Signing off, for now, and thanks if you've been reading

            I am home now, almost a week, and already the trip recedes in my mind like a vivid dream I can’t hold on to the minute after I wake up. It’s familiar, that receding, just like the last time, and this time with a similar, if less pronounced, sense of displacement happening along with it. Funny to return to the house where I’ve been absent the last month, to routines that have shifted without my presence; this time I tried to fold myself back in the place immediately, and it wasn’t so easy. But we’re getting our feet again, all of us, by this point.

            On the second to last morning, breakfast in a Salatiga hotel where I stayed with the participants from the Asia Creative Writing Group for two nights after our return from Dieng, I had a conversation with a Burmese woman who has been a lecturer in education in New Zealand for 10 years. She is an ethnographer who studies English language teaching in several countries – most recently she worked in Nepal, and she has also worked in Burma. She observes classrooms, and interviews teachers and students, the work of ethnography, for extended periods of time, and she said that teachers always ask her how they could be better teachers, what they might do better. “I never answer that question,” she told me. “That’s not why I am there.” Instead, she said, she always learns a new technique, new ideas, that challenge her notions about teaching.

            In Burma, for example, she noticed that recent graduates, who had been given work in Japan on the condition that they could learn Japanese in a year before they went, were actually becoming nearly fluent in Japanese in that time, and she wondered how they could do it, when they’d been learning English every year in school and could still not speak it that well. She said that their education would start with a man from Japan coming, speaking to the students about whatever he wanted to in Japanese, and then their Burmese teacher would translate everything he had said, and that they would do this, every day, for about month. They didn’t understand anything at first, she said. When the Japanese speaker left, they would start learning some of the basics of Japanese – vocabulary, grammar, etc. – for about month, and then the Japanese man would return for a month and they’d do the same thing. By the end of a year, they didn’t need translation anymore. It happened that quickly, and it was a method that was, she said, completely new to her as an educational method.

            The conversation troubled me, on my last full day in Salatiga, worried me, because I have wondered as I have moved around here what it is I think I am doing, what sort of impact I hope these workshops will have. I’ve had this niggling feeling that I am doing exactly what she said she doesn’t do – coming into an educational context and telling them how to change their practice so that they do it better. I think that’s probably too simplistic, but I also think that it might not be. I’m wrestling with this as I return, in part because I find this work so exciting and engaging – exciting and engaging enough to be motivated to create for myself the reasons that I am being successful, that is worth doing again. And of course narrating the conditions of our pedagogical success, in any context, becomes a sort of necessary professional habit for a teacher; that is, to sustain ourselves in this work, we have to tell ourselves stories about why it’s working.

            On one level, getting teachers to write and then reflect on the act of writing – in any context – has always seemed to me like a powerful teaching tool, a way to reimagine what writers experience. Certainly, when English language teachers in non-English speaking countries do this, they worry about many of the things that their students worry about, and they make mistakes too, if that word has any meaning in the writing world I’m trying to encourage. It’s also the case that teachers in the United States agonize, although in a different way, about student error in writing. So I’m torn about my role, about my ideas, about the value of the work beyond the extraordinary opportunities for learning and engagement it has offered me. That has been invaluable, but as I noted, perhaps in ways that can distract me from asking the right questions.

            I suppose that I am still struck, even more so, by the conditions of life on the ground for the people who are most caught in the middle of English as a global lingua franca, the teachers in the expanding circle countries, places like Indonesia where the ideas of English – whatever those ideas are – take on a kind of energy familiar to me as a student of the idea of literacy in educational circles: students need English to get good jobs, to survive in the world, to support the national economies in an era of globalization – those are the grand narratives that aren’t always articulated but are always present, and how teachers experience those grand narratives at the local level is at once both mystifying and important to me, somehow. In some ways, as they have with literacy in the United States, narratives like that induce fear into teachers and students who understand that their difficulty with things like grammatical structure and accents and vocabulary are not just personal learning challenges but are representatives of a sliding scale of failure that starts with teachers being assessed as poor teachers and moves through schools and systems and finally the nation itself failing to meet the expectations of a global economy. All of that, it seems to me, shows up in a sentence like “Umi angry I.”

            I hope, certainly, that I will continue to do this work in one way or another. But I need that internal critic to always ask me why I am doing it, the way I asked myself why I was teaching in the jail when I taught there: what good did I think it did? Who was I doing it for – myself or my students? What possible future did I see this playing into? Those will never be one-dimensional questions or answers.

            We’re excited about translingualism in my academic field, writing about how to embrace the multiplicity of languages showing up in our writing classrooms, and how those languages challenge our easily held ideas about writing and language and correctness and globalization. Good. But sometimes the place I work from – the American university – has difficulty following through with its own important insights in settings beyond the American university. So it matters that I sat with 15 English language teachers last month in an Islamic boarding school on the eastern tip of Madura Island – teachers who spoke at least three languages and usually four or five – and listened to them describe their challenges and frustrations and successes teaching English.

            On my last day in Salatiga - my ride for the airport came at 2:30, so I had several hours – my former student Galih met me at the University on his motorbike, and I spent the day with him and later with his fiancée, Kharisma, another former student. He shifted from his ambition of getting a masters in American literature in his last year in college when he and Kharisma opened up an English language school with the idea of supporting English language learning in the kampungs outside Salatiga, the rural and often desperately poor villages much like the ones he had been raised in. And he spoke about that education not only in terms of teaching English, but in helping students ask vital questions about the future of their country, questions about the environment and corruption and democracy – he was beginning to articulate a “why” behind his program that transcended the national educational narratives about why English mattered, and their school funds those free programs through paid-for programs within Salatiga. Talking to him made me think about my own stumbling and exciting first experiences in the literacy center in Seattle, where I had to puzzle through so many cultural associations and political agendas in the company of groups of deep thinkers that included my students and colleagues, who always challenged me and made me doubt everything I thought I knew. He’s wrapped up in those narratives about global English, competing with other organizations in Salatiga that are teaching English, competing within himself for language about why the teaching he is doing matters beyond the always unsatisfying answers we get boxed and bullet-pointed in official documents, and that amount to: “it matters because we said it matters.” These teachers are the ones I want to watch, and for purposes I can’t yet articulate. And they are the ones who still make me doubt everything I think I am doing, challenge me to think through my own motives, wonder what the point of any of this is.

            Galih told me that every time he meets with his language students, he starts by having them write about something that matters to them, a prompt he gives them that gets them to share their ideas in a more comfortable way than it would happen from asking them to speak it. He got that idea from my critical reading class in 2010, he told me, when he was a fourth semester student who noticed that his classmates said things, revealed things, and thought more openly, because I asked them to write at the beginning of every class, because I asked them what they thought and then listened to it. It was important to sit with him and hear that – important to think that there might be answers to my questions about my work that end in ripples like that instead of end only in more stamps in my passport.  He is dreaming the dream about education that all the teachers I respect the most keep dreaming, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, in the face of systems that continually narrow our goals in the most pedestrian and tedious sets of economic outcomes and objectives – he is dreaming of education that makes the world a better place rather than simply serves the systems we are all a part of anyway. That dream is always fraught too, always caught up in its own contradictions and self-propelling narratives – we want so badly to be transformative, we teachers, that we can’t talk about our teaching without including some Galih story or another – but still, it’s the dream we need to keep dreaming anyway, a dream we need to help teachers foster and embrace in their own practice.

            This will, for the moment, wrap up this blog. If you’ve been reading it, I hope you’ll let me know in one way or another. The belief in readers has made this something other than a diary entry or a travel journal. So I am grateful for you out there, even the idea of you out there. And I’m thankful for this space of written reflection. And I am glad to be home – even when Graham angrily reminds me, after I tell him that no, he can’t have a bowl of ice cream right after school, that things have changed around here in the month that I’ve been gone (or in the time that “you ditched us,” as he said in another context – our kids know just where to pour that salt). I’m glad I went. And now I’ve got to turn my head back to the other work – the history of the literacy test as a voting qualification in the United States – that I’ve completely dropped in my Indonesian month. Sometime in the future this blog will pop up again, though. I hope I’ll have readers – pretend or better yet actually – then too. Thanks.