Portraits of inspiring English teachers in China and Indonesia

The first report on our English Language Learning and Teaching Research Award (ELTRP) funded research project presented the data from a short survey (n = 279) which asked learners aged 14–22 to nominate and then describe state school teachers who had inspired them. The names of 168 different teachers were proposed, of whom 20 received two or more nominations. Here we report on following up a subset of eight of the nominated teachers. Through visiting them in their schools, observing one of their classes and talking to them about their teaching principles, we aimed to obtain snapshots of what inspiring teaching looked like in context, and of some of the thinking that underpinned such teaching. As can be seen in the observed lessons below (and the accompanying video extracts), inspiring teaching looked very different in different classrooms. Discrete reasons for such differences are inevitably extremely complicated to untangle, but we suggest several features of the political and social contexts within which English is taught in the two countries, which we feel may help account for many of the differences we observed. The inspiring teachers had things in common too, most notably they really cared about their profession and their subject, and about how to convey their own enthusiasm to their learners in ways that would encourage them to begin to care about learning it too. However, we also realised that the visible expression of each teachers’ care, as demonstrated through their in and out of class behaviour, was different and that it was bound to be so, since it had been shaped by their individual experiences of negotiating the norms and values of their particular school and classroom contexts over time.