From Ann Walker, President 2009-2010

As my first duty as your new President for KATESOL, I would like to welcome all of you to our website. I hope it will provide you with the information you are searching for or a connection with someone in our organization that will be able to assist you.
Secondly, I’d like to thank our out-going board members: President — Nicole Guerrero Foster, who is now our Second Vice President, Second Vice President — Dr. Abdelilah Salim Sehlaoui and Member-at-Large for Eastern Kansas – Jennifer Bingham for their tireless work and effort at keeping our organization running.
To our 2009-2010 Executive Board, we are delighted to add Kimberley Kreicker, as First Vice President and Melanie McQueen, as Member-at-Large for Eastern Kansas and Andrea Fisher, Member-at-Large for the Northwest)
I would like to introduce myself, how I got too this point in my career and a little about my family.
My first career was Bilingual Secretary. I studied Business Administration and Spanish at Pittsburg State University. Through a study abroad program offered at the University of Kansas, I went to the Universidad de San Jose, Costa Rica for one semester to better develop my ability and confidence with my second language, Spanish. I stayed in Costa Rica, married, worked as an administrative assistant for businesses in bridge construction, railway construction and shipping. My oldest daughter, Ellyn Rebeca, was born in Costa Rica.
My family and I returned to the United States in 1981. It wasn’t until the summer of 1998 that my life changed once again when I went to enroll my youngest child in first grade.
A family entered the library and were handed the many documents required for enrollment. It was an overwhelming task for them as they didn’t speak any English. I offered to help them through the documents with my very rusty Spanish. When I asked the principal if there was any kind of job in the district where I could use my Spanish, it opened that very important door of opportunity. I was eventually hired as an ESOL paraprofessional and worked with K-5 for three years at Slate Creek Elementary School in Newton. Upon visiting Irving Elementary School in Wichita, which was a bilingual K-2 school at the time, I remarked that I was too old to go back to college. A kindergarten teacher passing by heard my comment and told me, “If I can do it, you can, too!”
I attended my first TESOL Convention in St. Louis as a paraprofessional and was hooked. The following summer, I began to study for my second career with a double major in Elementary Education and Spanish and certification in ESOL and Bilingual Education.
This is my fifth year as an ESOL teacher and my fourth year at Cloud Elementary School in Wichita. We have 627 English Language Learners at our school out of 867 students. One of the things I truly enjoy is providing bilingual communication between the staff, the students and the parents at my school.
In the professional circle, I have been a member of the WSU TESOL Advisory Council since I graduated from WSU in 2003. I am a member of KATESOL, MIDTESOL and TESOL. In May of last year, I was chosen to be a member of the PRAXIS ESOL National Advisory Committee (at ETS/Praxis, Princeton, New Jersey) with 12 other ESOL professionals from as far away as Hawaii and the Virgin Islands and 10 states in the continental U.S. It was an extremely interesting project to be a part of.
I live in Newton, Kansas with my husband of nineteen years. We have five children together. Three of our children are now married and this year we became grandparents in the summer – twice! I love reading and international backgammon whenever my time permits which is usually summer.
I love what I do! Being an ESOL teacher is the most interesting, challenging, and awe-inspiring job in education. It’s a growing field, certainly in our state. I’ve worked with students for eleven years as a paraprofessional, an education major and now as a teacher and everyday is brand-new. I really enjoy the workshops, conferences and conventions. Talking with people in my field energizes me to new levels every time. That is why, I hope, you will enjoy your 2009-2010 year with KATESOL
Sincerely,
Ann Elaine Walker,
KATESOL President (2009-2010)

From Dr. Sehloui, President (2007-2008)

First of all I would like to thank the KATESOL members for trusting me with such great responsibility, i.e., to build on the previous successes and move the profession of TESOL in the state of Kansas forward. I would also like to congratulate KATESOL on completing a quarter of a century of great achievements. HAPPY 25^th BIRTHDAY KATESOL !! During all these years, KATESOL members have actively been committed to advancing education and training, developing standards and good practices in the field, supporting the development of theory and research so that a common disciplinary base can be established, and working as advocates for English Language learners to influence broader communities in ways that are positive. As I mentioned in our last meeting during the 2007 KATESOL Pre-Institute, we will do our best to continue the tradition and serve to the best of our abilities. In this message, I would like to welcome all of you and share with you some thoughts from my praxis as a TESOL professional. I will conclude with the input that I gained from KATESOL members at the Wichita meeting which will serve as guiding goals for me during the year 2007-2008. Of course, I trust that through our common vision, as a learning organization, KATESOL will continue to grow, set new goals, and achieve more excellence.

After my twenty two years of full-time ESOL teaching experience at secondary, elementary, and TESOL teacher education at college levels in various contexts, and active reflection on that practice, what I have come to understand thus far is not easy to put down in a few insights. It is even more difficult to characterize in a phrase, in part because my ideas and my practice have undergone such continuing, thorough, and fundamental changes over these long years, and because those changes continue to happen as long as I live. But there are some strands that, based on reflection (in the sense explained in Howard Gardner’s (1997) book Extraordinary Minds), have wound their way consistently through my thinking and my practice. Furthermore, discovering the power of ideas drawn from the field of TESOL teacher education, linguistics, applied linguistics, from child/human development and psychology, curriculum and instruction praxis, from research on cross-cultural communication and multicultural education, from theory and practice in computer-assisted instruction, from empirical studies in second/foreign language acquisition, from teacher education and supervision, has led me to the conviction that…

• Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reconstruct the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life.
• I always have to be exploring alternative ways to serve my learners and learn as my teaching becomes learning in the process of exploration.
• How we learn language does not change in principle from the time we start learning, as infants, to use language to be persons in families, to the time we’re learning, as adults, to use language to be persons as members of professional communities and the larger society. So, use, authentic communication, and students’ needs (cognitive, affective, linguistic, and social) should form the basis of our teaching.
• A richly developed literacy (both native language and second language) is the most important tool for thinking, reflecting, creating a culture of knowledge and being part of that culture of knowledge. For me, literacy should be defined as an individual’s ability to read, write, listen, speak, view, compute, and represent visually information at levels of proficiency that are appropriate to achieve one’s goals and develop one’s potential and knowledge, including knowledge, understanding, appreciation, and respect of other cultures.
• Based on my own experience as well as research findings and evidence from all over the world, knowing only one language and only one cultural communication pattern is a handicap. Multilingual and multicultural education is a natural human asset to any society. It’s a resource among other resources. It must be explored, supported, and preserved.
• Education is cross-cultural and multi-cultural by nature, since every human being is culturally unique. This means that teachers must possess a high level of cross-cultural communicative competence and should help their learners develop such competence as well. The need for cross-cultural communicative competence in our information age is crucial due to the technological advances of telecommunication in our global village, the global challenges, and the ever-changing demographics of our society. From a critical perspective, I advocate the empowerment of students by assuring the equal representation of the cultures of a given classroom in its curriculum and by detecting and eliminating the hegemonic practices of schooling of all kinds. Multicultural education is NOT the annual celebration of an ethnic group’s foods and music or achievements only and then forget about them when it comes to the day-to-day school curriculum and instruction. Multicultural education goes beyond the heroes and holidays approach to incorporate and celebrate all contributors and explorers from various cultures, especially the ones that made a great impact on how we think and use information. How many of us took Algebra? Algorithm ? Many, all! How many know the names behind such math concepts? Do we actually give credit to these great contributors and explorers from various cultures? When ELLs, especially if they belong to that culture, see the names of such contributors to human civilization, they feel good about themselves and learn better.
• Culture is first a dynamic process. It is a struggle over meaning and representation and having one’s voice heard.
• In our era of accountability, I believe in the rural proverb that says “You can’t fatten a hog by weighing it”. When it comes to the assessment of English Language learners (an all students) triangulation is the key (i.,e., use of multiple sources of assessment data). Relying on standardized test scores ONLY to make decisions is dangerous and goes against any scientific method and best practices in the field of education. I believe in positive backwash where teaching, testing, assessment, and evaluation serve learning. I believe that we can learn a great deal from the story of the six blind men and the elephant in this area.
• My ultimate goal has always been to help educators and future educators in the field of TESOL to develop their language of critique and language of possibility (Giroux, 1992). Being a firm advocator of critical pedagogy, I believe teachers must be able to defend and explain their practices using critical and appropriate TESOL pedagogical approaches, methods, techniques and procedures (speaking the language of critique). They must know their stuff. They also need to speak the language of possibility, that is, to bring about change for the better in their classrooms and communities. I believe that developing critical thinking skills become useless unless we move that step further when we speak the language of possibility.

To conclude this brief description of my praxis, I can say that extraordinary work is the result of experiences that unfold over years. The crucial components one needs for extraordinary work cannot be acquired in just a few days spent in a workshop or seminar session. Sustained effort, according to Gardner (1997), is crucial for normal individuals to master what they do and become experts. This echoes a statement made by Clair (1998) in the TESOL Quarterly: “One-shot workshops and prepackaged seminars, although potentially effective for creating awareness and building discrete skills, are insufficient for facilitating teacher collaboration and change” (p. 466). Thus, I keep reminding myself and my colleagues to set appropriate goals for outcomes we want to achieve as we continue to participate in TESOL professional development activities and follow-up with our audiences and speakers to keep the learning process going.

We should continue to seek opportunities to learn from and share our experiences with each other to improve our profession. During our brief meeting in Wichita, some members expressed the need for more regional workshops and making KATESOL an organization that promotes more collegiality. I also shared with them an idea that can bring us even closer to each other. I discussed it with Mr. Robb Scott, our webmaster and one of the most active members, who was very supportive and encourages us to think about developing or improving the organization’s website where KATESOL members can login to this portal and find resources, professional development opportunities, and any up-to-date relevant information. I believe these goals can be done if more collaboration and cooperation among KATESOL members is achieved. Let’s learn from the story of the six blind men and the elephant where the inadequacy of natural reason becomes most evident.

I look forward to a fruitful year and another great conference in the spring semester. Thank you and please join us and encourage more colleagues to join our mission to serve as a community of learners, educators, and advocates of English Language Learners.

Sincerely,
Abdelilah Salim Sehlaoui,
KATESOL President (2007-2008)

---

Clair, N. (1998). Teacher study groups: Persistent questions in a promising approach. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 465-492.Gardner, H. (1997). Extraordinary minds. New York: Harper Collins.

Gardner, H. (1997). Extraordinary minds. New York: Harper Collins.

Giroux, H. (1992). Critical literacy and student experience: Donald Graves’ approach to literacy. In P. Shannon (Ed.). Becoming political: Readings and writings in the politics of education. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

John Godfrey Saxe’s ( 1816-1887) version of the famous six blind men story, available at: http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/1/?letter=B&spage=3.

Sehlaoui, A. S. (2001). Developing Cross-cultural Communicative Competence via Computer-Assisted Language Learning: The Case of Preservice ESL/EFL Teachers, The Association of Learning Technology Journal, Vol 9 (3) 2001.

Sehlaoui, A. S. (2001). Developing Cross-cultural Communicative Competence in Preservice ESL/EFL Teachers: A Critical Perspective Language, Culture, and Curriculum Journal, Vol. 14:1, 2001.

Sehlaoui, A. S. (2001). Facing the Challenge of Teaching and Learning EFL Reading: Beyond The Language of Critique, Reading in a Foreign Language Journal, Vol 13 (2) 2001.