Interview

Chuck Sandy

Chuck Sandy teaches in the Humanities Department at Chubu University. He is also a frequent lecturer on English language teaching and Education throughout Asia, South America, and the United States. He has directed English language programs and taught in universities, language institutes, and teacher-training centers in Japan, the United States, Korea, and Brazil.

He has worked on several components of the Interchange series, is co-author of Passages, and has recently completed a new series for young learners entitled "Connect" with Jack Richards and Carlos Barbisan. He spoke with ELT News editor Mark McBennett in April, 2003.

ELT: Let's start by getting the background information out of the way. You probably hate the old "Why did you come to Japan?" question as much as I do, but give us a brief overview of how you got to where you are today.
CS: I'm not aware of anyone who grew up longing to become an English language teacher or writer of educational materials, and I am no different. I was always more interested in literature and various forms of printed matter, so spent my university years reading books, imagining myself a poet, and dabbling in journalism. One day I went into see my advisor who looked up at me and said, "You know, you're going to graduate this semester." Having no real skills other than the ability to write fairly well and talk at length about the books I read, I panicked. In the same meeting, though, he also suggested I fill in an independent study option by being an assistant teacher/mentor in a freshman composition class made up of Japanese students. I thought, why not, and casually agreed, not realizing of course that this was one of those moments which define the direction of one's life. In that class I wound up discovering the whole world of ESL, made some good Japanese friends, and met the woman I would one day marry.

As that course was drawing to a close, someone from the foreign language department approached me and asked if I would like to be an ESL graduate teaching assistant and the department's first ESL grad student the following year. Not having anything better to do and having found teaching to be something I enjoyed, I again casually agreed. This was another one of those defining moments, for not only did I get an early M.A. in TESOL, but I also got the chance to do some teaching in Japan on behalf of that department and met my mentors, the writer Yotaro Konaka and the Japanese language professor extraordinaire, Takeko Minami. These two people got me every job in Japan I've ever had and shaped my life in ways that are still now becoming clear to me. It was also, therefore, indirectly through them, that I met my co-author Jack Richards, who in many ways has taught me more about English language teaching and publishing than I learned in grad school or could have possibly learned with anyone else.

In short, like most people, I wound up where I am today through a series of happy accidents - very glad to be an English language teacher and writer of educational materials.

You talked in one of your Think Tank articles about a manifesto you wrote for the teacher's manual at a Tokyo college where you worked. You said about it: "At its core was a philosophy encouraging teachers to treat students as whole people with valid and various needs, motivations, and desires rather than as language acquisition devices or charges to test, grade, and control." Does this philosophy sum up your approach to teaching?
Though this early statement of mine does get at the center of my beliefs about education and teaching, I wouldn't say that it sums up my approach. Think of it more as a philosophical foundation on which I've built over the years, and that manifesto from the early 90s as a working document of who I would become and am becoming. Over the years I've built substance and depth onto what Ted Rodgers then called "The Nice Approach" and have come to understand that being an open and approachable person who creates, in Paulo Freire's phrase, "a warm nest" is not nearly enough.

It is the essential foundation for real learning to take place, but there also has to be stimulating content, questions and work that challenges students on a number of different levels, and a participant-teacher equipped with a headful of various techniques -- drawn eclectically but consciously from any relevant school of thought -- to make that warm nest a useful place. My approach to teaching, then, is to provide all of that ... with a smile. No one gets off easy in my classes, which is to say we do a lot of work and I expect a lot, yet we have good fun while we do it, and that, I suppose, sums up my approach.

In your recent columns for ELT News, you have used words like 'rebellion', 'revolution' and 'wobbling the system.' Do you think your students see you as a 'rebel with a coursebook' or just another "henna gaijin" (strange foreigner)?
By definition, teachers are agents of change, and true education in any real, transformative sense is radical by nature. It's our job to wobble systems, to gently incite personal revolutions within our students, and to rebel against educational practices and ideologies which lessen anyone's chance at becoming more than he or she is. To say so in such terms is simply to put into words what all good teachers instinctively know and what most students instinctively recognize when they encounter such a teacher - and I mean, here, a teacher in any field, in or out of school, foreign or not-so-foreign, with a course book or without any books at all.

There's nothing strange about such a person in any culture, though not everyone -- in any culture -- is developmentally ready to work with a teacher who approaches education in such a manner. Therefore, it's essential for a teacher to remain flexible enough to be able to provide serious challenges to those who are ready for it and challenge-lite or alternate ways into the course or content for those who are not quite as ready. How my students see me is an unknown thing, of course, but I sense they see me as someone that is flexible, as someone who's taking them seriously and at least trying to be one of those good teachers. Whether I succeed at this or not varies from day to day and hour to hour, but my overall sense is that my students see me mostly as someone who cares about them and about what he's doing, and that's enough for me.

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