TEIS Newsletter - June 2023 (Plain Text Version)
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EXPANDING MY COMMUNITY OF "LEARNING COLLABORATORS" AT THE TESOL CONVENTION Drew S. Fagan, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Developing knowledge is key to continued teacher success especially when that knowledge comes from sources that I never even considered approaching or was even aware existed. The TESOL Convention is the gateway to those sources! “Educators are learners: when we stop learning, we and the field become stagnant. When that happens, our students suffer.” This quote from my 2023 Teacher of the Year Interview in TESOL Connections (Nguyen, 2023) has been my belief since I first entered the TESOL field in 2001. Early on, my teacher educators guided me and provided tools to help me formulate my own foundational beliefs of what it means to learn and teach languages. They pushed me to read up on, make connections with, and then question the “it” scholarship and best practices of the day. This has continued throughout my career and is indeed helpful, but as a lifelong student I personally have the need to go beyond independent work to continue learning. For me, “students must play an active role in their education, and they will if they are a part of a community of learners involved in dialogue, questioning, debate, and analysis (emphasis added) (Wong, 2005, p. 87). My most prolific TESOL learning has come from dialogs, debates, and collaborations with colleagues, or who I refer to as my “learning collaborators”. I began exchanging ideas with my graduate student and teaching cohort colleagues early in my career, learning how their perceptions connected and countered mine and why, and how we could use these exchanges to enhance our collective knowledge. This allowed me to think outside of my own experiences and have a more encompassing understanding of what it means to be an educator in our field. Over time, my learning collaborators have included those within and outside of my immediate work contexts. The former group is easier to connect with given that we share the same physical space; as we work with the same student populations, though, our breadth of varied hands-on experiences adding to our professional knowledge can be somewhat restrictive. It is the latter group, those outside of my immediate work context, that can provide much more breadth in terms of thinking outside of my own educational box. The core of this latter group has been colleagues I have met (and ultimately collaborated with) at the TESOL International Association Convention. Language teacher associations play a vital role in educator learning given that they “mainly support members with knowledge exchange and development” (Lamb, 2012, p. 295). As an ESOL teacher, teacher educator, and scholar, developing knowledge is the key to continued professional success; this is particularly noteworthy when the knowledge gained comes from sources that I never even considered approaching or was even aware existed. Case in point was the highly successful Opening Keynote at the 2023 Convention in Portland. Sammy Ramsey illustrated how experiences in two seemingly disconnected fields, TESOL and entomology, can connect to one another in terms of learning and identity. As an audience member, this Keynote led to many fruitful dialogues with people sitting near me who I had never met prior to this event but with whom I quickly began discussing the importance of expanding the field of identity construction as it relates to educator and student development across cultural contexts (especially moving away from North American-centric work). I also experienced unexpected learning opportunities as a presenter. One of the presentations my colleague and I gave, Educating K-12 Administrators in TESOL: The Why’s and How’s, focused on the development of a new Ed.D. In School System Leadership Program in Maryland that specialized in preparing school- and district-level administrators on addressing multilingual learners’ needs from the “top-down”. Immediately, discussions during and after the presentation focused on the applicability of this program in other states in the USA such as Massachusetts and Colorado, each with their own state and local education agency parameters, as well as in other countries which have national administrator parameters set by their ministries of education (for example, dialoguing with a large contingent of teachers and administrators from Pakistan). Just talking about the intricacies of practically adapting our program to other contexts led to a wealth of knowledge into how others around the world not only educate their English learners but how they differently interpret the same literature that I am reading. For as much as I gained through the larger keynotes, formal presentations, and panels (both as an audience member and presenter), I particularly enjoyed talking one-on-one in more informal settings. This included just passing by some of the TESOL leaders and striking up a conversation. This also included attending informal roundtables at the TESOL Fair to have more one-on-one time with other attendees from various Professional Councils and Communities of Practice. In this more relaxed forum, I met so many new colleagues with whom I had similar experiences or shared identities. Additionally, as there were no official timeslots for these chats, moving from one table to another and hearing about the specific goals and needs of certain groups provided yet more insight into areas of the field that I had not yet incorporated into my own TESOL experience. As lifelong learners, we educators need to find different channels to continually enhance our knowledge of this ever-changing field; that is a responsibility we must take on to help ensure our students’ needs are met. For me, this is best accomplished through collaborative dialogue with my learning collaborators. The TESOL Convention provides unique and varied settings for such learning opportunities to take place. References Lamb, T.E. (2012). Language associations collaborative support: Language teacher associations as empowering spaces in professional networks. Innovations in Language Learning and Teaching, 6, 287-308. doi: 10.1080/17501229.2012.725255. Nguyen, L.T. (2023, April). Spotlight on the TESOL Teacher of the Year: Drew S. Fagan. TESOL Connections. Retrieved from http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolc/issues/2023-04-01/3.html. Wong, S. (2005). Dialogic Approaches to TESOL: Where the Ginkgo Tree Grows. Routledge. Drew Fagan is Associate Clinical Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Education and TESOL Program Coordinator at the University of Maryland. He is the 2022-2023 President of the Maryland TESOL Association and the 2023 Teacher of the Year for TESOL International Association and National Geographic Learning. |
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