Ken Wilson recently started a blog. Ken is pretty well-known for his work with music and drama in English Language Teaching and (more recently) some pretty darn fine coursebook series like Smart Choice from OUP. You can see his new blog here.
Ken is pretty active on Twitter, and I recall him mentioning there that he was slightly worried about starting a blog because it was going to be basically about him and his life. Myself and a host of other Tweeters assured him that was a better reason than most for starting a blog, and away with it he went.
Okay, so what? I hear you mutter. Why am I dedicating a whole post on my own blog telling you about Ken Wilson's new blog?
Well, for a start, Ken is a fascinating and lively person with a positively uplifting attitude to not only ELT but life in general. He is entertaining in that "drama-guy" way I recall from my own Year 12 days when the local drama teacher took over our VCE English Literature class and transformed it from a sleepy, dusty, lifeless class to one full of energy and all sorts of rich revelations.
However, it's not just that. I really like the way Ken is dedicating his blog to a rich account of his many experiences within the ELT field. Reading his post about how it all started for him, I got a rich insight into what ELT was like in 1968 (four years before I was even born), which reminded me of what I love about chats with Andrew Wright - another veteran from the early days of modern ELT (great interview with Andrew coming to this blog soon, by the way!).
These sorts of personal accounts of the 60s, 70s and 80s and what ELT was like in those times fascinate me endlessly. Call it a personal fondness for history or the feeling that in order to know better where we are and where we might end up going, we need to not only know but feel where and how things have been before. Young EFL teachers these days tend to get a very sanitized and (I daresay) very generalized account of what happened in our field in the past, generally through short paragraphs in methodology books quickly describing "designer methods of the 70s" or something like that. While I understand the space and genre limitations of these books, I can't help feeling that the decades leading up to now have been grossly summarized. Worse than that, they are portrayed in a way that is almost as black and white as the text that summarizes it.
That's where blogs like Ken's really help to fill out the picture more and add things like color and movement. In our field, we're lucky enough to have many veterans like Ken who are still very much alive and very happy to talk to new generations of English teachers (and some who even manage to keep up with or even ahead of the current generation!). I wish more of them would write blogs in the style Ken has - unrestrained, full of characters, settings, descriptions, and a very personal take on it all. It does his experience and the times he was a child of a lot more justice than he probably realizes, and inspires new generations of teachers in ways he probably never thought possible.
Plus it's just cool to see what these people looked like when they actually had hair!
:-)
