Who do you feel solidarity with?
This is prompted by comments on my How can we increase TEFL pay? post and Sara Hannam’s TEFL unions/ solidarity post, and also by the feeling that it is one thing getting stumped for an answer to “1, 2, 3, 4, what the hell are we fighting for?” but quite another to not even understand the question by not knowing who “we” are. If I can also dig myself out of yet another seeming case of NEST bias too, then all the better.
I want to start by asking people to answer this question just as it stands, specifically leaving the word “should” until at least a little later. After several attempts to do so myself, I found that the best approach was to see solidarity as circles within circles. And here are mine as an example:
I personally feel most solidarity with foreign teachers (native or non native equally!) in the country I am presently in or countries I have taken a great interest in (because I was there a long time etc), especially teachers who have gone down a similar route- CELTA or equivalent, mainly private language schools, thinking about doing a Dip if they are still in the game that long. On the edge of that inner ring but still in it would be teachers who are from the country I am teaching in but who have taken a similar route.
The next ring would be people who have all that in common, but are just in countries I have no particular attachment to or knowledge of.
The next ring would be state school etc teachers from the country I am in who I have nothing in common with in terms of job security or wages (usually to their benefit, but occasionally to mine) but who are on the same side of the fence when it comes to government policies and reforms on English language and education more generally. A totally different group who would also probably make it into that second ring are people who did pre-experience MAs in TESOL and have probably spent or are planning to spend most of their careers in universities.
After that would be anyone who feels totally underequipped to teach English and so are desperately searching around for anything to make it better.
And that would be the outermost circle worth mentioning. Have already started writing up what it might mean, but would like to hear others answer “Who do you feel solidarity with?” (in any way you like) first.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:21 pm
The students?
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:02 am
Really? More than your fellow teachers? (What “fellow” means being another way of looking at this question)
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:14 am
I was being mildly facetious, but actually…. who do I spend more time with? Who am I working with every day? I would have to include the students as a group I feel a connection to, and a much stronger connection than that with many other teachers.
Must dash…. but I’ll be following this one with interest.
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:40 am
Many a true word etc etc
I wonder if your students would be more likely to show solidarity with you if you got into trouble with the management than the other teachers would??
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:04 am
Well, there’s the rub….
… I hate to say it, but it’s probably every man for himself. Depends what I were in trouble for, but in the current climate of falling student numbers and everyone scrabbling around for classes I think there would be plenty of people happy that a job had opened up.
I’m in favour of unions in general, but ambivalent at best about the union which would represent me here (if I were to join it).
October 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I think it depends on the situation Alex, and what is going on at any given time. As a general rule, I feel solidarity with my fellow teachers and the students (but not all of them, those that identify with collective problems and solutions), and then other people working in other jobs around me where I see so many parallels with education (probably more in the caring professions), and then (sorry to sound trite) humanity as a whole.
I don’t find that I draw the distinction between public/private sector as I have a lot of contact with both really, and I always keep the other sector in mind when examining the problems I face. When there is a particular issue, then sometimes it means that I feel more solidarity with one group than another, but I try to avoid becoming too narrowly influenced by my”micro cosmos” (microcosm).
Yesterday, for eg, I felt solidarity with the 75 other people who came to a “birth choices in Greece” meeting that I and others organised to do something about the alarming rise in ceseareans (now over 60%) and the fact that the birth industry is controlled by the private sector with most parents paying upwards of 5,000 Euros to have a baby in Greece. Yes, 5,000. We are demanding state options, including home birth (most of us had ours at home to avoid this factory approach to birthing). I really think it is the same sort of situation as we have been discussing in education when profits are more important than the quality of birth care (or teaching). That reality affects all aspects of our lives, so I would say I feel solidarity with anyone, in any part of the ‘system’ who wants to put up a challenge to how this works in practice.
So….in summary. The problem I see with splitting it all up again and asking the question this way is that it sort of encourages us to hierarchy who is more important. Not sure I want to do that. My net goes much wider than education, and much wider than Greece.
Hope this helps.
October 6th, 2009 at 8:37 am
It is absolutely wonderful to be having these discussions, here on this site, Critical Mass and Marxist TEFL group. Indeed, the pace of the discussion and issues raised are rather bewildering given the inadequate space which had been given to them previously.
We will have to content ourselves with being rather random and spontaneous for the moment, but there is a need to take each issue much more slowly and in greater depth (what is a profession? What is the role of the native teacher? What is the role of a trade union, which should we join, who should be a member? How should we relate to the state language teaching sector? How should we relate to wider issues, say climate change?
Here Alex, has tried to identify a “we” from which talk of solidarity can emerge and elsewhere Sara has tried to avoid NEST perspectives which artificially separate teachers.
For our part, the name Marxist TEFL, is deliberately premised on the basis that there is an industry called TEFL, that it exists and is not some artificial construct. Have a look on the bookshelves of the private language schools, the university departments dealing with overseas students, the ESOL department in the Further Ed college and you will see the same books (this is not necessarily the case with the state primary and secondary education sectors.)
The word foreign is itself rather repugnant, but this does not mean it isn’t an active concept exercising unthinkable power. We can simply not use it, or we can appropriate it for ourselves, as an “honest” description of the state of affairs in a world which is divided between inter-national rivalries. Where the IMF can wreck the local education systems of developing countries and the British Council can step in to train the more advantaged members of the population how to speak English and access “hard-up” British universities.
So, without doubt, something exists which we call TEFL. People have an uneven relationship to it (ESOL teachers, researchers, writers, private language school teachers, university language school teachers, students in academies, students in inhouse company classes, NESTS, NON-NESTS, middle managers, directors, receptionists) but it is an entity which finds expression in professional bodies and publishing (Cambridge ESOL, Trinity College, British Council, UK English, IATEFL, Macmillan Campus, Cambridge University Press etc).
It is an industry that is dominated by considerable profits but low pay and questionable quality. Up until now a group of what we affectionately term “Cyber Knights” (namely Sandy McManus and Alex Case) have worked tirelessly to expose the worst abuses of this industry. With new sites appearing like our own and Sara Hannam’s, we feel the time is right to pull together as many of these voices of discontent as possible and direct it at the vested interests which dominate the industry (ie our call for IaltTELF- building an alternative to Harrogate 2010).
Of course, with a “them” we have a “we”. All those disenfranchised by the actions (or lack of actions) of those industry leaders.
What we need prior to the IaltTEFL, is a simple manifesto of “we”:
“We have called this alternative conference because …..”
Solidarity must begin with small steps such as these.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Now that I finally have the internet in my new flat I can try to answer Sara’s points in more detail
“sometimes it means that I feel more solidarity with one group than another”
Indeed, but deciding who we feel solidarity with on, for example, TEFL pay and conditions is a bit like joining or forming a political party- choose our friends too carefully and we are two men and a cat and unlikely to affect anything, feel solidarity with too many and our ideas get watered down if not abandoned or even reversed. Or, as Sara’s comments and experience seem to suggest, you can just form single issue groups and so have fewer of those issues (although more than you might think). That could lead to an organisation or at least some momentum that could lead to other things, or alternatively it might not…
October 6th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Or we just define ourselves in being in opposition to something or someone, which can also work
October 6th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I think it is important to clarify who the “enemy” is which may help people to realise where their loyalties lie? So many teachers are easily convinced that large entities are helping rather than hindering and do not realise what a pernicious influence they have on a global scale, or how the system links together. And it is important to define what issues tie us as educators together despite all our differences, which includes asking deeper and more difficult questions.
‘EFL’ started as an artificial construct in universities as a way of justifying the huge expansion post WW2 – it is now undoutedly a real entity with real people working in it at every level.
Single issues, as you point out Alex, are never single issues. Birth Choices is taking on the private health centres, the ministry of health and the sexist ideology of child birth which dictates women’s bodies need ‘controlling’ during labour as if they are victims of an accident rather than experiencing a natural process. Oh and the fear that is indoctrinated into women from the word go about the process of birth itself. Oh and the formula milk companies who get their samples into private clinics therefore encouraging women not to breastfeed, oh and the private clinics who charge extra for private rooms if you want to have your baby with you…..it never ends!!
The starting point though is knowing that it is wrong, which leads us to ask why? These sorts of discussions are important in clarifying that.
October 7th, 2009 at 10:42 am
I’m not sure any TEFL teacher could believe that large companies are THE enemy. because the obvious contrast is with small schools, publishers etc, i.e. those most notorious for ripping off teachers and students while producing shoddy education. I’ve been known to lay into IH with the best of them, but often an IH school or a local copy (e.g. DoS is ex IH) is the best school in town for teachers and students, therefore outstripping the smaller competitors. In fact, to take a much bigger and less educationally reknown (to say the least) school, I’ve been trying to dig for dirt on EF schools in Indonesia and China since I started my blog, but it seems teachers rarely bother complaining about them because they know local schools are even worse. Ditto with publishers- some of the worst books and worst paid writers come out of smaller publishers
October 9th, 2009 at 2:53 am
Interesting interview with a Tower Hamlets striker
http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/lessons-of-the-tower-hamlets-esol-strike/