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shift in perspective, as we consider the commentaries first of teachers
and then of girls who work alongside boys in language classrooms.
6
Teachers Talking
Having listened to what boys in different contexts have to say about the
learning of languages, we now present comments from some of the teach-
ers of these boys. These commentaries clearly come from different perspec-
tives to those of the boys themselves, reflecting different investments and
understandings, speaking through different discourses; but they have many
points of connection with what the boys had to say. They were collected
from various sources: some the result of impromptu conversations at con-
ferences or professional development workshops with teachers who identi-
fied as having a particular interest in the boys languages issue; others with
teachers who had worked with me during their pre-service programmes, or
who had responded to an invitation which I sent out through a language
teachers electronic discussion forum. They varied considerably, but prob-
ably represent a fairly typical cross-section of the language-teaching com-
munity. Some were recent graduates, others nearing retirement. Some had
taught all their careers in single-sex schools, some in independent schools
only, while others had taught across sectors and in a variety of institutions.
All had an identified interest in the boys languages issue several of them
talking about it as the sleeping dog issue of languages education.
Their views varied quite significantly, some clearly subscribing to an
essentialist, biological view about sex differences and learning, others
more concerned about what they saw to be effects of socialisation processes
which position both boys and girls in ways that are sometimes enabling
but often constraining. There were some points of commonality across
the teacher commentaries and some points of real divergence.
Nature or nurture?
One of the first questions to teachers, after initial context-establishing
questions about their teaching background and experience, was whether
111
112 Boys and Foreign Language Learning
they are conscious of teaching male and female students differently;
whether they think of them as being in any sense different as learners.
Only one teacher in the entire data set gave a straight, categorically neg-
ative response to this question, insisting that she teaches in exactly the
same way, regardless of the sex of her students, and in fact makes it a
point of principle and politics not to differentiate between them, nor to
make any kind of prior assumptions about them:
I try not to see them as male and female. I don t differentiate between
them: they re students, I m the teacher, and I m what they get! I don t
go easier on the girls, and I don t expect the boys to do less well. I
expect them all to work and to achieve.
(K.B.)
This teacher works in one of the most challenging sites visited, and has
had to work long and hard to establish a culture of language learning in
the school. She is popular with students and, in the context of this particu-
lar school, is attracting strong numbers into post-compulsory classes, boys
as well as girls. Her way of doing teacher could be described as delib-
erately unfeminine, as she resists what she describes as the traditional
model of the nurturing female teacher (what she refers to as girly-girl
communicative style). She talked about her consciously adopted position
in terms of constituting herself as teacher early on in her career:
I don t see myself as a girly-girl and I wonder if that makes a differ-
ence. I m really pleased with the numbers of boys coming through.
Other LOTE teachers are very girly-girl: I m not, and I have lots of boys
coming through . . . I discovered early on that if I was nice to the boys,
they didn t appreciate it so I m not very nice to them sometimes.
Early on in my career one boy told me I was as weak as piss because I
was nice my second year teaching . . . and I took that on board. I m
caring, but I try not to be too gentle am pretty rough they accept
me as a person. When I m stressed, I tell them: when I was doing my
study, I talked to them about that . . . they would ask me questions,
we d have discussions . . . they can see who I am. I was told by some-
one at the beginning of my teaching career that I had to have two
different personas: my own real self and the teacher. I tried it, couldn t
do it. As a teacher I have to be me.
This is an interesting commentary, which suggests the complexity of what
we do as teachers, and the dynamics of how gender in fact affects teaching
Teachers Talking 113
styles. As she talked more about her teaching, her students, and the kinds
of involvements they shared, it was clear that this teacher works to an
inclusive, collaborative model of teacher student relationship, which in
part comes from the demands of keeping a Chinese language programme
afloat in a school where she is the only language teacher, with minimal
material resources, and where wider community support is hard earned,
and in part from her own philosophy of education and personal commu-
nicative style. Her students seem to have a particularly strong sense of
group identity, volunteering for all kinds of extra-curricular involvements
helping to receive Chinese visitors, taking part in cultural events and cere-
monies, fund-raising for trips to China. Such is the level of engagement by
some students that they continue to be part of the Chinese group even
when they have stopped doing Chinese:
We do lots of fund raising, we go to China together, we do so many
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