Skip to main content

Personality and Context Follow-up

Last week, I quickly finished Rita Carter's book that inspired the previous post.  Although I found the first half of the book informative and inspiring, I was disappointed in the second half, which functioned more like a self-help book of getting in touch with your other personalities.  As an advocate of the skeptical movement, this half of the book rubbed me the wrong way.  It reminded me of plotting my astrological star chart, which I used to do in my undergraduate years.  Granted, there is much more science behind Carter's guidance than astrology.  However, she urged her readers about the fuzziness in implementing and interpreting personality tests like the Big Five Personality Traits (OCEAN) Test in the first half of the book.

I suspended my disbelief and took the test here for each of the roles I play in my life from father to PhD candidate to friend.  Most of this exercise confirmed what I already believed, but I learned that I could not pin down one specific personality for the role of teacher.  As I stated in my previous post, my teaching personality depends so much on the context of the schooling and the culture in and immediately outside the classroom.  I believe what drove me to read this text was to discover either my core teaching personality, which I'm not sure I or anyone has, or my various teaching personalities, which I learned are not as fully developed as many of my other personalities.  What makes it harder is that I am not currently teaching, so I have several teaching contexts to reflect upon.  So although I enjoyed taking a different perspective on teacher dispositions, I was disappointed with the book as a whole.  It really is only half a book.

So what?
It seems to me that a teaching philosophy is more of a constant than a teaching personality.  Perhaps for some teachers they are nearly the same as in being a kind and friendly teacher.  However, I argue that how we exhibit kindness and affability depends on the context.  Perhaps my experiences have made me more aware of this as I have found that eye contact, smiles, and laughter can carry different meanings across different cultures.  This is something I'd like to investigate more closely.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is Wikipedia Too Difficult to Read?

Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afghan_man_reading_Wikipedia_article_in_Kandahar.jpg The short answer via statistical analysis is yes .  For more information, read  Lucassen, T., Dijkstra, R., & Schraagen, J. M. (2012). Readability of Wikipedia.  First Monday at   http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3916/3297 .  Wikipedians are aware that the open online encyclopedia may be too difficult, and there is a discussion of its reading level at  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reading_level . Much of this discussion took place over a decade ago, but the gist is that many contributors write at or for the college level. What appeals to me most is at the end of the page, where Wikipedians are discussing accessibility and what it means to be open to all. Here's my screenshot (in case it gets edited later). What does this mean for English language teachers? I was interested in seeing how selected Wikipedia articles range according to

Adrian Holliday

In January 2015, the University of Warwick (UK) hosted a lecture by Dr. Adrian Holliday, whose work has greatly influenced my dissertation.  The lecture was recorded and can be viewed at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/groups/llta/activities/events/holliday .  If you are interested in watching the video, I advise that you wear headphones as Dr. Holliday was not wearing a microphone.   For this blog, I briefly summarize the video, highlighting what I found most provocative.  Following that, I explain how Holliday's work has influenced my research and teaching philosophy for the past 5-10 years. Summary of "Revisiting appropriate methodology, BANA, TESEP and 'contexts'" The main purpose of this lecture was for Holliday to reflect upon his book Appropriate Methodology and Social Context , published 20 years ago by Cambridge University Press.  In this lecture, he integrated criticism from another professor whose research I admire, Dr. Suresh Cana

TESOL Job Market Trends 2009-2018

I have been tracking full-time TESOL jobs since Fall 2009, my first year as a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa. Back then, the job market was quite bad because of the 2008 economic crisis. My motivation for tracking jobs was to help my future TESOL students understand the market. This was based on colleagues asking about good locations to live and work. I had hunches but not enough data, and now I have almost a decade of data. What did I track?  In Fall 2009, I started tracking TESOL job announcements from HigherEdJobs.com and the TESOL Career Center for tenure and non-tenure professorships in universities and community colleges. In 2010, I expanded my tracking to include instructor positions at universities (mainly intensive English programs) and "other" jobs, which used to be mainly governmental, non-profit, and publishing jobs. But now they are predominantly in the for-profit higher education ELT industry, including corporations like Shorelight and INTO. In 201