Oh dear. I was thinking that I was a little late for a December blog, but then, it is still December and now I see that I missed November altogether. Must try harder. However, don’t allow yourselves to be upset by all this nagging about posters. As I repeatedly find myself telling people, it’s not a question of how much time you have, we all have the same amount of time. It’s a question of what you prioritise, and I haven’t found a way to prioritise putting up a poster that is really only a self-promotional statement about some of my books. But why get so coy about it now? you might ask. What’s the point of creating the blooming thing if you don’t want people to see it? Eeeeeeeeeeeee, well, I guess I thought of it (along with the other posters) as an awareness-raising statement for the corridor here at work, something to point out that although most people in the School of Education have no real idea of what we do — the usual TESOL poor-relation phenomenon — that fact should not be understood as meaning that we are inactive or ineffective. This poster, however, is more individual and retrospective than the others and I couldn’t see where it would well fit in a blog. However, Richard has since suggested that I could put it on my individual home page, which boasts annual updates, so that is now my plan. When I prioritise the time for it . . . Before the January blog. Now, then, that makes it a goal.
And there is a poster-link to December/January, in the sense that the last book featured on the poster is indeed my last book: The Reflexive Teacher Educator in TESOL: Roots and Wings. Have I told you about that before? Probably. Anyway, it was officially published on 16 December 2010. I got in touch with the publisher when I heard about this date. I mean, you don’t want to have a book that’s already a year old before it reaches the shops, do you? I was reassured that the publication date in the book would be 2011. I didn’t know about that, did you? Just in case I haven’t told you, by the way, Roots is a reference to Narcissus, and Wings to Icarus, two of my flawed heroes whose reputations I try to redeem in the book. If any of you is thinking of attending the TESOL Convention (17-19 March 2011), I’m going to be doing a session on the book there at the bracing hour of 8.30am on the Friday. Of course, 8.30 in New Orleans in March probably feels a bit different to 8.30 in Manchester in December. I like to think, anyway . . . . warm evenings, pale mornings, a bottle of blues . . . .
You know, since I let go of the final page-proofs, I’ve been going through the usual post-writing experience of remembering things that I had meant to say and finding notes I had forgotten I’d made, conclusions I failed to draw, etc.. Most of all, I have been thinking about how obvious it is that we (TESOL people) have blazed the globalisation trail in so many ways, good and bad, sunshine and shadow, and are still struggling with its contradictions. At our most short-sighted, we set out with our modernist vision of progress via language learning and thereby support elite groups in countries around the world. At our best, perhaps, we recognise that our common humanity must entail some basic, general facts about how language is effectively learned, and our cultural diversity must entail some basic, situated facts about how language is effectively taught, but we are hard put to discern the features of either or the connections between both these manifestations of the global and the local as the tides of profit-and-loss sweep us along.
What have we learned in 2010? Well, certainly that if we once thought that we had countries and countries had banks, it has been spelled out very clearly for us that we belong to the banks, and countries are one way in which they collect from us. If we thought that among our rulers are vain fools who assume their right to mislead us while misrepresenting us, then we have started to learn how vengeful they may become when their foolishness and misrepresentations are uncovered. Oh dear, I seem to have wandered off the TESOL track here. Or perhaps I simply over-generalise.
One thing I am sure I have not learned is that our newly enhanced virtual learning environment is going to introduce a scheme of assessment of student assignments whereby we click on pre-formulated comments that will then automatically copy over into our feedback. That’s something that I don’t believe. Who would?
Twenty-eleven up. May it be good for you. Let us make it so. Lots to do. Back to prioritising, then . . .
Best,
Julian
