Autobiographical and Theoretical Perspectives on URL DOI...明治大学教養論集通巻527号 (2017• 9) pp. 43-71 Autobiographical and Theoretical Perspectives on Schooling and

Meiji University

　

TitleAutobiographical and Theoretical Perspectives on

Schooling and “Integrational Global” Education

Author(s) マーク,ケヴイン

Citation 明治大学教養論集, 527: 43-71

URL http://hdl.handle.net/10291/19142

Rights

Issue Date 2017-09-30

Text version publisher

Type Departmental Bulletin Paper

DOI

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　https://m-repo.lib.meiji.ac.jp/

明治大学教養論集通巻527号

(2017• 9) pp. 43-71

Autobiographical and

Theoretical Perspectives

on Schooling and

"lntegrational Global" Education

Kevin Mark

Growth is the movement of a whole towards a yet fuller wholeness. Living things start with this wholeness from the beginning of their career. A child has its own perfection as a child; it would be ugly if it appeared as an unfinished man. Life is a continual process of synthesis, and not of additions. Our activi-ties of production and enjoyment of wealth attain that spirit of wholeness when they are blended with a creative ideal. Otherwise they have the insane aspect of the eternally unfinished; they become like locomotive engines which have rail-way lines but no stations; which rush on towards a collision of uncontrolled forces or to a sudden breakdown of the overstrained machinery.

Rabindranath Tagore Essay on Creative Unity

I. Introduction: Why Memories?

People close to me tell me that I have a very good memory for the de-

tails of experiences we have shared in the distant past. I am going to

offer here a number of anecdotal "kernel" memories, and try to use them

as an illuminating backdrop to my professional thinking and projects.

I am sure that the objective aspects of many of my remembered experi-

ences are distorted now by distance, by the lens of my present pre。

occupations and emotions, by family lore or simply by self-deception.

There are also certain vividly recalled experiences that I feel confident

- with a confidence for which I can offer no reasonable justification -

44 明治大学教養論集通巻527号 (2017•9)

are objectively intact.

But even if they are not objectively reliable they are valid for the

communicative use to which I intend to put them here. They are close

in some ways to what some people might call "learning moments," but

in the case of each of the personal and professional experiences re-

counted here -I am going to call them "kernel memories" -the learn-

ing may or may not have been consciously taken in and understood at

the time. In my own inner universe these are archetypes of a kind that

help me to understand how I think, how I see my past, my present self

and my aspirations.

They can also be a tool here to enable me to communicate more

concisely, suggestively and memorably (for the reader) than might be

the case were I to present my thinking in a more conventional academic

manner. But it sh叫 dbe kept in mind that the experiences recounted

here are really only a very selective smattering of a much wider range

of educational experiences which I intend to make use of in one or more

future publications. Indeed, in putting together this paper I have real-

ized that autobiographical reflections lend themselves very well to help-

ing me to better identify and articulate the inter-connectedness of

interests that have led me to work across disciplinary boundaries, and

which have made it difficult for me to find firm support within any one

of the multiple fields that I have worked in.

II. What is my field?

It may be surprising for someone of my age and experience to con-

fess to difficulty in positioning himself academically. With long experi-

ence now and hopefully some maturity, I can see that when I first came

to work in Japan I was embarking on a process of synthesis. I have

always understood that I was challenging myself to work innovatively,

with equal emphasis on both theoretical and practical levels, and in a

conservative educational and cultural context. But it has taken me a

long time to see clearly the full implications of what I want to do prac-

tically, which is to create a working prototype or set of exemplars of

Autobiographical and Theoretical Perspectives on Schooling and "Integrational Global" Education 45

what I have been calling a global education approach (in the light of

current usage of the word "global" it is perhaps now better to use

"integrational global education") to university English education in

Japan. These unseen implications were:

1. that I would have to go deeply into a number of specialized

fields within the relatively new but very rapidly growing fields

of TESOL and Applied Linguistics (AL);

2. that I needed to theoretically relate these fields to each other,

with reference to the overarching philosophy of education that

I had already identified;

3. that point 2 above was of little interest to most people con-

cerned with TESOL and AL, the two fields where I could most

reasonably expect to find support for and understanding of my

work;

4. that one major reason for point 3 is that the professional cli-

mate is overwhelmingly one where ever greater specialization

and establishment of expertise within a particular sub-field is

the quickest route to career advancement;

5. that it would take twenty or more years for TESOL and AL to

begin to become friendly to the integrational ideas which I

have been advancing.

AL is in itself a field that is splintered into many highly specialized

sub-fields, and as de Bot acknowledges in his refreshingly honest and

eminently helpful history of applied linguistics, the field is both dis-

persed and lacking in coordinating principles.

There does not seem to be a common core of publications that de-

fine the field. Whether this is a specific problem for AL, I do not

know. A similar survey to the one reported on here among psy-

chologists or cultural anthropologists is likely to show an equally

disparate pattern. It may be a natural tendency of disciplines to

fractionize and reassemble parts of the old discipline into new coa-

litions. (de Bot 2015)

46 明治大学教養論集通巻527号 (2017• 9)

From de Bat's point of view, there has already been a "reassembl-

ing" paradigm shift within the highly scientific, technical and specializ-

ed field of second language acquisition, and this has come from apply-

ing insights from the sciences to do with complexity theory, introduced

to AL by Diane Larsen-Freeman (Larsen-Freeman 1997). In a more

recent exposition of how chaos and complexity theory relates to lan-

guage learning and teaching, Larsen-Freeman (Larsen-Freeman 2015)

astutely derives three relevant principles for teaching. All three have

been articulated in my own work over the past twenty years, albeit

presented differently. They are

Iteration v Repetition

Input v Affordance

Teaching Language v Teaching Learners

The first of these distinctions comes from a need to distinguish mean-

ingful and meaningless repetition and to replace the latter with the

former. My work on Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) and

on a wide variety of techniques to do with language chunks (Mark,

2014, 2015, 2017) that is represented as Field 5 in Figure I, has stemmed

from the recognition that one of the central problems of language teach-

ing materials design has been the question of how to provide learners

with multiple opportunities to notice and practice forms without their

feeling that they are being mindlessly drilled. I have often called this

"recycling" language. My work in these areas has also emerged as a

solution to the problem that we cannot consider everything put in front

of learners as "input," but we can, through the use of materials and tech-

niques designed for this task, plan for the provision ("affordance") of

maximal opportunities for input. When I first came to Japan my start-

ing point was how to reconcile the existing language theorizing para-

digm of the day -communicative language teaching -with the needs

of the people in front of me, and I articulated this problem in the first

paper I ever published (Mark, 1987). If it is reasonable to take Larsen-

Freeman as a representative of leadership in TESOL and AL, then she

is helping to synthesize these fields in a direction that I have been going

in from the beginning, but very much on the ground rather than from

Autobiographical and Theoretical Perspectives on Schooling and "lntegrational Global" Education 4 7

the perspective of academic authority.

A map

Collectively the reflections presented here are a kind of strategic

map, the making of which is of immediate benefit to me as I identify

areas of weakness and strength, problems and opportunities. Hopefully

they may also indirectly help a number of colleagues, within and out-

side of the university, to gain insight into or understand a little better

their own projects.

Figure I summarizes my own description of what I have been try-

ing to do (on the left of the diagram), and a depiction of the sub-fields

of TESOL and AL to which I have tried to refer for help and in which

I have published. My depiction of the fields is of course highly subjec-

tive, as I have selected only those that seem most relevant to my work.

I have presented TESOL and AL as overlapping, with sub-fields that are

placed on the diagram in such a way as to show their proximity to each

other as fields. The white clusters are those areas of TESOL that are

closest to my own overall project. The numbering indicates areas in

which I have done extensive work and published, in approximate

chronological order. In the case of Field 2 I have joined, for the sake of

visual simplicity and because they are closely related, "Global Issues,"

℃ ontent" and "English Medium Instruction." In two of the established

fields (global issues in language teaching and learner corpus develop-

ment and exploitation) I was an early pioneer but quickly found myself

out of step with colleagues who saw a need for specialization, while I

was working on synthesis. In the case of global issues, I felt it impor-

tant from the beginning to infuse global awareness into an educational

curriculum in a much more subtle way than to primarily disseminate

information and overtly promote activism. In the case of learner corpus

work I saw, from the beginning, an opportunity to integrate develop-

ment of corpora with on-the-ground teaching, to make use of learner

corpora in teaching materials and also to use learner corpora for better

understanding the mindsets of learners: their attitudes, interests, feel-

ings and ways of thinking. Only the second of these has emerged from

SIS PE, ,Tl 48

逗爺汁巾f姪琺器洪

告幣527~(2017·9)

Figure 1

Numbered areas indicate my research focus in approximate chronological order


learner corpus work, and to my mind in a very limited way: one which

simply fits into the prevailing atomistic and top-down "funneled deli-

very" of information and authority-based educational paradigm.

Because my learner corpus work was very explicit about the

integrational potential of this field, Figure 2 shows a link with the heart

of the integrational project that I am working on. At conferences where

I presented on learner corpora I received personal encouragement from

distinguished figures in the field of language teaching, notably the late

Chris Brumfit and the late Dave Willis, who were sufficiently thought-

ful, experienced and integrational in their own thinking to sense the

potential of what I was presenting about.

In all of the academic fields numbered in Figure 1 I have published

innovative work. The innovation has stemmed naturally from the fact

that I have been working from my experience within Meiji University,

and the problems as I have been able to define them in this context,

rather than from academic authority. The fact that the work has been

so contextualized and at the same time very broadly synthetic on a

theoretical level has made it very hard to express myself internationally

within TESOL and AL, at least in terms of international publications, or

indeed to get substantial help from these fields. A very modest break-

through was made in 2013 when my work on jumbled chunks or

"Junks" (Mark, 2013) was awarded the prize for the best poster presen-

tation at the annual conference of the British Association for Applied

linguistics BAAL). The significance of this for me was that I had finally

established a bridge -albeit a shaky one that needs strengthening -

between what I have been working in my own localized context and an

international audience. One of the reasons the judges gave for award-

ing the prize was the difficulty of the material I was working with. But

the difficulty they referred to was internal to the sub-fields of AL, and

did not take into account the project of theoretically articulating Junks

within the overall integrational project!

Our retired colleague Masanao Ikeuchi encouraged me, when I first

joined Meiji University in 1991, to further develop this integrational

approach to curriculum. I know, however, that it was hard for him and


for other colleagues to understand what I have been trying to do. At

any one point in the 26 years that I have been conceptualizing and prac-

tically developing an integrational global education approach to lan-

guage teaching within Meiji University, I have appeared to be working

- usually frenetically and over-ambitiously - on one of the projects

outlined above without the clear map that I am only now able to pro-

vide, benefitting from maturity and the experience of having created

solid exemplars. Something not depicted in Figure 2, that I should men-

tion, was my collaboration with the late Professor Philip Zitowitz in

making a sustained and serious attempt to integrate drama into the

curriculum in a way that embodied the educational principles here.

All of these apparently disparate projects are actually expressive of

an as yet inadequately articulated educational vision: a whole that ex-

ceeds the sum of its different parts. It is summarized in the three black

circles at the left of Figure 1. The central research question has always

been: "How can individual teachers, teacher/researchers and learners

thrive in & recreate a mass education environment?" Permeating this

vision is an orientation that is not explicitly explored in this paper: that

one of the keys to improved education is not so much an emphasis on

teachers teaching more efficiently, but rather on teachers feeling freer

to be themselves and to work in a way that they feel brings out the best

in them as teacher-researchers.

In a large mainstream institution such as the one we are currently

working in this would entail having two parallel tracks. One of these

tracks would be a kind of self-access system for learners working indi-

vidually and in small groups, following a teaching program that is

highly organized and systematic while also flexible and conducive to

creativity and responsive to learner input. This self-study system

would incorporate materials designed to have not only a language

teaching function but also to introduce learners, in English, to introduc-

tory aspects of politics, economics and social issues in general. English

Medium Instruction (EMI) is doubtless a direction in which universities

are trending and something that is going to be increasingly called for.

If we are to go in this direction on a scale beyond a small number of


students taking special classes given by scholars whose usual working

language is English and who are not called on to perform a language

teaching role, then we are going to need some kind of transitional

bridge. Otherwise there will be personal and institutional trauma. This

bridge w叫 dstand between the kind of language study that currently

prevails and participation in authentic university level content classes

that are not geared toward language learning. A self-access system can

be used in this transitional role while also being used to raise the lower

end of an institution's ability range.

The second parallel track would be one that allows teachers to offer

elective English courses that are largely of their own choosing. And,

because so many hours of instruction could be covered by individual

and self-access work (administratively but not necessarily physically

within a large class structure) much smaller class groups would be

possible than without the self-study system. By reducing class sizes

and encouraging teachers to do what they feel most qualified and com-

fortable doing, this kind of curriculum structure would increase oppor-

tunities for meaningful communication between students and teachers.

III. Macro Principles for SCHOOL and "Curriculum"

On the macro-level this is a mix of System on the one hand and,

humorously and in a tongue-in-cheek way, Chaos on the other, with

these two seemingly irreconcilable opposites being reconciled by Heart.

Of course they are reminiscent of the famous motto of the French Revo-

lution (Figure 1). These words allow me to make use of the acronym

SCHOOL to express the dynamic approach to curriculum that I am pro-

posing. Heart can be thought in terms of collegiality, conviviality and

a generally happy, tolerant and harmonious workplace. The last three

letters of SCHOOL can be applied as the words Organized Opportunities

for Learning. The word "learning" largely speaks for itself, but it is

important to point out that it gives a different emphasis than there

would be if were replaced by Teaching or Instruction. Its inclusion

implies an understanding that it is more productive to focus on what is

52 明l台大学教挫論集通巻527号 (2017 • 9)

actually learned that to pretend that what is taught equates with what

is learned. The words "organized opportunities" hark back to the dis-

cussion above of affordance in Larsen-Freeman's work, and express the

concept that we cannot predict accurately, with a group of learners,

what learning exactly will take place, or when it will take place. We

can, however, create conditions where desirable learning of a specific

kind is more likely to take place than would be the case without

thoughtful attention to ensuring that those conditions are present.

Curriculum conceived as I have presented it here is not the one-

dimensional, "additive" list that typically figures in university discus-

sions of what needs to be or what can be taught. Rather it is a conscious

facilitation of conditions for learning, a deliberate cooking or fusing

together of different ingredients that interact with each other. And

among the essential conditions are the minimization of coercion, allow-

ing learners to go at their own pace, the maximization of learner respon-

sibility for learning and an emphasis on faculty feeling comfortable.

This approach can also be called integrational global in that language

learning is not seen as separate from other types of learning, and that

there is an emphasis on encouraging people to be and express them-

selves as they are. We are human beings first, teachers and learners

second.

「＼ーat Fr

Liberte ’ Egalite

Heart

・/ ¥ Chaos System

Figure 2 Reconciling incompatible opposites: educational application of a familiar formula

System C坦_g_sHeart Organized Opportunities for Learning

Macro Principles for (real) SCHOOL


IV. Kernel Memories

A series of anecdotes to illustrate aspects of the

difference between "real School" (education) and "schooling"

The following are the selection of what I am calling "kernel" memo-

ries that are designed to elucidate and give flesh to the skeletal ideas

just outlined. It is of course a more personal, holistic and human per-

spective than is usually the case with an academic discussion of educa-

tion. I think, however, that these anecdotes may help the reader to

better understand what I have been expressing above. I will, in the

course of recounting these, refer to "schooling" or being "schooled."

When I do so, it will be the opposite to the kind of experience that I

believe represents real education. While I have found the "deschool-

ing" work of Ivan Illich (1971) and John Holt (1964, 1967) to be ex-

tremely helpful and illuminating, my own sense is to not give up hope

on established education systems. I believe that existing institutions

can be revitalized by the people within them. What is needed is hon-

esty, openness to new possibilities, clarity, courage and, last but not

least, a sense of humor. Speaking as someone who has been persistent

in the face of as many mistakes, personal overreaching, failures, misun-

derstandings and obstructions as I have, I do not choose my words

lightly. Notice, in passing, how rare such a "whole person" statement is

in the literature of applied linguistics.

Kernel Memory I: The spoon and the cereal bowl

This was probably before my third birthday. My mother had

served me breakfast at my high chair in the kitchen. Sensing an oppor-

tunity for more fun than the usual breakfast routine, I deliberately let

my spoon fall to the floor. My mother patiently knelt down to pick it

up, just close enough to enable me to place the upturned cereal bowl on

top of her head, on which it rested perfectly. For me it was a moment

of pure joy. With milk and cereal running through her hair and down

her cheeks, her face was a motionless time-frozen picture of someone


totally at a loss for words: a feeling not so much shock or irritation as

what in today's digital language is expressed as "wtf." There was also

the question "how did I just fall for a trick from a two-year-old?" And,

transcending these and no doubt surprising her, was the shared joy of

the moment.

Expressions of interest and enthusiasm for the field of education

are often met with an invisible rolling of the eyes. Just as I (uncon-

sciously) thought breakfast didn't have to be the routine that it was

becoming, I consciously want to share with colleagues a sense of the

potential for our work to be infused with a lot more fun than it cur-

rently is.

Kernel Memory 2: Kwajalein

This is really a set of experiences rather than a single archetypal

memory. My experience of kindergarten and the first two months of

first grade was on the tiny island of Kwajalein, then a US Navy base in

the Marshall Islands. Playing outdoors from morning till night, with

the ever-present sound of the surf and unforgettable sunsets at the end

of each day, we were close to nature. We were also reminded daily of

the war and the fierce fighting that had taken place on the island only

twelve years earlier. It was a common occurrence to find used bullets

on the ground, and we were warned to stay away from the large mound

behind our house because it was felt that it might contain unexploded

ordinance. There was also an atmospheric torii and a Japanese ceme-

tery at one end of the island. K wajalein was my first inkling of the

existence of Japan, and close enough to Japan to make it possible for us

to have a three-week family vacation in Japan -a vacation that was so

intriguing for my parents that my father submitted a (successful) re-

quest for his next posting to be in Japan.

As children we were not so aware of the darkness of nuclear testing

which was also taking place. My father had been given the task of

supervising the rebuilding of homes in the island of Rongelap and the

proud and well-intentioned repatriation of the islanders to their beauti-

ful new homes and church after one of the nuclear tests in the region.


I found out later, as an adult, that the islanders had been returned to

their home disastrously early: many suffered and died unnecessarily

from radiation-related illnesses. I only saw pictures of the new homes

on Rongelap - which was at a safe distance from Kwajalein - but I

knew that they were in stark contrast to the distressed shanty town

conditions on Ebeye, the nearest island to ours, and one which was only

inhabited by Marshallese, some of whom were ferried three miles across

the water every day to work in our homes or to work in other menial

jobs for the Navy.

By the time my family moved to Japan in October 1957, the year's

stay in Kwajalein had given me an experience of carefree days outdoors

in a glorious natural setting, and a sense of excitement about travel as

I went to sleep each night to the gentle pulsating drone of slow-moving

propeller aircraft flying off into the night to a destination I could only

imagine. The year there had also planted in me the seeds of an aware-

ness of ethnic and cultural diversity, social injustice; and, through my

father's work on Rongelap, it had connected me personally, albeit with-

out a sense of guilt or responsibility, to the misdeeds of government.

My interest in the field of global issues in language education can be

traced back to here.

In terms of school itself, I have no memory of the stress that later

came to be a constant in my experience of being schooled. But I do have

one memory that, while trivial in itself, came back to me when I first

started teaching, and has remained with me since. When accompanying

my mother on a shopping expedition to the commissary -the military

word for the small supermarket-like food store on the island - I was

impressed to see green apples on display. Until that moment I had be-

lieved that all apples are red. A day or two later, my first grade teacher

stood in front of the class and asked what color we thought apples are.

It seems that my classmates had not been privileged to visit the com-

missary as I and, presumably, my teacher had. I remember the feeling

of pride at being able to show that I knew something that my class-

mates did not know. I also feel, looking back on it now, that the teacher

was encouraging this feeling, unconsciously rewarding me in some


implicit way for enthusiastically responding to her question, for being

"right," and thereby allowing me to compare myself favorably with my

peers, some of whom probably felt slightly inferior to me as a result.

Relatively innocuous though this moment was in itself, it was my first

conscious whiff of what it means to be "schooled." There was no need

for me to feel that I was better than someone else just because I had

been exposed to green apples. There is a powerful force in the process

of "schooling" that implicitly encourages comparison with others and,

very slowly and imperceptibly, gradually usurps the simple enjoyment

of life, an enjoyment of life that does not need to be taught and is seri-

ously damaged by schooling. I know that what I learned by just play-

ing on Kwajalein was itself a rich education. It was an education that

kept my heart open and my curiosity and trust strong and alive. Little

did I know that schooling was going to take me in a different direction.

Kernel Memory 3: The USS President Cleveland

Early October 1957 saw us leaving Kwajalein for Japan. A Navy

transportation vessel took us to Manila where, after a few days, we

boarded the luxury commercial liner, the USS President Cleveland. Our

first and only stop, on the way to Yokohama, was in Hong Kong. As the

ship slowly progressed with the aid of tugs from the harbor toward the

dock, there was a lot of excitement among the passengers. Swarming

around the ship were tiny boats, each carrying two men in loincloths.

They had long poles at the end of which were small bags, and were

reaching with these poles to try to get the bags as close to the passenger

rail as possible. The passengers were trying to throw coins into these

bags, but many of them were not getting there and were falling into the

water instead. So these men were diving into the water, right next to

this huge ship, to try to retrieve the coins before they were lost. It was

hugely entertaining for all of us. I don't remember anyone in my family

commenting on this, but I distinctly remember feeling that, while, I

couldn't deny that it had been fun watching this spectacle, there was

also something sick about it. Child though I was, I knew that there was

something immoral going on, and that these men were being humiliat-


ed. After seeing the squalor of Ebeye, this was my second experience of

the gap between the rich and poor, of the exploiting world and the ex-

ploited world, and another seed for the conviction that a real education

is one that helps us to see that our own consciousness (or choice to be

unconscious), our own attitudes and the way we deal with the people

and problems that we encounter in our daily lives, are at the heart of

the world condition.

The ship remained docked in Hong Kong for a couple of days, with

traditional Chinese junks crowded together close to our ship. Looking

through the porthole of our cabin I could see a family on the junk clos-

est to us. What different lives we were living! I remember one moment

when my eyes caught those of a boy, about my age, on the junk. We

looked at each other directly. I was sure he was feeling something like

me: What is this force of life that places me in this family and this other

boy in another family, with such different circumstances? The moment

of gazing at each other was a breath of knowledge. We are one, and I

knew it, deeply.

Kernel Memory 4: Coloring inside the lines

I was in Miss LaFevre's first grade class at Negishi Heights Army

school. There were no green or red apple show-off opportunities here.

Apart from a reader with pictures sufficiently interesting to render

tolerable the reading of sentences like "Look! See Jack run!", there was

one activity that we seemed to spend most of our time on. Miss

LaFevre had a mimeograph machine that enabled her to keep us stead-

ily supplied with blue ink line drawings of scenes such as a house and

surrounding trees. Our job was to use color crayons to fill in the pic-

tures. It seems that not only was my rate of production slow in this

area, but that the quality was also messy. A mid-term report card that

I discovered many years later said something like, "Kevin must learn to

keep his coloring inside the lines."

There was anguish associated with this pedagogy: whenever we

failed to complete a line drawing on time, the teacher deprived me and

a few other low producers of our recess privileges. Even within this


grim concept of education there was the potential for at least learning

how to be more efficient (for example, not pay attention to the aesthet-

ics), but I don't remember ever being told any such techniques for get-

ting the job done more quickly. I was eager to do what was asked of me.

I simply didn't know how to change my behavior. All I remember is the

exhortations to go faster, and the fear of missing the recess.

Another abiding memory of this class is that of seeing what hap-

pened to a girl who couldn't stop talking when told to do so by Miss

LaFevre, who showed her seriousness by closing the girl's mouth with

masking tape. The pain and humiliation communicated through this

little girl's eyes and her stifled sobs were truly distressing to witness,

and filled me with dread. I was being schooled.

Kernel Memory 5: Yokohama International School: another coloring

project

One good educational decision that my parents made was to re-

move my brother and me from this school. I was sent to Yokohama

International School, where the classes were much smaller and the gen-

eral level of teaching far better. Yet even in this warm and friendly

school I was being schooled. Mrs Carr, the British teacher, of our sec-

ond-grade class, had a strong background in art education, and gave us

an art project that was reasonably well conceived and interesting. As

I remember it, she wanted us to make some kind of booklet or notepad

that showed, on each page, the colors produced as a result of mixing

different colors together. Although this project was significantly differ-

ent from Miss LaFevre's line drawing production line, it was similar in

that it involved not only coloring but also a deadline. I remember being

gradually overwhelmed by a feeling of dread: "What is going to happen

if I don't make the deadline?" I remember Mrs Carr herself feeling, for

some reason, a little stressed about this deadline, and her stress was

further feeding my anxiety, which was itself no doubt stemming from

the fears born of Miss LaFevre's class.

Embodied in Memories 4 and 5 are important principles. One is that

we are human beings first, teachers and learners second. What we are


trying to achieve pedagogically at a given moment does not need to be

at the cost of diminishing someone's self-esteem. As educators we need

to understand that we are projecting the way we feel about ourselves,

and stress is an indicator that we have started to go down the wrong

road. Miss Lafevre may have been a terrible teacher, but she must also

have been damaged in her education, as was, I am sure, my British head-

master (discussed below). People who have been hurt unconsciously

hurt others, and a vicious circle is set in motion. People who are com-

fortable in themselves naturally bring out the best in other people.

Another principle is coercion. Anything in education that smacks

of coercion is, for me, inherently suspect. Whenever I have felt that I

have to make students do something, it has been in relation to some

kind of unconscious burden that I have been placing on myself, and

passing it on to a student or students has backfired. A third general

principle is that individuals are ready to learn different things at differ-

ent times, which ties in with Larsen-Freeman's AL principle of thinking

in terms of "affordance" rather than "input."

Kernel Memory 6: Mr. Badman

My first memory of Mr. Badman was when I was aged 11, a first-

year at Hampton Grammar School in England. He and the cowering

18-year-old whose face he was pummeling with two fists were in mili-

tary uniform, so it must have been a Friday, the practice day for boys

who were members of the school cadet force. Apparently this boy, who

was head of the army section (there was also an air force section), had

ordered the boys in his charge to march to the wrong part of the school

grounds. It was an intimidating sight, and every year after that I hoped

I was not going to have Mr. Badman for history.

My luck held out until I was sixteen and I had to face Ordinary

Level General Certificate of Education history with this man. The year

turned out to be as miserable as I had feared. Although "Erb," as we

referred to him (his name was Ernie R. Badman) had a reputation for

always getting all his students through history O Level, his method of

teaching was abysmal. Each 40-minute class consisted of about 25 min-


utes of him dictating notes to us, and then he would either orally and

aggressively quiz us or talk to us about how "mature" boys would know

how to think independently and use his dictated notes as a starting

point, adding their own notes to his, presumably after reading the text-

book. Looking back on these classes, I see an educational principle

clearly demonstrated by what Erb was doing. In schooling, as opposed

to education, there is often a mismatch between the processes of learn-

ing and the stated goals. In this case Erb wanted us to think for our-

selves. But his principal method was to make us spend most of our time

slavishly writing down his dictated notes. This, particularly in an at-

mosphere of fear, is the opposite of what needs to be done, as it encour-

ages anything but independent thinking.

On one particular occasion I did learn something profound in this

class. In one of the post-dictation grilling sessions. Erb chose to ask me

to answer one of his questions. I knew that I had been learning nothing.

When it was clear to Erb that I wasn't able to answer, he turned to the

rest of the class, and seemed to be almost pleased to point to me as an

example of the kind of approach to study that we needed to grow out of.

He was standing very close to my desk, and I felt fearful and humiliated.

At that moment, something deep inside of me stirred, and spoke back to

him.

"On the contrary," I said, "How can you expect me to answer you

with you making me afraid by breathing down my neck this way?"

There was a stunned hush in the room, with all the boys expecting

to see me get beaten. I was just as stunned as everyone else by what I

was doing.

Erb paused for a moment and then took a step back, shocked by my

answer. In retrospect I understand that he was in a sense "physically"

pushed back by the energy that had risen from within me. He looked at

me, literally taken aback, and not knowing how to reply. Then he

moved on as if nothing had happened. After the class I was congratu-

lated by a number of classmates, who said they were astounded by

what had happened. My status in the class had risen somewhat.

In the next class Erb tried to make a joke of it, referring to his


"quarrel with Mark" in a way that I really didn't understand. For the

remaining five months or so of the school year Erb left me alone. Al-

though he gave me a fairly good grade in the "mock" or practice exam

in March, I ended up failing history O Level that June.

The experience remains with me as a reminder of the power of my

own inner resource of self-respect. Even a "terrible student" from the

teacher's point of view deserves at all times to be treated with respect

as a human being, and made to feel that as such he or she is of a value

that far transcends whatever it is that is being taught in school.

Kernel Memory 7: "Proof"

One of the privileges of being a member of the Sixth Form at

Hampton Grammar School, a young man at the gates of adulthood, was

to be able to sit once a week, alongside all the other 240 or so sixth

formers, in the front seats of the school Hall for a two-period (80 min-

utes) discussion with the Headmaster, George Whitfield. "George," as

we called him, though never to his face, apparently believed that we

needed to be stimulated, nurtured and guided by his intellect and moral

rectitude, by means of discussion of topics that he would invite us to

suggest to him a few days before each week's discussion. This was

supposed to be an enriching opportunity for us to go beyond the exami-

nation-focused study of the three Advanced Level General Certificate of

Education subjects which we had each chosen from a range of tradi-

tional "arts" or "science" subjects.

I found much of what we talked about actually quite interesting

and even refreshing sometimes, because George was a thoughtful and

intelligent man, and because he was ready on these occasions to talk to

us in a way that showed more about him than we were able to see in

morning assemblies. But while I sensed more of his humanity, I did not

feel in these meetings that he was becoming more sensitive to ours.

These sessions weren't actually interactive "discussions." I've used

this word because this is how he himself characterized the sessions. In

fact they were 80-minute monologues, two-way discussions only in the

sense that the thinking aloud that George shared with us was based on


the questions that he found in the letter box in his office door: those

that he deemed appropriate for the coming session.

It may have happened, but I do not remember any of the boys ever

speaking during these sessions. Nor do I remember any eye contact

that made me feel that he was talking to me, even when he once spent

a long time discussing a question from me. I myself often speak to large

groups of people, and always know, from people's eyes and expressions,

that there are people with whom I am communicating on deeply per-

sonal levels, often perhaps at a non-or trans-verbal level. I sense myself

subtly acknowledging individuals too. But to acknowledge individuals

while speaking to a group was not George's style, as I remember it. He

was, however, very good at communicating fear and transferring guilt

to individuals en masse, particularly during his school assembly ad-

dresses.

At some point during my Lower Sixth year I remember experienc-

ing several periods of what would now probably be diagnosed as

depression. At one of these times I decided to place a question in

George's letter box. I had been shuffling through each moment of my

life for three weeks or so, under an adolescent cloud of doubt about the

worth of anything that I was doing. Perhaps George c叫 dsay some-

thing about this in the next discussion session. Perhaps his answering

my question would bestow value on my life.

The note that I placed in the letter box was very close to, if not

exactly these words: ℃ an you prove to me that all human effort is not

futile and ridiculous?" For a few days after the point of no return of

slipping the question into George's letter box, I fretted that he might

disapprove of my question and rebuke me for it. So when he said, at the

beginning of the next session, that he was actually going to seriously

address a "question from Mark," my heart began to pound, hard and

fast.

George had obviously given time and careful thought to my ques-

tion. His approach was to answer it, somewhat in the manner of a

model examination essay, by focusing on my use of the word "prove"

and carefully considering different meanings of the word "proof." He


talked about three kinds of proof: logical, scientific, and legal. His con-

clusion was that the topic of my question could not be addressed as a

matter that could be proven or disproven. He was, in a very circuitous

way, saying essentially that I had made a mistake and used the wrong

word. While in his terms he was impeccably addressing the words of

the question, he was failing to respond at all to its heart. The latter

would have been better expressed as: "Everything that I am trying to do

is striking me as meaningless and of no value. Can you help me?" Now

I understand that he didn't know - ordained man of God though he

was - either how to recognize or how to answer a question from a

troubled heart. As an educator and priest he should have been able to

sense the desperation behind the words. Had he been able to do so he

might have (helpfully) referred me to a psychological counsellor, or

even tried to talk to me from the heart about his Christian faith.

Here are a couple of the questions I would ask him if I now had a

chance to go back to that school Hall in 1967.

1. Sir, are you happy with your life?

2. If you are, why is it that when I am around you I always feel

afraid instead of happy?

I think he ought to be able to answer these questions honestly, on the

spot, as one human being to another. But I would nevertheless show

him respect by submitting them in advance, as he requested.

Perhaps, in the end, he was just trying to show us what it is to be

a perfect schoolboy, by submitting to us a perfect homework assign-

ment that he had worked on for a couple of days. Poor man. What he

must have gone through in his education!

Kernel Memory 8: "Difficult to prove"

Of all the subjects that I took for my Oxford degree, the new field

of general linguistics - which came late to the UK - was the most

alien to me. I was taught by Roy Harris, who not long after I studied

under him became the first Oxford Professor of General Linguistics. He

taught using a textbook that was extremely clear and logical, but was

designed for minds more mature than mine at the time. I struggled to


relate the content to my personal experience - a sine qua non of real

learning -and Harris was apparently not interested in helping me to

find ways of making the connections that I needed. His teaching was

the perfect antithesis of what I would call an educational approach. He

made me feel unimportant, and the content of the book we worked

through was high! y atomistic and linear/ sequential. Nevertheless, I

tried to engage with him, and one day asked him a question about lan-

guage that was of interest to me. I had come across an obscure Indian

idea that there is, somewhere in the past or future, an age of humanity

in which there is a single language of man. I asked him if he had heard

of this "yogic theory" as I called it. His reply was not so much uninter-

ested as curt: "It would be difficult to prove." And that was that. As

with my headmaster, "proof" seemed unable to recognize "heart."

I never felt like reading anything by Roy Harris until I stumbled on

some of his books a few years ago. I found his writing style beautiful,

completely untouched by the scientism that characterizes much of lin-

guistics and applied linguistics. Most astonishingly for me, given my

experience with him, was the discovery of the central theme of his work

(that had not yet emerged when I knew him, but which preoccupied

him from soon after I knew him till his death in 2015). His preoccupa-

tion was to be this: that the fundamental mistake of all linguistics is to

not understand that all human language is one. Without this under-

standing, he claims, there can be no truly scientific study of language.

Now, this is obviously not the place to go into a discussion of such a

highly controversial claim, but suffice it to say that the claim appears to

some, including myself, to have more practical relevance than first

meets the eye. It is certainly a claim that I will explore in depth at some

point in the future.

But what most astounded me was to see that the thinking that he

calls "integrational" is very much in tune with my own "global" educa-

tional approach. Ironically, given my first experience with him, Harris

is the only general or theoretical linguist whose work resonates with

my educational interests. As the "map" presented as Figure I indicates,

the field of "integrational linguistics" that Harris came to establish is,


ironically, almost entirely ignored by mainstream linguistics; but it is,

intriguingly reaching toward humanistic education.

One of the "morals" of this story is to do with potential: don't jump

to conclusions, and don't write people off; give them a chance to grow.

Sometimes the people who seem to be the least likely to be of interest to

one could actually turn out to be the opposite. I certainly feel this way

about Harris. I'd like to think that he would feel the same way about me

were we to have met years after our first interactions.

Kernel Memory 9: An academic passing through

It was in 1986, I think, that I attended a lecture on "The Communica-

tive Approach" in Okayama, by Dr. Keith Johnson, who was then a lec-

turer at Reading University. I remember him taking aim in the lecture

at Chomsky's language learning "black box" or "language acquisition

device" (LAD) concept, and at the attention it was garnering in applied

linguistics. In other words I remember a whiff of academic (and per-

haps transatlantic) rivalry.

Johnson was arguing that it was much more fruitful for teaching

and research to focus instead on the similarities between language

learning and the learning of a skill such as skiing. This sounded sensi-

ble to me, and the lack of academic pretension in the lecture as a whole

appealed.

After the talk I took advantage of the chance to chat with Dr. John-

son. I told him, by way of introduction, that I had been using a writing

textbook of his. He expressed mild surprise that the book had been

selling well in Asia, but I did not know how to follow through on this

point. I suspect now that its success derived from many writing teach-

ers primarily finding the book interesting for themselves, and, secon-

darily, reasonably easy to use in the classroom. I did not tell him that

I was learning more for myself about how to approach the analysis of

language for pedagogical purposes than the students seemed to be

learning by going through the exercises.

The points that stood out for me in the learners'writing as they

completed the exercises were far more numerous, varied, complex and


in need of learner attention than the list of discourse level study points

that formed, as I recall, the basis of the textbook's approach. I was start-

ing to think about, but not yet articulate, a questioning of the "one size

fits all" textbook approach.

I was also beginning to think about what I had read by Henri Holec

on the need for "learner autonomy," a topic that was the subject of my

first published paper. And this was my first inkling of how helpful it

would be for teachers and learners to have access to examples of the

language used by learners writing or speaking in response to the tasks

or exercises of a particular textbook or lesson.

Instead of discussing the textbook I asked Dr. Johnson how he felt

about my feeling that, by studying the methodology of language teach-

ing, we seem to end up as I had, not trusting our own intuition suffi-

ciently as a tool for responding with appropriate flexibility to students

within an overall coherent "system" or methodological approach. He

seemed very thoughtful for a moment, and then responded that he

thought that the single most important task for teacher training was to

develop in prospective teachers the ability to trust their intuition, to think

for themselves and to flexibly apply their methodological understanding.

When I asked him why he had not made this point in his talk on "The

Communicative Approach" he said, "That's not what I was asked to talk

about." This is in no way a personal criticism of Johnson, whom I liked

and respect, but it is shocking to me now that he could answer the ques-

tion in this way. Basically his answer reflected the prevailing mindset

of the day, that methodology is separate from concerns to do with peo-

ple.

And, despite their importance, I doubt very much that the teacher

training program he was working on was consciously and systemati-

cally designed to cultivate confidence and intuition. Based on my expe-

rience of language teacher training in the 80s, this kind of issue would

not have been addressed systematically. My own educational work is

based on a conviction is that it absolutely is possible to design educa-

tional programs that foster trust in intuition and overall self-confidence.

My reply was to say, referring to the Japanese educators who made

Autobiographical and Theoretical Perspectives on Schooling and "lntegrational Global" Education 67

up virtually all of his audience (and implicitly separating myself from

them) that they tend to take methodological theory too literally. If I

had been more mature, self-aware and honest I would have made the

point that I just made above. I would also have added that it was I who

found it difficult to apply what I had studied of methodology, and that

the problem he identified as central (in italics above) had not been ad・

dressed in my educational studies and training.

Kernel Memory 10: Food for thought

This is a comment made in the course of a conversation about me

to which I was not privy. It was passed on to me by a friend. A senior

Japanese academic and very prominent figure in the field, within Japan,

said, in relation to my interest in English teaching in Japan, "Foreign-

ers are not capable of understanding Japanese English education." My

reaction when I heard this was to think, "Well, at least you could try to

help me to understand ... " While I hope I am in the process of proving

him wrong, these words say a lot not just about the intercultural as-

pects of working in Japan, but also about the more general need for

collegiality and openness to learning from each other. If we are to cre・

ate a dynamic learning environment that is attractive to people outside

Japan, collegiality is essential. Experiences of this kind have led me to

create and cherish an adage of my own: "Excellence loves to raise peo-

ple up. Mediocrity needs to put people down in order to feel secure."

Kernel Memory 11: More food for thought

A British academic, a specialist in literature who had spent a couple

of years teaching English in Japanese eikaiwa schools at the end of the

seventies, many years ago gave me a question that seemed to me at the

time to stem at least to some extent from an attitude (apparently

widely held) that the fields of TESOL and AL are somehow inferior to

that of literature. The question came in the form of an observation. He

told me how he had noticed that the teachers he worked with who had

formal qualifications as language teachers were less popular among the

students than he was. He had no formal qualification, and all he did


was chat enjoyably with the students. I remember finding this question

somewhat aggressive and offensive at the time. Now, on the face of it

at least, I find it reasonable. We are human beings first, teachers and

learners second. This is axiomatic of the global educational approach

driving this paper.

I would respond now by saying that my experience is that the fields

of AL and TESOL have, with good intentions, created a kind of monster

that most practitioners are either deluded by or choose to distance

themselves from. I myself remember saying to our colleague whose

career we are celebrating in this journal, Professor Mark Petersen, that

I felt that my language teacher training had left me less confident and

competent as a teacher than I had been in the two years of teaching I

had done before attending the course.

I have come across gifted, sensitive and dedicated people -many

with extraordinary intellects -in the fields associated with language

teaching, and continue to have hope for this area of study to reshape

itself for a more genuinely helpful response to the real needs of educa-

tion.

V. Envoi

Academically I have always felt very at home with radical educa-

tional writing, whether it be the work of Dewey, Ivan Illich or John Holt

or others. Writings by these and other writers in this area have helped

me more than any other writing to make sense of my own experience of

education. They have also helped me to gradually understand, in my

own work, how I can work with intellectual integrity and comfort in

my role as a teacher/researcher. If there is one quote which encapsu-

!ates the educational values and philosophy underlying the "integratio-

nal global" thinking underlying this paper, it is this from A. S. Neill:

"We have to make the school fit the child, not the child fit the school."

The term "integrational global education" needs to be explicitly

distinguished here from the the term "global education" as it has come

to be used of late: a matter of sending as many of our own students

Autobiographical and Theorel!cal Perspectives on Schooling and "Integrational Global" Education 69

overseas as possible on overseas study programs of varying length.

The overall implication of this kind of approach is that the best univer-

sities are those that manage to send as many students overseas as pos-

sible. This is a kind of "schooling" rather than real education, which

demands conscious cultivation of minds and hearts. While many stu-

dents will benefit from study abroad, an emphasis on increasing the

numbers of students studying abroad belies an unnecessary lack of

self-confidence, and represents an unsustainable survival strategy. I

know there is real educational potential here in Japan, and continue to

find the challenge of helping to create something fresh and innovative

in this educational environment to be worthy of my sustained focus and

best effort.

A self-confident and dynamic educational environment here will

automatically and naturally make Japan an attractive study destination

for overseas students. An education that is mainly a form of schooling

rather than education will not. In this paper I have tried to give a sense

of this distinction.

As for the question of whether the challenge of improving English

education is worthy of serious intellectual interest, my answer is this: If

English teaching is so easy to do well, then why does the standard of

English proficiency in the Japanese population remain so low? The

challenge of improving English education may be best met not only

with intellectual rigor and focus, but also in a spirit of fun and freedom.

You may need a shower now to wash the milk and cereal from your

hair.

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de Bot, K., (2015), A history of applied linguistics: from 1980 to the present, Lon-

don and New York: Routledge Kindle Edition Location 3156

Dewey, J.. (1938) Experience and Education, New York: Macmillan

Holt, J., (1964), How Children Fail, Pitman

Holt, J., (1967), How Children Learn, Pitman

Illich, I., (1971), Deschooling Society, New York: Harper & Row

Larsen-Freeman, D., (1997) Chaos/Complexity Science and Second Language


Acquisition. Applied Linguist 18(2): 141-165.

Larsen-Freeman, D., (2015) Plenary Address at TESOL 2015 in (video) http://

www.tesol.org/attend-and-learn/international-convention/convention20l4/

featured-speakers/diane-larsen-freeman-keynote-video

Mark, K., (1987), Towards Autonomy? A Survey of Students'Attitudes to

Their Studies. Bulletin of the School of Education, Okayama University, No.

74, pp. 77-94

Mark, K., (2014), A Fresh Approach to Teaching Lexical Phrases and Colloca-

tions. In Opening New Lines of Communication in Applied Linguistics (Pro-

ceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the British Association for Appli-

ed Linguistics 5-7 September 2013 Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, pp.

307-318.

Mark, K., (2015), Introducing Techniques that Make Use of "Jumbled Chunks".

Bulletin of Arts and Sciences No. 504, Meiji University, pp. 127-147.

Mark, K., (2017), Meaningful Form-Focused Techniques for Fluent Processing

and Use of Multi-Word Chunks. In Proceedings of the International Confer-

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Neill, A. S., (1962) Summerhill: a radical approach to education London: Victor

Gollancz (originally published 1960 Summerhill: a radical approach to

child rearing New York: Hart)

Words of Appreciation

It is an honor to be able to write an essay in this special edition of the

Bulletin of Education to celebrate the retirement of our colleague Pro-

fessor Mark F. Petersen. Mark's sharp eye for language is legendary,

and his ability to capture and describe the nuances of the English Ian-

guage have been truly enlightening for his many readers and col-

leagues, including myself.

His acuity and aesthetic sensibilities of course extend well beyond

the domain of language, and I am one of many colleagues whose appre-

ciation of film and the arts in general, wine and good food have been

enhanced through knowing Mark.

Autobiographical and Theoretical Perspectives on Schooling and "lntegrational Global" Education 71

Mark's ability to craft a succinct sentence within a beautifully bal-

anced essay or letter is inimitable. It is a quality that is unfortunately

not reflected in the rambling and messy essay above, but which is nev-

ertheless offered in friendship to a modest and unpretentious colleague

who has set high professional standards for all of us to aspire to.

Thank you Mark, and congratulations on your retirement.

（マーク・ケヴィン政治経済学部教授）

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