Complicated

I often find it difficult to explain to people what I do, what my ‘job’ is, or even how I spend my time! A lot of the time that is because I just don’t know HOW to describe it in a way that will actually mean something to people.

This might be because they’ve never been to the places I’m working in or focusing on, or never met the people I’m working with. It might be because the topics I’m focusing on (Multilingual Education… Identity Based Development…) or the questions I’m wrestling with (How do people really feel part of a ‘community of practice’ and learn from each other?) are unfamiliar to them – after all they haven’t spent months studying them or hours discussing them with colleagues. You see, every concept needs a structure within which they can be understood. Without that structure or ‘context’, they are just empty words with no real meaning.

Other times, however, the sheer variety of what I find myself doing makes it difficult to communicate! If you like, the WHAT gets in the way as well as the HOW! Take this week, for example. I have been:

-communicating and arranging with colleagues about attending a reading conference and advocacy training in Kenya in August;

-engaging with MLE teaching sessions on topics such as ‘primer production in situations where there are multiple languages’ (causing me to reflect back on and share our experiences of working in a nine language cluster project in Tanzania);

-working with colleagues on preparing a funding proposal for work with two communities in Bangladesh (communities where over 80% of households live on less than $2 a day);

-reviewing abstracts for an international conference on language and education in Bangkok in the Autumn;

-continuing to plan towards the next Asia-wide learning event (community of practice event) to be held later this year;

-marking students papers on the theoretical basis of MLE in their given work contexts (which included Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, and Indonesia).

How do I explain that to people?! Of course not all my weeks are like this, in fact some weeks I spend the whole time writing one conference paper or working on a funding proposal. However, as my work regularly involves diverse activities and contexts it is pretty difficult to describe them in a way that people can follow and understand. Granted most jobs have a range of tasks which can be quite complex to explain, but I guess the difference is that often in those situations even the job title itself helps to bring clarity, since people tend to understand the context or have some familiarity with the subject area (‘Oh yeah, my brothers uncle used to be a…’, for example!). That’s not often the response I get when I say I work on issues around language, education and development in Asia!

Ultimately, I guess what it really boils down to each week is that I am trying to make the best use of the skills and training I have been lucky enough to receive to come alongside and assist people around the world. Learning together, sharing knowledge (both ways!) and encouraging each other onwards towards the future.

Want to know more? Drop us an email – I’ll try and explain as best I can…!