I have been teaching for 26 years in the English departments of the high
school system in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. Recently, my teaching
interests have led me to transfer to a small adult education institution in
this same school board. Early in my career I developed an interest in the
so-called "general level" student population, those students who came from
largely working class backgrounds and who seemed to be dissatisfied with the
academic orientation of most schools of the time. I became interested in
developing programs for this population, and this interest has provided the
underlying theme to my teaching career, my master's degree work, and most
recently the work of my PH.D.
For my PH.D. work, I set myself the problem of (1) developing an
instructional program which would assist students to explore and discover
how to improve their performance in language uses found in social settings,
of the student's choice, outside of the school institution, and (2)
describing the instructional discourse processes involved in such teaching.
The fieldwork has a strong anthropological/linguistic flavour with some
similarities to the work of folks like Ron Gallimore, Louis Moll, and the
earlier work of Shirley Brice Heath. And, especially, the most recent work
by Gordon Wells with his strong background in systemic functional
linguistics. The earlier work before and during my master's thesis was
dogged by the limitations of the narrowly psychologistic theory work I had
drawn upon, such as personal construct theory, script theory, and schema
theory. As a consequence, shortly after I began my work at OISE, I
developed an interest in the thought of the Vygotskian tradition because of
its potential for making powerful theoretical connections among the somewhat
separate traditions of sociology, psychology and linguistics. This sort of
interdisciplinary tendency seems well suited to the problem-oriented
approach implied by an action research field methodology.
I have occasionally participated in, but mostly simply observed, the
discussions of xlchc since about 1991.
--glenn
Glenn Humphreys
P. O. Box 11
Echo Bay,
Ontario, Canada.
Telephone (home): (705) 248-1226
Telephone (work): (705) 945-7185
Fax: 705-945-7195
Internet: glenhump@soonet.ca