The Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching
Volume V- 2000

TESOL: Art and Craft
by Henry Widdowson

So TESOL practitioners, I suggest, are, as individuals in the particular circumstances of their own classrooms, acting as artists in the exercise of their craft. They are not scientists seeking to eliminate variety in the interests of establishing generalities. They are not technologists seeking to exploit the findings of science by manipulation. As artists, they react to variety and give shape and meaning to it, and they do so by reference to the principles of their craft. But notice that to talk of TESOL as art does not mean that it is simply a matter of untrammelled individual creativity, that teachers are born not made and that’s that. Artists are made by knowing about their craft, and so are teachers. Leonardo da Vinci did not become an artist at birth and neither did David Nunan. Of course some artists are better than others. But even those with instinctive gifts need to have them informed by a conscious awareness of the principles, the theoretical principles, of their craft.

To modify lines of Alexander Pope:

True ease in teaching comes from art not chance.
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.