Dear colleagues,

Thank you for your interest in a focus on issues of social responsibility in TESOL. Social responsibility can mean so many things to so many people that it is hard to pin down exactly what we mean when we say that we are the Social Responsibility Interest Section. Sometimes we are talking about issues of bullying related to origin, language, beliefs, family structures, and more. At other times we are talking about issues of marginalization of the nonnative-English-speaking educators among us. We even address program structures that are built to support students who are learning English and healing from traumatic experiences. This list grows longer as we learn more about the lives and learning profiles of the many students we teach and the colleagues and families we partner with every day. However, I wonder if we can learn enough, share enough, or experience enough? Will our work ever be done? As I offer tissues to a fifth-grade girl on this rainy report card day, Dr. Cummin’s voice keeps sounding in my head: “First, do no harm.”

Regardless of the policies we advocate for, the curricula we develop to engage our students in critical issues (environment, peace, poverty, water rights, fair employment practices, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.), the long list of strategies we develop and share with colleagues, and the parents we endeavor to engage in the educational process, in the end it is the students who will measure our success. My fifth-grade student was clear in her message to me today; my colleagues and I have not met her needs. We haven’t met her needs because we have been teaching her the same way we teach everyone else. We have not considered the possible challenges she would face as a female learning alongside males, a new experience for her. We could not measure how desperately she wanted to learn at the same rate as her brother. I could easily go on, but I want to share what her self-advocacy brought to my attention.

Social responsibility is to approach our work with more questions than we have answers. We need to be ever ready to look through a new lens and see possibilities we haven’t seen before. The content matters, but the context and communication actually mean so much more. While I celebrate that my student has learned enough English and enough about teachers in the United States to advocate for herself, to stand tall and say, “You are wrong. I don’t have English,” I am humbled that she has forced me and her other teachers to see the challenge through her eyes. She told us how we should view her as a learner, and it is our responsibility to accept that we have to make a better effort.

This is, for me, the reason that the Social Responsibility Interest Section is important and integral to our work as English language educators. Issues of social responsibility are constantly changing as we interact with new students, new families, and new colleagues in an ever changing work environment. So like the issues of diversity noted by Elisabeth, social responsibility is a piece of what we all learn in order to meet the needs of our students, but it should not be taken for granted.

Every time I interact with you through our community forum, read your publications, and attend your sessions at the convention, I see things I have never seen and think things I have never thought. I find new lenses and learn the language of lives I have never lived. I appreciate all that you have taught me and look forward to more in the years to come. As I work alongside Elisabeth and Josie this year, I hope that we continue to develop our collective definition of social responsibility and find ways to help us all engage in learning the lives of our students in order to build relationships and inform our practice. Please join us on the community forum, write an article for our newsletter, and submit your proposals for TESOL 2016 in Baltimore. We will be talking about how far we have come and how far we have yet to go. We can’t know exactly what lies ahead, but we can discuss the questions that will keep us growing and learning.

Respectfully,

Anne Marie