Faculty of Education Award for Distinguished Teaching

Mary Maguire

Department Of Second Language Education

Our intellectual histories as researchers and teachers shape our inquiries and teaching practices. I recall the late Dean of Education, George Flower's advice when I joined McGill: "The avenues for exploration are broad, the choices infinite; be prepared to face the bumpy intersections in balancing teaching and research." Memorable are the mid '70s -- an interesting political time for an anglophone to be doing an MA in English at the Université de Montréal! Robert Browne's personal attributes stand out -- the discipline he brought to his "lit crit" course, the intellectual space he created for all students. I appreciate the ecologically valid approaches for researching culturally diverse children's bi-literacy and perspectives that I learned from Susan Philips during my PhD in applied linguistics.

Children's literate actions are not neutral phenomena; "we have to be alert to what comes from books as well as from life" (Meek, 1989). I hope my students develop an ethical, intellectual stance towards teaching, learning and research, believe they can make a difference, and do so with integrity, imagination and insight. I do not want them to be learning clones, but to critically evaluate what I have to offer them, to take risks, to stand back and reflect: that was good or not so good. I encourage students to challenge the assumptions embedded in language teaching approaches, to conduct their own inquiries and keep reflective logs of their learning.

Teaching does not occur only within a classroom. The Young Authors' Conference shows me that innovation and vision bring many possibilities for effecting educational leadership. Over 14,000 students have attended this annual event since 1988. When young children play with language, they discover that a sentence can say what is, as well as what is not, the case. Students should dare to ask what if it were otherwise. Learning must be some kind of dialogue; otherwise, as Meek says, the "life of the mind becomes a series of vain repetitions" and teaching becomes what Rorty calls "lessons in final vocabularies."