EIGHTH TASK

DIRECTIONS: In your blog write your autobiography by enhacing your schooling experiences and the development of your bilingual literacy skills


SAMPLE AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

MY TEACHING IDENTITY: A LIFELONG LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Edgar Alirio Insuasty

My initial views of teaching were shaped by the kind of schooling I had as a child and a teenager. Teaching was one of my favorite childhood games. As soon as the daily school timetable was over, I used to get together with some of my neighbors and I played the role of the “teacher”. What I did was to “teach” my friends the topics we had previously studied at school by trying to replicate as much as possible our teacher’s strict ways. Our teacher was an all-knower who taught us all the subjects. He was a respectable person in the community, as important as the judge, the mayor or the priest. Definitely, I wanted to be become a teacher when I would grow up! 

When I entered my secondary studies, I underwent some educational changes. There was a library with lots of books. With these new facilities, the students were supposed to have become more autonomous. There were different teachers for different subjects. One of this was English! At the elementary school, (un)fortunately I had not received any English lesson. The assumption of a beneficial early start cannot have had any advocator at that time. So English was something bewildering and exciting for me and my peers. I still remember my first English lesson: it was about the objects of the classroom such as notebook, pencil, ruler, blackboard (“It was actually a blackboard”); something different, as you can notice, from what is expected now in an initial English class, devoted to matters such as self-introductions or formal or informal greetings. Anyway, I must have learnt a considerable stock of words and structures from my knowledgeable English teacher and my textbook.

As I suggested before, I seemed to be destined to be a teacher. Because of my explicit motivation towards this profession, I was taken to the Normal School to continue my pedagogic studies from the ninth grade on. There I was exposed to different pedagogic schools and philosophers of education. From this grade, I was involved in observation and microteaching. In the last two years I did my formal practicum at the school campus. I used to teach children topics of different subjects such as math, science, geography, history, Spanish and religion. At that time, I learnt the importance of different ingredients of this profession: planning, methodology, preparation, motivation, self-confidence and classroom management.

Some years afterwards, I entered the English-Spanish Licenciatura Undergraduate Program of Universidad de Nariño. I wanted to become an English teacher, perhaps the sort of teacher I had had in my high school. That is, somebody respectable and knowledgeable enough of the target language. I kept being overwhelmed by the inspiring expertise of my new teachers when they talked about the English language and when they eventually used it to communicate something. Once again, from reading some relevant literature I can say now that most of them used different methods such as the direct method, the reading method  and especially the audiolingual method, All of this happened in the late eighties when the Communicative Approach, which we studied eagerly in our methodology lessons, must have had over a decade of impetus somewhere else! In the last two semesters of my college studies, I also had to do my English teaching practicum, then with high school teenagers. It was a great challenge for me. Even though I had been given some theoretical insights about general, developmental and educational psychology during my pre-service training, I found it difficult  to have rapport with my students. I feel I did not have a proper guidance from my cooperating teacher in this respect.

I was lucky to have been hired as a part-time English teacher by my University as soon as I completed my undergraduate studies in 1988. It was a time full of energy and high expectations because as I started working as an English teacher, I also started studying the graduate program “Specialization in TESOL”. In this program, I went deeply into crucial concepts of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, text linguistics, methodology, research, evaluation and testing, among others. I tried to put into my professional teaching practice some of the principles I found potentially relevant and useful in these subjects, but it was not that easy! A feeling of uneasiness with the way I taught English started to arouse. There was a clear mismatch between my teaching discourse and my teaching action.

Three years later, I was hired to be an English teacher by the School of Languages of Universidad del Valle. I derived very important pedagogic lessons from this experience. I had a different sort of student (caleños are more outgoing and extroverted than pastusos, my own stereotyped perception?). Naturally, I had to fit my teaching style to the new audience, and I kept trying to be as much communicative as possible. Along with a colleague who took part in the COFE project, I started the ECC (English Conversation Club) as a co-curricular setting for the spontaneous practice of the target language. It was a special weekly event that enabled participants (few of them being our own students) to have fun by learning or to learn by having fun, in relaxed informal conditions outside the class. There was singing, acting reciting, discussing and, most importantly, cooperating! But something I did not do very well, from my current way of seeing things, was my role as a practicum advisor. The student teacher under my guidance chose a school and went to face the music with my distant accompaniment. I never went to visit him in his practicum setting. I never witnessed the consistency of his good teaching intentions shaped in the lesson plan and his actual teaching performance in the classroom. I just trusted him blindly! You may wonder why this can have happened in a prestigious institution like this. I did not perceive the practicum within a coherent framework. 

Three years later, I came to work for the ELT Undergraduate Program of Universidad Surcolombiana. It was then a new and promising teacher education program in Colombia.  Here I have been entrusted with high teaching responsibilities. I have been not only in charge of teaching English classes, but also of conducting English and American literature, TESOL methodology, English grammar, research and translation courses. An all-knower? Not at all, just somebody who faces new challenges with responsibility and inspiration! Here I have also played the role of being a practicum advisor. I have encouraged the student teachers under my guidance to practice reflective teaching as a way to give full sense to what they experience in the classroom.

Universidad Surcolombiana has proved to be the destination I had been looking for: a context where I have had the chance of growing professionally as a teacher and  researcher. Along with other eight colleagues, I am a member of COMUNIQUEMONOS, a research team which has conducted several studies and published some materials in the fields of English teaching in primary school and development of communicative competence with high school and university English students. 

Thanks to my M.A in English language teaching and my Ph. D in education, I have gained further insights into a socially.and humanistically committed way of understanding and practicing my profession. 

Finally, after having looked backwards into my academic life, I feel that all of these learning, teaching and research experiences have made me a reflective practitioner who is eager to keep learning to teach and teaching to learn!