Aim 2: We aim to challenge organizations like IATEFL to abandon their elitism in favor of a more bottom-up orientation

Oh well, I'm here now...:-). Couldn't find the "next" button (it's the "mailbox" symbol) and kept getting kicked out.

we aim to create more bottom-up, 99% orientation in the field of EFL and encourage discussion and action around this, an egalitarian dynamic often missing in professional organizations EFL teachers may belong to

<== such a rephrasing does not target IATEFL directly and avoids invoking 'elitism' as a charge, so less 'confrontational' in a rhetorical sense

Oh ok - thanks for joining and for your comments Helen!

many of us want more 'horizontal' structures, on the job, in the classroom, and more broadly in the society

here something on the spirit of 'horizontalidad': http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements many national EFL teacher associations have little horizontalism so making verticality more horizontal is a general aim, however one may see the metaphorics

Concretely, this can mean building EFL teacher communities of face-to-face interaction and exchange at the scale of local: for example,in a given small or larger city, or a district, a province. How much interaction, creatively structured, do you have with other EFL educators in the explicit geography where you work and live?

In Thailand, I worked in a metro area in the north where there were three universities (two largely working-class, one more elite). All three have substantial English depts. There was virtually no contact (even social) between the EFL teachers at these three universities, maybe 20-30 minutes apart by car or even traditional tuk-tuk. There are a number of primary and secondary schools in this city. Little regular contact between the EFL teachers at these institutions as far as I could judge. In many cases, perhaps zero contact. Privatism is trump.

Thai TESOL, a highly even remarkably 'vertically' structured architecture as a national association, did virtually nothing to encourage such bottom-up hands-on grassroots interchange. I suggested creating a local EFL teachers' association in our city in Thailand, bottom up, but got nowhere.

One locally based EFL teachers association I think is in part a paradigm along such lines is PELLTA in Penang/Malaysia http://www.pellta.org/ This is indeed a very local teachers' community with much face-to-face interaction centered on the island/city of Penang.

Totally agree with you on horizontalism Bill - and getting teachers to network among themselves to encourage more of this.

rewording as Bill says

I agree with Bill and that is what I'm working towards to now. My aim is to create collaboration and an RP group locally. For the development of teachers language proficiency, I am to work with iTDi courses and for digital literacy (google for educators local group). Then, I want to learn how I can explore with the groups I'll help to start to look at matters more deeply and think of actions. Thanks to TaW motto and these group discussions I'm feeling more empowered to go out there and actually do something about it. If we think about, we encourage from the bottom and dialogue will start to happen with the top naturally as we move.

I agree with what all of you are saying. I think I may have been the one who wrote this line about elitism in IATEFL on the google doc, and it was just brainstorming. I'm ready to abandon it.

The question does have an inbuilt value judgement and could be reworded. I think something like this might be good:

To develop an praxis of grassroots organising and promote this as a viable alternative to hierarchically structured institutions

I feel strongly that we should not mention other organisations in our own aims. It will bite us in the bum in the future.

What about:

We aim to nurture grassroots, self-organised, horizontal activism in the field of EFL.