I am currently attending the IATEFL conference in Birmingham and have come to the end of my first full day here. I went to my first talk at 8 a.m. and attended my last talk at 6 p.m. with another five spread across the day. I enjoyed all of these immensely for different reasons – topics ranged from tips on getting published in a peer-reviewed journal (Graham Hall, editor of the ELT Journal), to Alan Maley emphasing the importance of not forgetting about ‘past’ great educators (many of them heroes and heroines of mine like John Dewey, Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori but also some who I am not familiar with like David Horsburgh and Sylvia Ashton-Warner) to the benefits of using meditation in the ELT classroom (Monique Simpson, International House John Haycraft Classroom Exploration Scholarship winner). In between talks I circled the event and spoke to a number of fascinating teachers from around the world – one of my main reasons for attending the conference in person.

All in all this day represented a very successful learning experience and I was ‘fully engaged’ throughout. But at the end of my last talk the only thing I wanted and felt I was still capable of was to crawl back to my hotel room and to shut out the rest of the world for the remainder of the day. This made me remember a quote by Alison Gopnik, an American child psychologist, who I have recently become interested in:

If you want to know what it’s like to be a baby? It’s like being in love for the first time in Paris after three double espressos. […] It’s a fantastic way to be but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three in the morning.

(taken from a TED talk: What do babies think?)

Based on her own and other experts’ research, Gopnik sees children/babies as the “research community of the human species” with babies’ brains being “the most powerful learning computer on the planet” (same TED talk as above). From a lay perspective as a mother and someone who has worked with children a lot over the years I would tend to agree. I also believe that education (language education included) should aim not to destroy this capacity for learning as deep engagement with a wide range of stimuli (which I think might be happening at the moment) but rather to create spaces that allow us to return to this state throughout our lives. I feel lucky enough to have developed ways to achieve this from time to time and for having opportunities come my way to make this happen, IATEFL being a case in point.

Admittedly some of my engagement might have been fuelled by actual espressos! However, I think this quote captures very well the intensity of the experience of being fully in the moment, of interacting with your environment (especially an unfamiliar one) on a deep level. It takes a lot of energy.

Throughout my MA studies as well as at the conference I have heard it emphasised again and again that engaging our students or creating engaging materials should be one of our main aims as teachers. And overall I very much agree. However, my conference experience has reminded me of what it is we are asking of our students and that it is not always possible and especially not for all of our students at the same time to muster the energy needed for full engagement. What we should not do, is to think less of our students for refusing to engage or of ourselves for having failed to come up with engaging lesson content!

Cube, Pixabay.com