Category Archives: Teacher education

edgeblog 20

Posted on 2, November 2011 by | 7 Comments

Well, it does seem to be true what they say about pensioners being so busy. Or is it that we just move more slowly? Anyway, here we are, crept into November already with October a blog-free zone.

On the last day of that month, I was in Liverpool to examine a fine PhD thesis and, while there, managed to catch up with Michael Hoey for lunch. One reason I had been looking forward to this was that Michael had promised an analysis of The Golden Teeth. (Of course you remember The Golden Teeth. Or, if not, check edgeblogs 16 & 18.) For ease of reference, here’s the text again, this time without the priceless pictures:

The Golden Teeth

A toothless king commissioned a goblin to make him a set of magical golden teeth . . .

However, the two argued and the goblin threw the teeth into a deep well . . .

The teeth were found by a young frog, who proudly wore them to the palace ball . . .

The furious king took back his golden teeth and the frog was executed for his impudence.

The End

As best as I remember (it was a long and fine lunch), Michael’s version went like this:

‘Toothless’ signals a Problem to which ‘commissioned’ signals the Response, of which ‘a set of magical golden teeth’ is the intended positive outcome. ‘However’ signals some kind of interruption to this positive trajectory and ‘argued’ spells out what the Problem was. In Response to this Problem, the goblin ‘threw’ the teeth, creating a negative outcome and, therefore, a new Problem for the King. This same act, however, created an Opportunity for the frog, signalled by ‘found,’ an Opportunity that he Took, signalled by ‘proudly wore.’ At this point, Problem/Response and Opportunity/Take patterns come together, as the frog’s wearing of the teeth gives the king an Opportunity to Take that is also a Response to the Problem of his lost teeth. ‘Took back’ signals both of these, completing the discourse pattern for the king. For the frog, the outcome is terminal, an ‘irredeemably negative result’ in Hoey’s terms, thus completing the discourse pattern for the frog, too. Michael pointed out that it’s unusual to have ‘The End’ spelled out in this way, but we agreed that it fits the genre and adds an extra humorous touch, given the brevity of the tale.

So, that, as they say, in the nicest possible way, is as close to the horse’s mouth as we are likely to get in the world of discourse analysis!

Back in the discourse world of counselling, it is most intriguing to encounter again such issues as ‘the best method’ and ‘eclectic approaches’, now being approached against a different disciplinary backdrop. I can’t see that the argument leads anywhere else than it has led us in TESOL, to the primacy of the reflective practitioner in specific interactions, learning to theorise practice as part of the continuing development of emergent praxis.  And along with the strength of that argument, goes the fact that beginners need clear guidelines with which to start out.  It’s cool being a beginner. And it’s a great bunch of people I’m working with.

Last week, I had one of those great ‘fusion’ moments in which a diary note I was writing, a memory of something someone else had said in class, an idea I’ve been carrying around for years regarding a related topic, an interaction I had been involved in during skills training that day, and a thought I had not properly articulated in a personal development group all came together and helped me understand a little more about myself and what I’m trying to do. Only connect: E.M Forster, Fritjof Capra, Gregory Bateson. Strange attractors and open systems. Morewards!

Best,

Julian

 

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edgeblog 19

Posted on 25, September 2011 by | 2 Comments

Well, while contemplating the composition of edgeblog: the end, as promised in edgeblog 18 (and, therefore, while necessarily trying hard to hold back from the tempting parallelism of quoting Jim Morrison’s The End), I found myself battered by the number of events and incidents that seemed to demand a mention. And that is even allowing for the iron discipline that I insist on working to, that only issues directly relevant to TESOL and education more broadly should be included.

First, there were “the riots” in August, starting in London and then spreading across our major cities. The links to ‘firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions’ will seem pretty clear to many people. Perhaps that is not where I ought to edgeblogging, when Naomi Klein has made the points so eloquently, even though, as John Harris points out, one looks around too often in vain for voices being raised against the moral and ethical backdrop that politicians and bankers have provided for the education of the next generation.

And anyway, I realized that there would be no time or space to go into any of that once I had come across a line in a political commentary that really did take my breath away. Let me not be drawn into commenting on the suitability of the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, to be the next president of the United States of America (I fear there will be time enough for that over the next year or so). The line that struck me was the chilling: “If you are explaining, you are losing.” From the way it is used in this text, this seems to have become such an obvious truism in USAmerican political discourse that it passes without comment. I managed to trace its origin back to a column by Chris Bowers from the 2008 election. The key paragraph goes like this:

McCain has a new, stupid, false ad out about Obama where he claims that Obama has passed a law to mandate sex education for kindergarten. However, just because it is stupid and false doesn’t mean it won’t be effective. In fact, it might demonstrate a truism about contemporary American politics: if you are explaining, then you are losing.

I find that so strong, so explanatory, so threatening. It explains why I so often find myself out of tune with the zeitgeist. All this effort expended on the proposition that awareness will arouse a sense of responsibility and the motivation to learn more and act differently. No, buddy, if you are explaining, you are losing.

I rallied after a while, reconciling myself to the fact that something like this stance has always been around and that the creation of a new aphoristic way of expressing it does not increase its power, but only restates it.  In the Roman imperial period, the reference to ‘bread and circuses’ as the way to keep the masses happy strikes a similar note. And public education remains democracy’s constant uphill battle against the contemptuous greed of the powerful. If I have frequently referred to my working life as ‘fighting the long defeat,’ that doesn’t mean that the struggle is not worthwhile. And so I thought, “Your new course, Julian, your Diploma in Counselling course, the way ahead, that should be the focus for edgeblog 19.”

Then, as I passed the university bookshop on the way to pick up my student card, I could not help but notice the proud slogan that it displays in each window: “The Knowledge Retailer.” My heart sank a little. On the university website, after having registered, I was invited to select the courses that I intended to take. Having identified them, I was instructed to place them in my Shopping Cart. Have these people not read, or even heard, of the power of ‘the metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1990)? Bookshops sell paper and print; people construct knowledge. Students are not customers; they are certainly not always right and their fees only permit them to engage with a very different set of rights and responsibilities. Are these facts not important? On commenting to a colleague, “The enemy is within the gates,” I received her wise response: “The enemy has bought the gates and is dismantling them for future sale.”

Not that it ends there. There has been much debate recently about the abuse of the internship idea in professional and political life. Young people agree to work for nothing because they hope that the experience (and contacts) they gather will help them get a good job later. This suits employers, as the number of well-qualified young people desperate for work is large and rising. It also suits graduates who can afford to work without pay while they establish the contacts and gain the experience that will give them further advantage in the future. So, as sure as eggs, while university staff are receiving reminders that the window of opportunity for them to take voluntary severance will soon close, we are also being alerted to:

The Manchester Graduate Internship Programme (MGIP)

along with an informative little article entitled:

Have you heard how MGIP can help your staffing needs?

Oh dear, I seem to have drifted back to my earlier theme, and gone on much too long, and I still haven’t told you about the counseling course.

I have also come round to thinking that perhaps there will be enough common ground between edgeblog-as-was and my new role as part-time postgraduate student to make it worthwhile to see if edgeblog can stand on it. Encouragement so to do has also been very welcome and gratifying.

So, edgeblog endures. This is the last one I shall write as an employee of Manchester University. I have already apologized individually to those doctoral students to whom my departure means re-arrangements in their supervisory team, and I do so again here. I am very happy to say the new arrangements themselves are very strong and in each case bring in new and highly relevant skills that I do not possess. My confident best wishes go with them.

edgeblog 20 will be my first as a postgraduate student. Goodness, it has only just struck me that I am starting my second postgraduate diploma at Manchester University exactly 40 years after I started my first: the Diploma in Teaching English Overseas, 1971/72.  Hmmm. We shall see.

Best,

Julian

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1990. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

 

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Recent panel I took part in

Posted on 23, September 2011 by | Leave a comment

Here is a link to a discussion that I took part in about the use of social media in teacher education. This was part of a conference that was happening at the time in Moscow: http://connectpro10829081.adobeconnect.com/p84tr9d2eyd/. This talk uses Adobe Connect Professional.
Gary Motteram

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Posted on 7, August 2011 by | 5 Comments

edgeblog 18

This is an edgeblog of distinct parts. First, thunderous congratulations to Achilleas for winning the Gold Teeth competition announced in edgeblog 16. It’s true that no one else entered, but I don’t see that one can blame the winner for that, and any fair-minded person referring back to Achilleas’ analysis of the text in question would have to admit, I believe, that he did not hold back in going for it.

The prize can now be revealed to be a signed copy of Edge (2006): (Re)-Locating TESOL in an Age of Empire. Achilleas, I hope you find it worth the effort.

Relocation also gives me a link into the second part of this edgeblog, to which a tiny bit of sociocultural background might be appropriate . . .

You may well not be familiar with an album by The Doors, released in 1967, called Strange Days. Along with Jefferson Airplane’s, After Bathing at Baxters, it was what made British discussions about the relative merits of the Beatles and the Stones seem so very parochial. I note that the current Amazon reviewer writes:

Even darker than their purple-hued debut, the Doors’ follow-up, Strange Days, closed 1967 with an ominous flourish. On it, Morrison railed at everything from organised religion to pollution, and his rallying cry, “We want the world, and we want it now!” became a call to arms for the counterculture rising up around the band.

Oh my. I didn’t come here to tell you about that, but it is true that the opening line of the title track did go through my mind this morning: ‘Strange days have found us, strange nights have tracked us down.’

Or, to start this story somewhere else, my employer, strapped for cash following the government’s withdrawal of funding for the humanities in general, discovered in early summer the need to cut another £28m out of its budget. Now, the quickest way to save money is to get rid of staff, so it introduced a scheme of Voluntary Severance/Early Retirement. I thought the situation through and decided to apply for it.

I have just heard this week that my application has been accepted and I will leave the university’s employment on 30 September 2011. Apart from a few promises to keep here and there, and perhaps the odd occasional gig, that will be that as far as TESOL is concerned.  As I have been involved in TESOL one way or another (in fact, come to think of it, most ways), since 1969, there will doubtless be ramifications of this that I have yet to think of.  Overall, however, I am feeling very positive. I am, once again, in the lucky position of being able to do what I decided I want to do.

At the moment, my thoughts are beginning to turn towards the part-time Diploma in Counselling that I start in September. I remember years ago reading a book called, ‘Beginner’s Mind’ by Shunryu Suzuki. It was “about” the practice of Zen Buddhism, but/and what I brought away from it was one of those quotations that stays with you: ‘In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in expert mind there are only few possibilities.’

Well, that quote may not be word perfect, but it’s close enough for jazz and captures the message that I understood. It’s an exciting message, I think, and exciting, too, that I hadn’t thought about it for years, not until I got into that last paragraph. And that, of course, is the connection with cooperative development — learning through articulation — and with counselling.

OK, enough for now. I’ll be back in September with edgeblog: The End.

Best,

Julian

 

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Posted on 17, July 2011 by | 8 Comments

edgeblog 17

It seems a long time since edgeblog 16, the main reason for which is probably that the intervening period included a trip to Peru. I shall spare you the details of the wonderful traveling, awe-inspiring sights and sites, welcoming people and delicious food, even of the repeated headaches that moving around the high Andes brings about for some of us, but I must mention the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano that invited me to Lima in the first place to run some professional  development workshops. It is a very large institution, with five branches across Lima, tens of thousands of students and hundreds of teachers.

Working with my friend and long-term collaborator, Bob Oprandy, we ran sessions introducing Cooperative Development and associated skills/attitudes to the teachers and supervisors there. The sound level produced by over two hundred teachers seriously engaged in pair-work in an underground room is pretty impressive, but even more impressive was the effort and energy that they put into exploring such a new approach to peer interaction and professional development. The commitment, the  shrewdness of the questioning and the enthusiasm for the idea of seizing more personal autonomy in their teaching was, in a reflexive kind of a way, hugely inspiring and empowering for me.

Follow-up sessions with smaller groups of supervisors (around 20) were no less energising and allowed us to go more deeply and sensitively into procedures and potentials. It was all very satisfying. I came away hoping that some of this work might take root for some of the participants and that I might hear more about it.

Meanwhile, back here in Britain, a very successful BAAL Language Learning and Teaching SIG conference had taken place, organised by friends and ex-colleagues at Aston University, Birmingham. The theme was:

Theorising practice and practising theory: developing local pedagogies in language teaching

(There’s a back-story here about me making a mess over diary dates and commitments, but I have apologised a lot, still feel bad, and so I’ll just look the other way at this point.)

The organisers, Sue Garton and Nur Hooton, allowed me to send in a videoed presentation, entitled, ‘In search of the hybrid: Discourse analysis, TESOL methodology and cultural politics,’ which we have now posted on Manchester University’s server. I’m attaching to this edgeblog The Aston-BAAL_hout that accompanies the talk and the handout also includes the url for the video. My talk turns to a large extent around an analysis of the following article:

Zhang, X. & Head, K. (2010). Dealing with learner reticence in the speaking class. ELT Journal 64 (1), 1-9.

So, it would be even better if you could first read that article and think your own thoughts, or discuss them with colleagues, before going on to the talk.

Hey, I’ll tell you something else. While you’re out there in cyberspace, discovering new delights, I cannot recommend highly enough this recipe for Peach Pie. Peach Pie may not resonate for you the way it does for me, but all I can do is pass on my recommendation for this one as a high-summer treat. And when the weather is a little cooler, I may let you in to the source of last night’s Pork and Black Pudding Wellington, which was also magnificent in its own way.

I hope your summer (or winter, given my growing hemispherical sensitivity) is going well.

Best,

Julian

 

 

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edgeblog 16

Posted on 10, June 2011 by | 5 Comments

Well, I have to start by telling you that I am nothing short of gutted to note the absence of edgeblog 15. This is serious. I remember writing it and I remember posting it. There is no sign of it on either home or work computer. I have become to some extent reconciled to my failing memory, but the onset of imagined memories is a new step in a different direction. Don’t know what else to say on that front at the moment, so I’ll get on to what I actually wanted to talk to you about.

I could let you have the formal reference if you need it, but mainly I just wanted to reflect on this elegantly barbed comment with which Henry Widdowson  once introduced his response to a critic:

 I welcome his intention to take a critical look at my position. The problem is that this involves a reformulation of my position so as to make it more amenable to his criticism.

 Without wanting to take up a position on this particular instance, I regularly find this phenomenon one of the more depressing features of our professional and academic discourse. It’s bad enough that we should be trained to ‘make space’ for our own ideas by attacking the ideas of others, but even if one does want to live in this world of displacive discourse, where someone else must be wrong before one can speak, it undermines the whole process if one then fails to represent one’s target in its best light. It drags us down to the level of the politicians I daily hear in the news misrepresenting the views of opponents, or fabricating arguments that no one has proposed in order to put their own views in a better light. If, on the other hand, we make a point of presenting other people’s arguments as soundly as we can, then we achieve two things immediately. First, we clarify what has already been contributed; second, if our re-presentation still leaves something to which we can further contribute, then we have really justified what we have to say as worth the saying. More generally, we might see ourselves as helping develop a world of augmentative discourse that would at the same time be more rigorous in its argumentation. The basic test is an extension of the one that Carl Rogers proposed: Would the person whose ideas I am representing agree with my representation? If not, what am I doing?

 Ha! There, after such a heavy opening, that expression, ‘What am I doing?’ makes me smile, because it is also written on a sign, given to me by my friend, Bob Oprandy, that I have fixed at eye-level above my desk at work. I am one of those people (Or is it just me?) who is (a) not great at multi-tasking and (b) prone to be thinking, once I have started to do one thing, that perhaps I should be doing something else. So a constant reminder to focus on whatever it is that I am doing at any one time is always a very useful corrective to the possibility of being overtly engaged in doing one thing while thinking about something else. In contrast to Czikszentmihalyi ‘s concept of flow, this is more like eddy.  

Ah, and speaking of Bob, all being well, I shall be off to Peru on 24 June to do some workshops with him and with the teachers at the Instituto Cultural Peruana Norteamericano in Lima. I’ve never actually tried pair and group work in Cooperative Development with gatherings of 200 before, so it’s clearly time that I did.

 As our teaching term here has come to an end, I thought it was time for another edgeblog competition. The challenge is to provide a Hoeyan SPRE analysis of the attached text, The Golden Teeth, shamelssly cribbed from The Guardian.

You may feel that this advantages those entrants who have studied  relational analysis with me. Well, doh!! This is edgeblog, isn’t it? What did you expect, something on intercultural sensitivity, multimedia sustainability or ecological psychology? Once again, there will be a blisteringly attractive prize for the winning entry, which needs to reach me before the end of July.

So, have fun in the meantime and keep in mind that golden rule: Represent others as carefully as you would wish them to represent you. (And if you find edgeblog 15, do get in touch.)

 Best,

 Julian

 Oh, training will out. Here’s the reference.

Widdowson, H. (1998). Positions and oppositions: Hedgehogs and foxes. International Journal of Applied Linguistics8/1:147-151.

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edgeblog 15

Posted on 2, May 2011 by | Leave a comment

Anyone interested in qualitative research in general, and interviewing in particular, is likely to find something relevant and useful in the last issue of Applied Linguistics (32/1), edited by Steven Talmy and Keith Richards.

I had to smile the other day when I pointed this collection out to someone about to complete her PhD. “No!” she cried. “I don’t want to see anything new about that now!” I do sympathise. It’s a feeling that anyone should recognise when they’re trying to finish something off. Intellectually, of course, you always want to be in touch with the latest thinking, even if it is “threatening”. And pragmatically, it can rarely do you any harm if your text shows that you are aware of what is happening in the current literature. A final word of warning, mind, you have to be sure that you have got your head around just what is being said in that new publication. As the ancient saying has it: It is better not to have referred at all and have people think that you are not aware, than refer inaccurately and have them think that you didn’t understand.

Another reason I smiled, I have to admit, was because this situation reminded me of probably my favourite line collected from the recent trip to New Orleans. There we were in a small boat, creeping along a bayou and heading towards some open water among the swamps, with hopes of alligators, water snakes, cormorants, herons, pelicans, egrets and all sorts ahead, when the woman in front of me looked down at her camera and said, “Oh no! My battery’s low. Hope we don’t see anything great!” I thought this was an even greater triumph for the digital world than the idea of kids playing video games all the sunlit, sunshiny day.

Oh, don’t let me get started on that front. IT is so much with us and dealing with information overload is truly a constant battle. On which topic, our colleague, Drew Whitworth, has made a study of this with his work on information obesity.

The trouble with that obesity parallel for me, mind, is that while my body sets certain parameters to help me judge and control the food that I put into my system, my intellect and imagination are not so clearly bounded. So, how small would a topic have to be for me have a shot at gathering even the truly authentic and legitimate information about it, even if I could make those evaluations accurately?

That can’t be the way forward. I think the answer must lie in changing one’s attitude to the status of what is that one wants to say. More than ever, and increasingly, we have to speak and act while knowing not only that our knowledge is incomplete, but that the information we lacked would have been available if only we had known where and how to look for it. Humility, a tolerance for uncertainty, and recognition that others are in the same boat seem to be the qualities required.

None of the above, I might add, have been apparent in the political scene here in Britain of late. We are about to vote in a referendum on changing the system according to which we elect our members of parliament. What has stood out most clearly for me has been the unspoken and unchallenged assumption that the best way to inform the public about the issue is to set up an argument between two people who have already made up their minds. This is Deborah Tannen’s (1998) Argument Culture in all its glory. Rather than any measured information about the advantages and disadvantages of the different systems, we are presented in all media with the unedifying spectacle of people talking past each other while trying to score points off each other. And then we are apparently meant to be surprised when the “debate” sinks into rounds of accusations of misrepresentation and name-calling. Your life in their hands. Oh yay.

On the other hand, meteorologically speaking, I hereby declare this to have been, thus far, the most beautiful British Springtime that I can ever remember.

And Stoke City in the FA Cup Final.

Best,

Julian

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edgeblog 14

Posted on 6, April 2011 by | 11 Comments

April already. Temperature at a delightful 19C (that’s 70F for USAmerican readers — you know I love you, but it really is time you caught up on this one) in the afternoon sun, the trees and bushes a riot of pink-yellow-white blossom, and daffodils everywhere. A truly picture-book English Spring day. The kind of day that makes me want to warn our students here for the first time that they should enjoy this while they can, because it will be cold and rainy again ‘ere long.

I noticed a distinct pause before I wrote the word ‘students’ in that last paragraph. ‘Overseas’ students sounds so quaint and somehow ‘centre-periphery’ in its connotations, and ‘international’ always makes me think either, ‘How can anyone be ‘international,’ or ‘Are we not all ‘international’ together, once we are together? Does anyone have a view on this, or a good alternative term?

(I should warn you at this point, that anyone suggesting  ‘full-fee paying,’ or even worse, ‘gold-plated,’ will receive a two-blog ban for bringing an avowedly ideology-free communicative space into disrepute.)

Which reminds me, I was writing (on paper, with a pencil) a note for Richard the other day regarding a document that I had reviewed and was passing on to him in the very firm expectation that he would agree my analysis and conclusion. I ended by saying that if this were not the case, he should, of course, take the matter on himself. I found myself about to add a ‘smiley-face’ to indicate the intended irony of this last comment, and then thought, but if I do that, whither irony itself? It is lost to us, because it must be pointed out and made explicit. Is it then still irony? The emoticon works to save us from being misunderstood and simultaneously robs us of our subtlety. There is a super line the ‘The Name of the Rose’ where the young narrator says of his older mentor that it was sometimes difficult to know if what he had said was meant seriously, because when he made a joke he didn’t laugh at the end of it to show that it was meant to be funny.

Rather like the slight pause in the dialogue of a play I saw last week, when a character said of one of our current political colossi: ‘Two things I can’t stand about Nick Clegg: his face.’ Perhaps you had to be there. Perhaps not.

Being there (not) takes me back to edgeblog 13 and some of the very kind comments and requests made there regarding my recent TESOL presentation. I’m not honestly sure if that session would bear repeating, as it was a very deliberate presentation of my book (and the ideas in it), rather than professional/academic only. It was, to that extent, commercial. But what I can do (and indeed have done) is get around to making available, with Peter Leigh’s technical wizadry, the in-house version of my TESOL 2010 talk on Reflexivity, which introduced a lot of the thinking that went into the book. I’m linking to this message (in shaa allah) the Reflexivity_video_handout that goes with the talk, and the handout contains the url for the video.

I hope that the technology delivers and that you enjoy the talk.

Best,

Julian

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edgeblog 13

Posted on 23, March 2011 by | 7 Comments

This is the post-TESOL Convention edgeblog in two ways. First, because I am just (a few hours ago) back from the convention in New Orleans. Second, because I am pretty sure that that was the last TESOL Convention that I shall attend.

The 2011 conference itself was the usual vortex of activity, with a range and depth of topics and speakers impossible to fathom and navigate with any sense of certainty regarding what one would discover. But how not to be intrigued by the sensationally named Shaknoza Abdurakhmanova speaking on the topic of using wikis in Uzbekistan, and posing the question: How do learners manage to use wikipages to improve their writing through collaborative projects without having internet access at the university, and what a teacher needs to do in such settings?

Jennifer Jenkins, whose views many of you will be familiar with from discussions arising out of Rob Drummond’s Article Interview, featured in our EDUC70020 module, gave a plenary on English as a Lingua Franca. More particularly related to my own interests, Alastair Pennycook’s abstract for his plenary ran as follows:

English is an impossible idea. It is plural, fuzzy, unbounded, mixed, emergent and indefinable. English can no longer be pinned down; it is set of ideas, aspirations, desires, hopes, and threats. This plenary asks what it is we are involved in when we teach English.

My own session, I have to tell you (Who else will?), went very well. It was explicitly dedicated to introducing my new book, The Reflexive Teacher Educator: Roots and Wings. With my friend, Phil Quirke, contributing some scripted heckling from the back of the room, we presented a dramatized performance of Chapter 1. We had a full house, with people standing at the door. They laughed in the right places, listened carefully, and asked some astute questions at the end. Feedback was very positive and the publishers (Routledge) sold all the copies they had taken along. What more can you ask? Ah well, yes, and I enjoyed myself. To give you an idea, I’ll attach to this message the script that Phil and I used, along with the accompanying Powerpoint , for which wondering acknowledgement must be paid to Eljee Javier. All that I can add is that, for the opening and closing passages, I did my best impersonation of Daniel Day-Lewis’ voice in ‘There will be blood,’ which I think was an impersonation of John Huston in ‘Chinatown.’ Anyway, Gary, who was kind enough to come along and support, said, with a shake of the head, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve,’ and I know he meant it in a good way.  :>)

Having seen Baton Rouge, I now know why Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin were so keen to get out of it, and I have to confess that Lafayette is a lot more exciting in Lucinda Williams’ song that I found it, but then, her brother knows where all the best bars are. New Iberia was delightful, as was the electioneering sheriff, who shook my hand on the street and again that night in a restaurant, even though he must have known by then that I couldn’t vote.

If you have heard that New Orleans is full of live music, you won’t hear any contradiction from me. And some of it is good. Standout venues for me were Preservation Hall, as a living museum kind of gig, and Snug Harbour, a serious jazz venue where we saw a quintet led by Victor Goines and Delefeayo Marsalis play with apparently effortless virtuosity, startling creativity and a great deal of obviously enjoying themselves.

I got back here to discover that I am on strike, the union having called us out for two days in protest, most immediately, against the attack on our pension provision. It’s not really possible (although legally necessary) to separate that out from protest against the government’s overall approach to the economy, in which people’s pensions generally are being sacrificed to make up the losses caused by the financial services’ scandal, while the banks shovel our cash into their vaults and bankers pay themselves the bonuses they insist that they need, and against the overall attack on our system of higher education and the values on which it was built, since 1945, at least.

I shall use the ‘on strike’ time to catch up on emails and Blackboard. I’m not sure about the ethics of that, but it reduces my stress levels and means that I don’t cross any picket lines. Both of these seem good things and, in the words of Jim Steadman, ‘Two out of three ain’t bad.’

Ha! I didn’t tell you about why that was probably my last TESOL Convention. Still, enough for now. That’ll have to wait till next time.

Best,

Julian

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Second Life Teachers Group

Posted on 21, February 2011 by | Leave a comment

For anyone interested in teaching languages in Second Life, we have brought two groups together and amalgamated resources. Announcements of events will happen on the AVALON Project Ning site: http://avalon-project.ning.com/ and the SLExperiments wiki will be used for the storage of teaching ideas, lesson plans and a summary of what happened on the Second Life Events. Meetings are held twice a month, on the First Friday (19.00 GMT) and the third Wednesday (20.00 GMT).

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