Incidents in an Educational Life: A Memoir (of Sorts)

Seven: Reflections on an Educational Life

seven Reflections on an Educational Life 83 A few meta-reflections I am sufficiently aware of contemporary work on text and discourse analysis to recognize that the vignettes recounted in the previous chapters are not, in any simple sense, “true slices of an educational life.” After all, some I have recounted before in oral form, and in these retellings they become shaped in some more artful way, and have been reshaped again as I have been putting them down on paper. They have in effect been multiply “re-voiced.” And, of course, they are egocentric, rather than offering some triangulated inter-subjective account of events. Consider the case of the schoolboy episode, the one which I entitled “A touch of realpolitic” and where I offered the view that the headmaster could do little other than not expel me from the school because of the administrative vacuum that would have ensued. In fact, of course, his reasons might have been quite different, such as fear of litigation or a desire to support my housemaster. Doubtless, similar alternative interpretations could apply to various other incidents. On a more troubling level, there emerges the question raised by the cultural anthropologist, Charles Bauman: In what sense is it the case 201 that the events make the narrative (as one might expect at first sight), or is it also the case that the narrative makes the events? After all, there has been, on my part, much careful selection of certain details (such as a fragment of conversation), and much omission of other details. Perhaps , we can leave the issue here with two quotations. The first from the Franco-Bulgarian textual theorist, Tzvetan Todorov: No narrative is natural; a choice and a construction will always preside over its appearance; narrative is a discourse, not a series of events. There exists no ‘proper’ narrative as opposed to ‘figurative’ ones (just as there is no ‘proper’ meaning); all narratives are figurative. The second from Ilya Prigogine, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry : “On all levels reality implies an essential element of conceptualization .” Or, as I have recounted above, reconceptualization. Despite these equivocations, it also remains the case that the episodes recounted in the previous six chapters are not, in the end, fictions . They are all anchored in some version of reality at least as perceived and then presented by their raconteur. So, with that, let’s move on to somewhere else. 84 At the end of the accounts I have been a classroom teacher in university settings for 47 years now, and still enjoy its challenges. (Grading papers is another matter.) There has also been a long (if small) administrative career, and only once was I subject to an official complaint about my management, and even there the outcome was not resolved in the complainant’s favor. I do not work in a glamorous or high-profile field, one that might require brilliance and/or remarkable erudition on the part of its leading protagonists. Rather, my corner of Applied Linguistics is a field that rewards concentration , persistence, and an appropriate degree of educational self202 questioning. So, in this accounting, I have tried to interweave into a personal history various kinds of excursions that may have, at least for some, a certain pedagogical or investigative resonance. The story itself has been oddly serendipitous, one of being uncannily in the right place and the right time, so that it would serve ill as a model “career trajectory” for younger colleagues. A part of this serendipity comes from my choice of the field of English for Academic and Research Purposes, because knowledge of this variety of English has, throughout my working lifetime, become increasingly de rigeur for all those millions of academics, researchers, and research students who have not had the benefit of acquiring English as first language. International anxiety here about potential deficits is sharp, and alas often now reinforced by all those national evaluation criteria prioritizing publication in peer-reviewed English-language journals. In consequence, I have, over a working lifetime, visited 50 countries to speak about such issues. It was luck that placed me in charge of materials production at the College of Engineering in Libya in the late sixties, and it was the fortuitous timing of the Libyan Revolution of 1969 that led to the publication of Writing Scientific English in 1971. I do not intend here to inflict upon the reader any kind...