Books in our field on leadership and management are relatively rare, compared with books on methodology in TESOL, and compared with books on leadership and management in other fields, such as health care. One of the relatively few books is MaryAnn Christison's and Fredricka Stoller's "A Handbook for Language Program Administrators," which was first published in 1997 with a second edition out last year. Another book is "From Teacher to Manager: Managing Language Teaching Organizations," by Ron White and colleagues, published in 2008.

Over time, the field had become more specific, with two edited collections on leadership in TESOL: "Leadership in English Language Teaching and Learning" (Coombe et al., 2008) and "Leadership in English Language Education: Theoretical foundations and practical skills for changing times" (Christison and Murray, 2009). But given the many thousands of language program administrators (LPAs) all over the world, it is surprising that there are not more books in this area.

The main title of the White et al. book, "From Teacher to Manager," gives a possible clue as to why this is the case. Many of us move from language teaching into language program administration almost "accidentally," as reflected in the title of the 2003 book by Gary Topchik, "The Accidental Manager." But for people with my background, moving from the classroom into LPA entailed not only a change of job titles, roles and responsibilities, it also meant learning how to lead and manage from the periphery.

Shades of Meaning

In 2006, Mary Romney and I published an edited collection, "Color, Race and English Language Teaching: Shades of Meaning," in which we asked TESOL professionals around the world to tell us how growing up as people of color had impacted their work later in life, as TESOL professionals of color. One of the recurring themes in that book was "being on the periphery" and "being at the margins.

Although I was born and raised as a native speaker of English in England, my Hindi-speaking parents and grandparents were from South America, and before that, from India. So, in my chapter in our book, "Dark Matter: Teaching and Learning Between Black and White," I reflected on incidents that had happened early on in my life as a learner at school, as a result of my race, and how those incidents had "colored" my work as a language teacher.

The next logical step, then, was to reflect on and write about how my work as an LPA has been shaped by my experiences as a TESOL professional of color. From 2002 to 2006, I was running an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) program in Ontario, Canada. There, I was one of only two people of color in a total staff of more than 20, working in a university and in a city neither of which are culturally, racially or linguistically diverse.

As a result, my chapter in the Christison and Murray (2009) book was titled "On the Edge: Leading from the Periphery." In the same book is a chapter by Neil Anderson on "Leading from Behind," in which he encourages the reader to focus their attention “away from leadership as defined by one’s title or position and towards leadership as defined by one’s behaviors.” Although I agree with that idea, when you have lived a life in which you are always in the minority wherever you are and whatever you are doing, the idea of "leading from the periphery" can be helpful.

Lessons Learned

One of the lessons that took me a long time to learn was that being on the periphery and at the margins of society is not necessarily the worst place to be, and there can even be some benefits to being out there. The difference is whether you are forced to be there against your will, or if you choose to position yourself there.

For the first two decades of my life, I tried to be in the middle and "mainstream." In the second two decades, I stopped trying to make that move and got comfortable on the periphery. In the last decade, I have seen some real benefits. One of the advantages I found was that it is difficult to get a good view if, for example, you are in the middle of a crowd. You can often get a much better view from the edge of the circle. Sometimes being farther away enables you to see things more clearly.

The second lesson was that the many books written about "leading from the front" have led to an assumption that it is the best place for a leader to be — but if you are in front, it is almost impossible to see clearly what is happening behind your back. A quote usually attributed to the 19th-century French Revolutionary Alexendre Ledru-Rollin is: “There go my people. I must find out where they are going — so I can lead them." Being at the front can result in being trampled.

A third set of lessons learned was that, although being on the periphery and at the margins is difficult — in fact, growing up with the extreme racial violence of England in the 1970s, it was a life-threateningly dangerous place to be — there are ways to put such negative experiences to positive use. For example, as the director of an EAP program with 1,000 students from 50 countries, I was able to not only sympathize but also able to empathize with some of their experiences of feeling, as one student put it: “We’ll always be on the outside, no matter how good our English gets.”

As a language teacher and language learner, I know how difficult it can be to teach/learn how to listen in a second or foreign language. In fact, even in our first languages, listening is often the weakest of the four main language modalities. And as an LPA of color, I learned how often people "listen with their eyes." For example, when they would meet me for the first time, with the confusion and cognitive dissonance between what they were expecting and what they were faced with was written all over their faces. "Listening with our eyes" does not make us bad people; it just makes us people. We all do it, so knowing that can help us develop our management communication skills accordingly.

Teaching and Learning at the Margins

Being on the periphery and at the margins of a society is generally thought of as a bad place to be, and I know there may be readers of this article who are there and who have strong negative feelings about being there. But many years as an LPA have taught me that there are ways of drawing on those experiences as a source of strength and understanding in leadership and management roles.

The dividing lines between the world’s languages and cultures are becoming increasingly blurred, and we are becoming increasingly connected. It may be that leading from the periphery will one day become a well-recognized set of knowledge, skills and competencies that will be of use to all language educators in leadership and management roles, wherever they chose to position themselves.