Embracing the International TESOL Perspective

This weekend, I participated in the Southwest Fulbright Symposium in Texas, and it was just what I needed for renewed inspiration about the importance of international perspective in our field.  In one morning, I listened to colleagues talk about brokering peace in Colombia, pharmacy student exchanges between Brazil and the United States, analysis of how the Mexican economy is portrayed in film, optometry innovations in Perú, and ways small private universities are promoting international experiences for their students.

I, in turn, spoke about how transnational teachers (specifically U.S. and Mexico) undergo different teacher identity and language awareness development than other types of teachers.  All in all, the conversations were fascinating and helped me grapple with something with which I continually struggle.

Sometimes, I wonder if, as a TESOL professional from an anglophone country (i.e., the United States), I am promoting linguistic imperialism, or the transfer of a dominant language to other people, often at the expense of the languages already present in that context.I think as TESOL professionals, we would be remiss if we didn’t account for this perspective as a sort of counter-balance to the potential benefits of learning English and participating in English-speaking discourse communities in all their various forms.  As a TESOL teacher educator, I think it’s important to  present future and current teachers with the case for language rights so that ideally, they might make pedagogical decisions that are more inclusive of local English use in their context, as well as all of the different ways that language learners can be bilingual (or trilingual, or multilingual).

However, one message that I took away from my own Fulbright experience and that I was reminded of this weekend at the symposium, was the importance of the perspectives that international interactions bring to our lives.  TESOL is one field where many different perspectives converge, and, in my mind, that is one reason it is so vibrant a profession.  My closest friends from my PhD program are Slovakian, Irish, German, Polish, and Serbian.  My current PhD students are from Puerto Rico, Brazil, China, Iraq, and the United States, not to mention all of the places from which my amazing graduate and undergraduate students come.  I wouldn’t have met any of them had it not been for TESOL and English language teaching, and I hope that all that I learned and am still learning from them permeates my own practices and world view.

The power relationships among languages can and do have negative consequences, but the use of English as a word language, as well as study and respect for Global Englishes in local contexts, also serve as powerful tools to communicate with each other.  I encourage TESOL educators and teacher educators to continue to develop their international perspectives by connecting with colleagues from other countries who might speak different kinds of English, traveling to other countries for conferences or job opportunities, and making a point to network with colleagues from around the world at TESOL’s many conferences and professional development seminars.

It’s definitely a continuous balancing act to consider the role of English learning and teaching in different contexts, so I’ll be curious to hear how other teacher educators  mediate these phenomena.  Let me know in the comments!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/embracing-the-international-tesol-perspective/