instead of going to school due to extreme poverty. This then student used her babysitting money that she had saved up to send this child and others to school and she very quickly realised how much more there was to do; today, she has built a children’s home, women’s centre and school in Surkhet, Nepal and is legal guardian to over 50 children. She is the sort of person for whom teaching, coaching and mentoring comes so naturally because her labour of love is within the messiest of human realities: educating and protecting children in remote under-resourced environments.
What I learnt from interviewing Maggie is that perseverance is about dreaming these big bold dreams that keep our worlds magical and give us the momentum we need to keep moving forward. I mentioned at the beginning of this talk how we all know what it is to find that little extra in the tank when it’s necessary and people like Maggie remind us how big the tank is.
These four incredible educators show us the poetry with which we English language teachers connect dots that span the whole world, embodying this most vital culture of fostering greater tolerance in the world through better quality communication. Our strength as a community has always been in the collective space and we will only grow more resilient by honouring and celebrating each other every possible chance we get.
I began this article by walking you through English teachers showing up across the ages; a thousand years ago, one hundred years ago and today. Today, our outstanding technological prowess in language learning is coupled with plummeting enrolments in English degrees in higher education. Today we’re embracing large language models in AI with a nervous look over our shoulder as to what this really means for sustainable, global language teaching and learning.
What will our students look like in fifty years, in one hundred years, and will there even be a planet to inhabit in one thousand years or would we, in our hubris, have destroyed it? We don’t know. I do know this: we are here, and this, us and future uses with our profoundly human gazes are irreplaceable. And so, in the spirit of IATEFL, let’s celebrate the irreplaceability of teachers showing up.
About Divya: Divya is the Director of the Department of Languages and Cultures at CentraleSupélec, an engineering school in France. She teaches courses in English and coaches debaters for inter-varsity competitions. Divya is also the Founder and Director of Université Paris-Saclay’s Academic Writing Center, which provides publications support and communications training to France’s most prominent research communities. Through these experiences, she has come to value professional development that is truly meaningful and useful to busy teachers who so often have even busier lives. She is a graduate of the universities of Warwick, London, and Exeter and a Fellow of the RSA with extensive experience in building language policy, designing curricula, recruiting, and training teachers. As she has journeyed from a young language assistant over 20 years ago to heading a faculty today, Divya has leaned on the IATEFL community in so many ways, at so many moments, which is why she is so excited to share these stories with her community.