Great comments can be hard to relocate (they're not titled, you have to click or scroll, you can't remember where you read them) and I thought I'd highlight some here, in case they prompt further thought or investigation.

These thoughtful comments on change in life and work, prompted by Dogmevolution, complement each other nicely.

The first is from Anthony Gaughan, a fellow dogmetist and pioneer of teacher training unplugged. 

Anthony Gaughan wrote:

The nature of life - even Second Life - on this planet is that of evolution... While observers may have railed periodically against this basic fact, life stoically progresses, incrementallly, accommodating new conditions and making use of the local affordances. None of these changes fundamentally changes what life is about - on the contrary, it confirms it. As with life, so with Dogme, or any movement worth following.

Now, one can argue that any shift in a starting position is either an intellectual capitulation or a sellout. But life clearly does not think so, the world does not think so, and thank whoever for that.

The second is from Valéria Franca, whose blog on ELT and teacher development can be found here. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Valéria after a very stimulating #brelt chat in May.

Valéria Franca wrote:

Change is a glorious thing! It's basically all around us in everything we do, in our own lives, emotionally and physically (and it's implacable, inexorable!). So how are we going to avoid it in our work, in our profession as educators, which is surely influenced by experience?

I think it's perfectly healthy for any teaching approach to be questioned and looked at under the light of new elements (e.g. all the technology which exists today and which 10 years go we could never have imagined would exist; new classroom contexts with 50 or more students, etc) which collide with it, even if only at a tangent. And if this means asking new questions, then it's all the better. All of this does not mean principles change, they are just looked at under new light.

But our field is one of passions. It's always been there in the debates between the different teaching methods; it's there in the research and findings of our Applied Linguists, who sometimes get lost in quibbles about what can be empirically proven and what can't; it's there in our debates about CLIL, about the use of technology in education, etc.. Well, differing points of view abound... ours is not (thank God) an exact science!

But our field is one of passions. It´s always been there in the debates between the different teaching methods; it´s there in the research and findings of our Applied Linguists, who sometimes get lost in quibbles about what can be empirically proven and what can´t; it´s there in our debates about CLIL, about the use of technology in education, etc.. Well, differing points of view abound...ours is not (thank God) an exact science! 

This comment on Teacher People comes from Mark Andrews - whose blog, Classrooms on the Danube, is a unique combination of literature, politics, geography and ELT. His conclusion - that our first language is neither here nor there when it comes to our ability to foster the right kind of classroom culture - neatly sums up response to the issue here and elsewhere.

Mark Andrews wrote:

In response to this Luke ‘our behaviour as a teacher won’t represent every aspect of ourselves, any more than our behaviour as a lover, friend or parent can. Each role is an expression of the whole: we reveal and explore different facets of ourselves in each, but the more authentically related to the whole these facets are, the happier (and the more convincing!) we tend to be.’

It reminded me of what one of my M.A. colleagues, Julian Cook, once wrote.

‘If we want to be ourselves in the class, I don't believe it means revealing all our most intimate secrets, or even completely rejecting or jettisoning the teacher's mask - we need it. But instead of hiding behind it, we can come out and play with it, and maybe even lend it to our students to try. Nor does it mean becoming friends with our learners. I would prefer to call it something like "giving of yourself". By that I mean being present with as much of yourself as you can and expressing as much as seems appropriate. Of course it means taking risks...if we risk things then maybe some of our students will too.’

Another colleague of mine on that M.A., Simon Gieve, talks about getting people in the class to see themselves as good ‘learning partners’ and discussing together what this might mean and whether it is something desirable.

It strikes me that these are the kind of voices and identities that are worth exploring in the classroom and as teachers, in an assymetrical relationship with our learners, we can give our learners the green light to go ahead with these things. 

In the end whether we succeed or not will often depend on the classroom culture that we are able to foster, and we as teachers are just one variable, albeit an important one, amongst many others.

Whether we are a native English speaker or an non-native English speaker is neither here nor there in all of this.