Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Wilson 2017 Changing Gears FINAL
Wilson 2017 Changing Gears FINAL
Changing Gears
CHANGING GEARS
Amanda K. Wilson
Universidad de Guanajuato
Introduction
What makes a teacher? There are those who believe teaching is a vocation,
something one is born to do. Some believe it comes from the thousands of
hours one spends as a student. Still others believe it comes only with special
training and education. I believe there is validity in each of these theories,
but perhaps it is only when taken together that they provide a full picture
of what makes a teacher. Our life experiences are what shape us as teachers.
Those experiences allow us to understand our students, not only the way
they learn, but what is interesting or important to them, what they are ex-
periencing as they learn, and perhaps most significantly, what our students
are going through in their lives outside of the classroom. I believe, as teach-
ers, we must understand and accept our responsibility for all aspects of our
students’ lives while they are in our classrooms.
In examining my own very different and circuitous route to becom-
ing an English teacher in central Mexico, I recognize that my path has
been like that of so many other language teachers because of its difference.
Speaking with colleagues, I have yet to find any who have taken a straight
route toward this profession. It seems that everyone arrives at language
teaching through their own, uniquely circuitous route. This is such a com-
mon phenomenon that a phrase has been coined to describe it: “falling
into the job” (Lengeling, 2010, p. 28). But it is those different routes which
I believe make us teachers, and that give us the experience necessary to
understand our students and their own unique routes. Perhaps examining
15
Amanda K . Wilson
the similarity of our differences may further help us understand our stu-
dents and their differences.
In this chapter, I will examine the question of “how” I arrived at this
profession in anticipation that it may help answer the question “why” I
have chosen to become an EFL teacher at this point in my life. I recognize
that the selection of life incidents I include in the story of my path toward
becoming an English teacher is necessarily subjective. I have, however, at-
tempted to recount them as honestly and objectively as I can, although even
that judgment I must accept is equally subjective. Access to “the subjective
dimensions of social action” (Maines, Pierce, & Lasett, 2008, p. 3) is made
possible through recounting life experiences. Through that, “motivations,
emotions, [and] imaginations” are made visible (Ibid.). In selecting my
own life incidents to re-tell, I have been struck by one common thread: it
has been the most difficult and painful experiences that have taught me the
most about myself and other people. It is those times that I find coming to
the foreground in recounting my path toward becoming a teacher.
The story of how I came to English teaching spans countries and decades. It
begins in southwestern Colorado, in a small town during the 1960s. Times
were less complicated, and a three-speed bike was all that a girl needed to be
fully occupied during the long, summer vacations. The gears start changing,
and the story moves to the Colorado School of Mines (Mines) followed
by Texas and Louisiana and the oil and gas business during the 1980s oil
boom. The boom turns to bust, which leads to another gear change, mov-
ing the story to law school and public interest law in the San Francisco Bay
Area. Life circumstances then take the story to central Mexico, to a univer-
sity town, and the third gear: a third career as an English language teacher.
16
Changing Gears
Literature Review
My story is about how and why I became a teacher. Teachers’ stories have
much to tell, not only about personal experiences, but also about how
those experiences relate to the world around us. Coffey and Atkinson
(1996) explain that teachers’ stories “have functions of self and cultural
identity, entertainment, moral evaluation, and news. They provide media
for reflecting teachers’ cultural context in the work they do” (pp. 62-63).
In examining teacher stories, we look for themes in our analysis of what
those stories have to tell (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Several themes
present themselves in telling my story, themes which are perhaps common
to the stories of other English teachers. In this section, I will discuss litera-
ture relevant to themes related to how teachers enter the field of language
teaching, whether it be by falling into the job or the result of outside pres-
sures for professional development, and what ultimately makes someone
a teacher.
As Lengeling (2010) notes, there is “a range of entry methods into the
EFL profession and a range of educational backgrounds” (p. 204). As men-
tioned above, the spectrum of theories about how someone becomes a
teacher includes the belief that teaching is a vocation, that it is something
absorbed during the thousands of hours one spends as a student, and that
it is something requiring special training and education. For English lan-
guage teaching, however, there has been an additional path of entry. This
path was recognized by Lengeling (2010) as almost universally followed
by English teachers in Mexico, where, she explains, “‘falling into’ the job
represents the primary EFL career entry path... Few teachers begin in the
classroom with any formal EFL training” (p. 190). Being able to speak the
language has historically been the key to obtaining an English teaching
job for many English language teachers. Teacher training or education has
not been considered that important, much less training or education in
the profession of teaching a language (Ibid.). Is there more to the English
language teaching than mastery of the language? I examine next the devel-
opment of theories regarding the teaching profession.
17
Amanda K . Wilson
The etymological derivation of the word profession shows the term de-
veloped in a religious context. Brown (1992) explains, “The earliest mean-
ing of the term profession was religious, and referred to a proclamation of
faith” (p. 18). Its etymological history illustrates this evolution:
c.1200, vows taken upon entering a religious order,’ from Old French profession
(12c.), from Latin professionem (nominative professio) ‘public declaration,’ from
past participle stem of profiteri ‘declare openly’ (see profess). Meaning ‘any sol-
emn declaration’ is from mid-14c. (Profession, n.d., Online etymology dictionary)
Perhaps because of the historical significance of the term and its develop-
ment in a religious context, it is not uncommon to hear teachers speak of
their profession as a vocation, or of having a calling. While a natural ability
or interest in teaching may cause one to want to enter the profession, in
and of itself, it may not be sufficient today, as the world of language teach-
ing adapts to the needs of a growing global economy. We have begun to
recognize the complexities involved with teaching, and in particular, with
teaching a language. As a result, how teachers learn to teach has been the
subject of much research.
Lortie (1975) describes what he called an “apprenticeship of observa-
tion”, and argued that this apprenticeship is responsible for many of the
beliefs teachers have about teaching. Prior to receiving any teacher train-
ing, young teachers and student-teachers already have had significant
exposure to teachers and teaching. Lortie argued that those thousands
of hours spent as schoolchildren, watching and judging other teachers, is
what determines how we are as teachers. When we begin teaching, we may
simply imitate the way we were taught. As Borg (2004) notes, however,
“One of the consequences of this apprenticeship period is that... student
teachers may fail to realize that the aspects of teaching which they perceive
as students represented only a partial view of the teacher’s job” (p. 274).
This argues for more formalized training and education.
The academic reality of teachers has seen an increased pressure to have
ever-higher levels of educational degrees (Muñoz de Cote, Lengeling, &
18
Changing Gears
19
Amanda K . Wilson
Methodology
Writing my story has been a process of “living and telling, and reliving and
retelling” (Clandinin, Steeves, & Caine, 2013, p. xv) in a narrative frame-
work. Although a distinction may be made between “story” and “narra-
tive”, I use the terms interchangeably to mean a recounting of events in
an organized manner which leads to an interpretation with some social
significance (Squire et al., 2013, p. xv). In the re-telling, I have struggled
with what it means to talk about oneself. It is not easy, as society discour-
ages us from using the word “I”. Questions and self-doubt about my abil-
ity to narrate this story, as well as why anyone would even be interested,
have plagued me throughout this process. What “social significance”
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 130) could my story represent? Part of
my doubt comes from the difficulty in selecting which life experiences to
re-tell, as well as how to tell them. The selecting and telling are bound by
my subjective view of what is relevant or important.
Qualitative research is “the product of the researcher’s subjective inter-
pretation of the data” (Dörnyei, 2011, p. 38), and is therefore a product of
the researcher’s personal values, history, attitudes, and beliefs. In interpret-
ing anyone’s story, that interpretation will be affected by one’s own personal
beliefs and background. There is a greater vulnerability, however, in inter-
preting one’s own story. While my prior life experiences clearly affect how
I have selected, viewed, and analyzed my own story, there is most probably
an even greater impact from those prior experiences on the process of re-
telling and analyzing precisely because it is my own story. My interpreta-
tion will necessarily be biased. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) recognized
that this is especially common in autobiographical texts as “memory is se-
lective, shaped, and retold in the continuum of one’s experiences” (p. 142).
As this process has been marked by my personal values, history, attitudes,
and beliefs, it is important to acknowledge and make that visible in order to
create as open and honest a narrative as possible (Dörnyei, 2011; Hunter,
Emerald, & Martin, 2013; Ortlipp, 2008). I have therefore also struggled
with how to make this process more transparent, and how to increase both
20
Changing Gears
The telling of this story begins with a three-speed bike. It was a dark green
bike with white pin striping, a “girl’s bike”, given to me by my father for my
eighth summer. That bike carried me all over our small town in southwest-
ern Colorado for many summers: over the graveled streets in our neigh-
borhood, to the public swimming pool where I baked until the blonde hair
on the back of my hands and arms was crispy, and to the public library.
With my bike parked outside, I would enter the coolness of the library, and
the smell of books, to check out “the limit” every day it was open. That bike
had three gears, and it is three gear changes that have carried me to other
places in my life.
First Gear
The gears started changing, and my story moved to the Colorado School of
Mines (Mines) in Golden, Colorado. In high school, the pie graph show-
ing my aptitude test results indicated that I had an equal aptitude for all
skills, or no particular aptitude for any one area of study. I was offered
scholarships to study engineering and journalism. Because I could more
easily transfer from engineering to a liberal arts college than the other way
around if I decided to make a change, I chose Mines. It had a joint pro-
gram with the University of Denver Law School for graduate school, and
as I had spent many hours after school sitting in my father’s law office, I
thought that path might be a good way to accommodate my lack of a par-
21
Amanda K . Wilson
Second Gear
22
Changing Gears
asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t go to law school?” He was right,
of course, and so back to school I went. Compared to working in the oil
and gas industry, it was a welcome relief. Moreover, considering the fate of
many of my colleagues in the oil and gas industry, I felt fortunate to be able
to change gears.
While in law school, I took several classes in environmental law, as it
seemed a natural combination with my undergraduate degree and work
background. One semester, I had an internship with DNA (Dinébe’iiná
Náhiiłna be Agha’diit’ahii) People’s Legal Services on the Navajo Reserva-
tion to work on a lawsuit involving coal mining on the reservation. From
where I worked in the small, reservation town in New Mexico, I could see
the mountains around the town in Colorado where I grew up. When the
price of coal dropped, mining plans stopped, and the need for a lawsuit
disappeared. Since I was there for the semester, they put me to work rep-
resenting Navajo clients in cases involving consumer rights, government
benefits, and other typically “public interest” cases involving poor and un-
derprivileged people. I was like a duck to water. I finally discovered the
type of work I wanted to do.
When I graduated, I was able to continue working in public interest law,
representing children, elderly, immigrants, prisoners, disabled, and other
disenfranchised groups in class action and impact litigation. Through that
work, I watched clients struggle to make changes in their lives by using the
legal justice system to make their conditions better. As people disenfran-
chised by their conditions, it took courage for them to try to work within a
system which had left them in positions of such disadvantage. Having law-
yers at their side, however, gave them an advantage they had been lacking.
But their experiences in dealing with the legal justice system were still dif-
ficult, even painful at times. I stood beside them as they stood up against
their oppressors. I watched Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees stand up
against a slumlord, despite their understandable fear and mistrust of gov-
ernments after the almost unspeakable traumas they had experienced at
the hand of their own. Some Cambodian women refugees had been struck
blind by their experiences under the Khmer Rouge; although there was
23
Amanda K . Wilson
nothing physically wrong with their eyes, their brains simply refused to
process what they saw any longer (Van Boemel & Rozée, 2008). I stood
with African American families after a group of high school students com-
plained about being denied service at a local Denny’s Restaurant because
of their race. They were refused service when they attempted to go there
following a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) College Forum so they could continue talking about their col-
lege plans. After those high school students, children of Freedom Riders,
brought Denny’s discriminatory practices to light, thousands of other Af-
rican Americans came forward with similar complaints, and our class ac-
tion was finally settled. I sat beside women inmates as they testified about
sexual harassment and abuse at the hands of the very guards who con-
trolled almost every aspect of their lives in jail. Many of these women had
long histories of sexual abuse as children and adult women. I heard them
talk about the fears they faced, and saw the courage it required for them to
then face the guards.
The ordeals my clients went through in trying to improve their lives was
at times difficult to witness, in my role as their lawyer. It took strength and
bravery for them to see their cases through. Working with clients during
cases that sometimes lasted in excess of five years gave me the opportunity
to get to know them, their families, and their life circumstances. I believed
the work to be meaningful, and I valued my role as a lawyer helping people
improve their lives.
Third Gear
Life is rarely a straight path in my experience, and events along that path
seem rarely to be of our own making. It is what we do with those life
events that both are a result of who we are, and shape who we will be-
come. With my step-daughter’s graduation from high school, my husband
and I took the opportunity to move. We both wanted the experience of
living in another country and, after spending some time traveling, settled
on central Mexico. In anticipation of that move, I went back to school
24
Changing Gears
again, this time to study Spanish. I loved learning the language, and am
proud of the Associate in Arts in Spanish I obtained in a night program at
a local community college.
Once in Mexico, I began working with a local nonprofit organization
which provided university scholarships for bright, poor students. Working
with and getting to know the students and their families was a privilege.
I saw the changes the students went through, the challenges they faced
going to university, and the opportunities which were opened to them as
a result of an education. I had felt fortunate to get to know my clients and
be part of their struggles to improve their lives, and working with these
university students gave me the same feeling. I discovered what Ur (2002)
summarized: a teacher is a “bringer-about of real-world change” (p. 390).
Just as I had recognized that public interest law was work I loved, my expe-
rience working with these university scholarship students helped me reach
the same realization about teaching.
Perhaps teaching is “in my blood”, my “calling”. My mother taught
second grade on the Navajo Reservation when I was growing up, and in
1923, my paternal grandmother was in the first class to graduate with a
teaching degree from Western State College, after it was renamed from
the Colorado State Normal School (Western State Colorado University,
n.d., Western’s History). I was able to teach English in a night program
for adult learners similar to the one I had enrolled in to learn Spanish.
As a litigation lawyer, I had been invited to teach courses and lecture on
trial techniques, negotiation and mediation, interview and counseling
techniques, ethics, and other areas of substantive law. Teaching other
lawyers was a challenge, but one I enjoyed. Teaching English was an even
bigger challenge because I had no training or experience. Unwittingly I
had joined the legion of other “backpack teachers” who become language
teachers simply because of their ability to speak the language. Without
any teacher training or education, I turned to my “apprenticeship” as a
student to help me as I began teaching English. I found I relied not only
on my experience as a student and the hours I spent observing teach-
ers, specifically as a Spanish-language student, but I believe I found my
25
Amanda K . Wilson
26
Changing Gears
Conclusion
27
Amanda K . Wilson
it has been circuitous, the path I followed, “how” I got here, has been re-
markably similar to many other language teachers. I first “fell into the job”
simply because I speak the language. Without any teacher education or
training, I turned to my “apprenticeship” as a student as I began teaching
English to help me formulate both a teaching style and my beliefs about
teaching a language. Because of outside forces, a requirement at my uni-
versity that teachers have formal teaching education, I became a student
again, giving me the opportunity to correct the partial view I had of my
role as teacher.
I now turn to the question of “why” I am a teacher. My story, as with
all teachers’ stories, reveals my identity as a teacher as “that identity is evi-
dent” (Chan, Keyes, & Ross, 2013, p. xiii) in our stories of teaching and as
teachers. As much as I have struggled with academic research and writ-
ing, and have had to adapt to the idea of expressing my personal beliefs, to
write about what I believe and the experiences I have had leading to those
beliefs has been simultaneously forbidding and freeing. Much of my life
has been spent focusing outward, first on my clients and their life stories,
and now on my students and theirs. Examining my story, turning inward
and focusing on my experiences and beliefs, has led to a better understand-
ing of why I am a teacher. Through this process, I recognize the value I
place on having work that I believe to be meaningful. I appreciate the im-
portance I place on helping those who are working to improve their lives.
I now accept that this may be my calling.
In internalizing the ideas expressed by Johnson and Golombek (2003)
about the sociocultural theory of the cognitive development of L2 teach-
ers, I recognize that as teachers, we have an understanding based not only
on our education and experience, but our individual life experiences. It is
this mixture which we use to help our students learn. Lengeling (2010)
explains that “teachers hold a complex body of knowledge, gained from so-
cially constructed experiences within a social context” (p. 57). The socio-
cultural theory of teacher learning reflects this idea of teacher knowledge
as an understanding which, like a lawyer’s, is developed through a process
of taking in knowledge through education and experience, and ultimately,
28
Changing Gears
R efer ences
Altman, K., Riebe, S., Abbink, T., Beach, M.B., Bolis, J., Kramer, S.,
Mencin, C., Schenk, T., & Tittes, P. (1999). A century of women
at Mines: A retrospective collection of the challenges, victories and
achievements of Colorado School of Mines alumnae. Golden, CO:
Florence Caldwell Centennial Celebration Committee and the
Women in Science, Engineering and Mathematics Program, Colorado
School of Mines. Retrieved from http://inside.mines.edu/ UserFiles/
File/WISEM/A%20Century%20of%20Women%20at%20Mines.pdf
Borg, M. (2004). Key concepts in ELT: The apprenticeship of observation.
ELT Journal, 58 (3), 274-276.
Brown, J. (1992). The definition of a profession: The authority of metaphor in
the history of intelligence testing, 1890-1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Chan, E., Keyes, D., & Ross, V. (2013). Narrative inquirers in the midst of
meaning-making: Interpretive acts of teacher educators. Bingley, UK:
29
Amanda K . Wilson
30
Changing Gears
31
Amanda K . Wilson
from http://www.western.edu/about/brief-history-western-state-
colorado-university
Discussion Questions
32