Conceptualizing our roles and acts as TESOL professionals

Understanding Post-method pedagogy

WEEK 3

POST-METHOD

Agenda• Three BIG ideas/theories you acquired.

• Discussion of teacher roles: Teachers as passive technicians, teachers as reflective practitioners and teachers as transformative intellectuals.

• Introduction to Post-method methodology

• Discussion of Critical Pedagogy

QUIZ!• In a piece of paper, define these important vocabulary form this week’s readings:

1) Teachers as technicians 6) Pedagogy of particularity

2) Teachers as reflective practitioners

7) Pedagogy of practicality

3) Teachers as a transformative intellectual

8) Pedagogy of possibility

4) Critical Pedagogy

5) Teachers’ theory of practice

Teachers as passive technicians• Primary goals:

• Advantages and disadvantages:

• A technique that represent this role:

Teachers as reflective practitioners• Primary goals:

• Advantages and disadvantages:

• A technique that represent this role:

Teachers as transformative intellectuals• Primary goals:

• Advantages and disadvantages:

• A technique that represent this role:

TRANSFORMATIVE INTELLECTUALS

• This idea is derived mainly from the works of critical pedagogists and through the philosophy of the Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire• Schools and colleges are not simply instructional sites;

they are, in fact, “cultural arenas where heterogeneous ideological, discursive, and social forms collide in an unremitting struggle for dominance”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

What are the implications of becoming a transformative intellectual? For what reasons would you support or oppose the extended role that teachers as transformative intellectuals are expected to play?

What constitutes a “theory”? Who constructs a “theory”? What constitutes practice?Theory:• Constitutes a set of insights and concepts derived from academic disciplines.• Theoretical knowledge is necessary to become a language teacher

Practice:• Set of teaching and learning strategies informed by

theory

Reciprocal relationship between theory and practice.

What’s the relationship between theorists and practitioners? Do practitioners always apply theories?

Bridging theory and practice• Theory in TESOL/Applied linguistics can be defined as a set of insights, frameworks and concepts derived from disciplines such as education, second language acquisition, anthropology, cognitive psychology and linguistics.• Practice in TESOL/Applied Linguistics• The relationship between theorists and practitioners is NOT like the producer and the consumer.

What are the differences between professional theory and personal theory?

• Professional Theory: perpetuated within the professional culture. theories that are transmitted via professional training in colleges

• Personal Theory: individual theory unique to each person which is developed by putting professional theories into practice- Teachers as implementers?

Critical Pedagogists criticized this distinction! Teachers as implementers approach diminished the role of teacher’s agency, knowledge and sense of plausibility.- Teachers’ theory of practice

Theorizing as an intellectual activity

How can preservice teachers theorize from their practice?• Three types of knowledge:

1) Speculative theory

2) The findings of empirical research

3) The experiential knowledge

The importance of critical thinking instead of breath of content knowledge.

• Three levels of theorizing:

1) Technical level: Classroom-centered goals

2) Practical level: developing practice and evaluating your own practice

3) Critical, emancipatory level: Theorizing is concerned with ethical , historical and political issues.

POST-METHOD PEDAGOGY

KUMAR, CHAPTER 2

UNDERSTANDING POSTMETHOD PEDAGOGY

•What is post-method pedagogy?

--a model in teacher education that promotes context-sensitive education based on a true understanding of local linguistic, social and cultural peculiarities.

--raises teachers sociopolitical awareness and enables teachers to construct their own theory of practice

--a model that treats learners as co-explorers.

Mainstream understanding of “method”—does not refer to what teachers actually do in the classroom, but established methods conceptualized by experts sometimes based on research conducted in controlled environments.

Language Centered Methods

• “Language learning is intentional rather than incidental.”(Kuma, p.25)• Theory of Language: structural linguists view language as a system consisting of several hierarchically linked building blocks: morphemes, phonemes, phrases, clauses and sentences.• Each block/structure can be analyzed, described and systematized and graded.• Theory of Language learning: derived from behaviorism (50s and 60s)

Language centered methods cont.

• Theory of Language learning: Behaviorist scientists analyzed human behavior and observed that behaviors can be reduced to a series of stimuli that trigger a series of corresponding responses.• Learning: stimulus—response—reinforcement: Learning to speak a language is similar to learning how to ride a bike• Learning is mechanical habit formation according to this view.

Learner-Centered Methods

1. Concerned with learner needs.

2. Aim at making the learners grammatically correct and communicatively fluent.

3. Language is a system of expressing meaning

4. The central purpose of language is communication.

5. Basic units of language are not merely grammatical and structural, but also notional and functional.

Learning-centered methods• Concerned with the learning process. • Provides opportunities to create meaningful learning opportunities.• Pre-occupation with meaning-making will lead to grammatical and communicative mastery of the language.

What was the method of teaching when you learned your second language?

Why dissatisfaction with the concept of method?• Certain techniques were considered as the right way to teach; at other, they were frowned upon.• Pedagogical limitations of method:

1. Methods go through an endless cycle of life, death and rebirth. Even the experts don’t know how many language teaching methods are developed. What appears to be radically a different method appears to be a variant of an existing method.

2. Each method specifies a set of theories and classroom procedures. They overlap!

3. They may overlook the funds of knowledge students bring to class or the tacit knowledge of the local teachers about the lives of their students.

Methods should be informed by the understanding of the sociocultural context.

Moving away from the notion of “method”?• Rather than “prepackaged” set of procedures, teachers should “develop, select, or adapt tasks which are appropriate in terms of goals, inputs, activities, roles and setting” (Nunan, 1989, p.2).• Method as “interested knowledge” (Pennycook, 1989)—promoting inequalities.• “Anti-method pedagogy” (Macedo, 1994)• “Postmethod condition” (Kumaravadivelu, 1994)

The myths of methods1. There is a best method out there ready and waiting to

be discovered—the implementation of any method should take into account language policies, teacher profiles and learning needs and variations.

2. Methods constitutes the organizing principle for language teaching—method is too inadequate to explain the complex process of language learning and teaching. The uncritical acceptance of method has mislead to believe us that method has the capacity to cater all learners.

3. Method has a universal value—learners across the world learn languages for the various reasons and follow different paths.

4. Theorists conceive knowledge and practitioners consume knowledge—Teachers do not simply follow the principles. Teachers develop and follow context specific sequence of activities.

Why do we need “postmethod condition”?

• Help us overcome the limitations of method-based pedagogy

• Empowers practitioners to construct personal theories of practice

• Enables practitioners to generate classroom -orientated strategies.

• Signifies teacher autonomy: How can teachers act autonomously? How can we develop approaches to self-observe and self-analyze?

• Sense of plausibility: “subjective understanding of the teaching do” (p.172)

Three parameters of postmethod pedagogy1. Particularity: Context-sensitive and location-specific

pedagogy based on a true understanding of local, social, cultural, and political particularities. Be sensitive to local context. Observe and reflect!

2. Practicality: Ruptures the reified role relationship between theorizers and practitioners by enabling them and encouraging them, to theorize form their practice—teacher generated theory of practice.

3. Possibility: Seeks to tap the sociopolitical consciousness that students bring with them so that it can also function as a catalyst for identity formation.

Pair work• How do you think these parameters can guide your everyday teaching?

• Go over the list of macrostrategies . Which ones are you already familiar with? Can you add to this list?

Pennycook, A.

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL

WHERE TO START?

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL• Should involve BOTH research and pedagogy.• Transformative pedagogy: Aims to change/question status quo! Greater sensitivity to inclusiveness.• INCLUSIVITY- Struggle for diverse representations in the classrooms and materials.• Focus on race, gender, identity, relations of power, structure of inequality• View of language learning is not autonomous.• Aims to ensure that marginalized students’ from less privileged backgrounds gain access to mainstream discourses: “Access to powerful linguistic and cultural tools”

What does it mean to be critical? What’s critical theory, really?• Taking social inequality and social transformation as center to one’s work• How aspects of popular culture are related to the forms of political control and how particular forms of rationalism have come to dominate other possible ways of thinking.• Always turning a skeptical eye towards assumptions, ideas that have become “nauturalized.”- Problemitizing the given• Awareness of the limits of knowing. Being self reflexive.• E.G. Brian Morgan (1997,1998) gives an example of his own classroom to illustrate how critical practice in ESL can emerge from community concerns. He writes “ a community-based, critical ESL pedagogy doesn’t mean neglecting language. It means organizing language around experiences that are immediate to students.”

Critical theory on youtube:•What’s Critical Pedagogy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFOhVdQt27c

Conversation with Paulo Freire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFWjnkFypFA&feature=related

Conversation with Henry Giroux:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCs6XkT3-o

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF TESOL QUARTERLY SPECIAL ISSUE ON CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN ELTGet into groups of 4-5. Pick one article that presents critical ways to ELT. Discuss the article based on your undestanding of Pennycook’s Transformative Pedagogies:

• Critical Literacy article• Critical Pedagogy in Brazil• Community based approach to Critical pedagogy• Becoming Black• Participatory education for immigrant women

How do these studies explain transformative pedagogy? Do you see signs of pedagogy of engagement/problemitizing practice/notion of learner autonomy in this study? What are the research questions? What are the data collection methods? What are the findings?

What is your definition of a language teacher?How do you define classrooms and classroom interaction?

CREATE YOUR GROUP’S VISUAL VISUAL ART ON LANGUAGE EDUCATION:

IN GROUPS OF THREE, DRAW A METAPHOR FOR YOUR DEFINITION OF TEACHER AND CLASSROOM FROM A POST-METHOD PEDAGOGY PERSPECTIVE