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John F. Fanselow started
teaching English in Nigeria as a member of the first group of Peace Corps
Volunteers sent to Nigeria after John F. Kennedy established the American
volunteer organization in 1961
After teaching at a
teacher training college in Nigeria for two years, he was invited to train new
volunteers bound for Nigeria at Teachers College, Columbia University. While
training volunteers he started work on his Ph.D. He took a two-year break from
his studies when Teachers College under contract with the Peace Corps sent him
to Somalia to train Peace Corps volunteers there. In Somalia he worked with
both Somali and American teachers, visiting every intermediate and high school
in the country numerous times.
After he returned to
Teachers College from Somalia, he continued to train Peace Corps volunteers in
Togo and Senegal during semester breaks. When he completed his Ph.D. at
Teachers College, Columbia University, he was invited to join the faculty
there.
His experiences in Africa opened his eyes to a wide range of worlds
that totally transformed his thinking and feelings. His entire professional
life developed as it did because of the profound influences on him during his
five years in Africa.
For the past thirty
years, he not only directed the graduate program in TESOL at Teachers College,
Columbia University but he established an off-campus graduate program in TESOL
in Tokyo. For a decade he split his time between teaching in the graduate
programs in New York and Tokyo. By teaching at TESOL Summer Institutes at UCLA,
the University of Oregon, San Francisco State, Georgetown and ESADE in
Barcelona, he was able to work with a very wide range of teachers from around
the world. These teaching experiences, together with his living in Tokyo, have
continued to strengthen the open, exploratory thinking forged during his Peace
Corps experiences.
In addition to
Contrasting Conversations, he has written Breaking Rules, also published by
Longman, and Try the Opposite, published by SIMUL International in Tokyo and
reprinted by International Pacific College. He has also produced a collection
of lesson plans and teaching practices called Teaching English in Exhilarating
Circumstances, which was distributed by the United States Peace Corps to
volunteers in various countries.
In addition to his books,
he has written scores of articles, two of which were first published in the
TESOL Quarterly and subsequently reprinted in anthologies: "Beyond Rashomon "
and "Let's see". The latter article received the Malkemes prize from the
American Language Program at New York University for the best article of the
year for relating ideas to practice and formed the basis for Contrasting
Conversations as "Beyond Rashomon" was the foundation for Breaking Rules.
Another article in the TESOL Quarterly, "It's too damn tight" highlights his
interest in authentic language, as the title suggests! His "Post card
realities", published in a collection edited by Cassanave and Schecter,
(Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) reflects on the transforming
experience of his Peace Corps years.
He has served as
President of TESOL International as well as Second Vice President and Program
Chair for the 1976 TESOL Convention. He was also president of New York State
TESOL. He has made countless presentations at TESOL, JALT and dozens of TESOL
affiliates around the world. In the 1999 January/ February issue of ESOL
Magazine, he was named one of thirty American ESL Pioneers.
He became Professor
Emeritus of Teachers College, Columbia University in 1997, at which time his
students established a scholarship fund in his name to encourage "Fanslovian"
ideas and practices among MA candidates in TESOL at Teachers College, Columbia
University both in New York and at the off-campus program in Tokyo.
He was appointed President of International Pacific College* in
Palmerston North, New Zealand in 1998, a tertiary institution for the
internationally minded that he had been associated with since before it was
founded in 1989. |
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