SHARE
An Electronic Magazine by Omar Villarreal and Marina
Kirac ©
Year 7
Number 165 May 5th 2006
10,232 SHARERS
are reading this issue of SHARE this week
__________________________________________________________
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of
the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being SHARED
__________________________________________________________
Dear SHARERS,
This has been a rather difficult week. I have been down
with flue since Wednesday. And the worst nightmare has become true: now
I passed it on to her. It´s incredible how necessary
she is to “organize our lives”. Sebas, Martin and I are trying to survive
in style (if you can call pizzas and empanadas “surviving in style”),
Tomorrow (let us hope it´s a bit warmer) I´m off to Chivilcoy
for a visit to one of the seats of the Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa of UTN.
I still feel a bit under the weather but I cannot (and do not want to) postpone
it. I have been eagerly anticipating this trip and my meeting with the new
Licenciandos for some weeks now.
All my friends are telling me I should get vaccinated
against flue but ( I must confess) I´m a bit scared. Maybe when this bout
of flue goes away I might reconsider (notice the use of the modal, please)
Love
Omar and Marina
______________________________________________________________________
In SHARE 165
2.- What is Radical Constructivism?
3.- Action Research in the Foreign Language Classroom.
4.- Seminario de la Asociación Pampeana de Profesores de Inglés
5.- II Jornadas de Lectura y Escritura en Catamarca
6.- Maestría en Educación en la UBA.
7.- Concurso Docente.
8.- The Second Anglia Examination Syndicate International Congress
9.- A Course on Teaching Adults.
10.- News from the British Council.
11.- Encuentro de Capacitación Docente sobre problemáticas del
aula en tiempos de crisis.
12.- The Buenos Aires Journal - Revista online en inglés y castellano
13.- Workshop In Corrientes.
14.- Shakespeare On Screen At The British Arts Centre
15.- BRAZ -TESOL 10th National Convention.
16.- Ninth IATEFL Conference in Chile.
17.- Presentación de un Libro en la Academia Nacional de Educación.
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1.- “ENGLISH IS THE KEY TO A BETTER
LIFE FOR THE POOR”
Our
dear SHARER Gabriela Romero Segura from
Development,
culture and language: ethical concerns in a postcolonial world
by Alastair Pennycook
Introduction
On
the first page of a recent edition (October 99, Issue # 237) of the EL Gazette
(‘English Language Journal Opening Doors Across the World’), a picture of
laughing children (announcing ‘News Analysis’ on page 3) is accompanied by
the subtitle "English is key to a better life for the poor". On
p.2 the editorial explains further that "for many of the world’s poorest
people, English can hold the key to escape from grinding poverty" (emphasis
in original). And finally on p.3 the article itself carries the title "English
language could be the key to a better life for the underprivileged",
and the subtitle "The benefits of primary English language teaching are
finally being recognized". Alongside an interesting question of modality
as the headlines move from "English is key" to "English can
hold the key" to "English language could be the key", these
statements go to the heart of some of the issues that need to be addressed
in the context of language and development.
The
article itself argues that the benefits of primary school English language
teaching have long been overlooked. Suggesting that English teaching has often
been the domain of the privileged, aimed at overseas travel, tertiary education
and so on, the article argues that by introducing widespread English into
the primary sector, there will be greater access for all, and a greater democratisation
of English. This is because "the impact of communication in English is
immense: it affects those normally excluded from development. Rural workers
now speak to the outside world through mobile phones, and write only using
the Internet, both of which may be powered by solar energy. The real impact
of the Internet is that anyone can make contact almost anywhere in the world
immediately, and much of this contact is conducted in English."
So
English is widely used, particularly in new technologies, parents around the
world are demanding greater access to English, and therefore to provide more
English at the primary level will enhance development. Seductive though such
an argument may appear, there are several fundamental flaws. First, there
are numerous questionable assumptions in this argument: Which rural workers
have mobile phones? What languages would they use to speak to "the outside
world"? Who has access to computers and the Internet? What actually are
the languages of the Internet?. Second, there are some deeper questions we
need to ask here: Does parental demand amount to a sufficient reason for wider
provision? What may actually be the results of wider provision of English
in schools? And most importantly for this discussion here, how might such
access to English be linked to poverty, inequality and development?
I
shall deal with these first two issues very briefly. The problem with the
parental demand argument is that although on the one hand it looks like a
basic question of educational equity, the issue is often one of parents demanding
access to the language that inequitably divides social, educational and economic
access. Hong Kong has been a good example of this: parental demand produced
extensive schooling in English, which did not have the effect of giving people
greater access to resources; rather, it gave people an inadequate education
both of and through their first language. The second question has to do with
the need to look very carefully at primary school education, much of which
around the world suffers from immense lack of resources. We need to ask how
limited resources can best be employed in order to provide more opportunities
for children in general, for girls more particularly, many of whom still receive
little or no schooling, and for other impoverished and disadvantaged groups.
That may be instruction in mother tongues, other languages, literacy, health,
agriculture, basic economics, any number of local concerns. Unless we look
at the particular contexts of schooling, the funding available, the local
needs, the type of access and so on, it is impossible to determine what role
education in English might play, or what detrimental effects it might have.
But
the key question here is how might English — and other languages — be related
to development. There appear to be two basic sets of propositions in the arguments
outlined above, both of which are problematic. On the one hand is the idea
that language education, and particularly English language education, may
cause development. The suggestion above that the presence of English in a
school curriculum may in fact have negative consequences in terms of keeping
other, more useful, languages and subjects out, already points to the issue
that English may be negatively related to development. At the very least,
for some sort of causality to be shown, the argument would need to be based
on far more complex understandings about how language education may be related
to change. The second major problem is that the argument above only suggests
that English may help people "escape from grinding poverty". Thus,
any form of gain is discussed in terms of individual or group escape rather
than systemic change. It seems to me that if we want to discuss a relationship
between language and development, we need to address ways in which language
education may be related to other forms of positive change rather than in
terms of escape. Indeed it might well be argued that escape from poverty through
English (which still in any case needs to be demonstrated) perpetuates inequality
and holds back development since it only provides access (for some) to inequitably
distributed resources rather than change the distribution of those resources.
At the very least, we need to understand these issues as related in complex,
contextual ways. Indeed at this point, we need to address a whole series of
questions about what we mean by development, how language education may be
related to it, and what different contextual factors may lead to very different
configurations of useful language education for different people in different
places.
Language in relationship
with development
In
this paper, therefore, I want to discuss some of the basic problems involved
in language and development. First of all, I would like to dwell on some different
possible relationships between the notions of language and development. Given
that our overall topic here is not language development (therefore to do with
language learning and teaching themselves) but rather with language AND development,
we need to ask how the processes of language learning and teaching may be
related to broader processes of social, cultural, political and economic development.
The ‘and’ here suggests little more than a conjunction of terms. If we substitute
various prepositions for this, however, we get various other possibilities:
Language as development, language in development, language for development,
and language of development. Language as development is akin to the notion
discussed above, where language development is in itself the developmental
goal.
In
this sense, then, which might be glossed as ‘language teaching and external
funding’, development is an assumed goal of external funders — aid organizations,
the World Bank, NGOs etc — and language education is one particular funded
aspect of development programs. Development in this context, therefore, comes
to mean little more than improving language education with funding from outside
both state and commercial systems. This, then, is the first possible meaning
of language and development, where language development (i.e. improvements
in language education, particularly in dominant languages such as English)
is assumed to equate with overall development.
While
making language usefully central to our concerns here, this first meaning
suggests that language development is the same as language and development.
Language for development, by contrast, tends to distance the two processes,
suggesting that the main issue here is one of improving language capacities
so that people can better participate in development projects. Thus, while
on the one hand this usefully distances itself from the assumption that language
improvement is development, on the other hand this position tends to accord
only a functional role to language as a tool to gain access to the development
process. In terms of English language teaching, language for development is
concerned merely with teaching English in order that people can participate
in business, agriculture, trade and the like. Language in development (and
cf Markee, 1999) seems to take
us further than these two positions by asking what the role of language education
may be in relationship to processes of development. Of course, this still
leaves open the question of what development may be, but it enables us to
see language education not as development in itself, nor as merely a tool
to gain access to development, but rather as an important interrelated piece
of the puzzle. Finally, language of development points to a very different
issue, namely the need to look at the discourses of development, the ways
in which development is constructed as a field of practice and knowledge.
I shall return later to discuss the question of the importance of always looking
at the language of development while we try at the same time to work out how
language may operate in development.
In
order to try to open up discussion of this issue, I shall look at three related
sets of problems: the problem of development, the problem of culture and the
problem of language. The first set of questions have to do with the whole
notion of development and the relatively recent addition of the notion of
sustainability to development. A crucial question here is: What images of
development and sustainability are put into place by language programs? This
leads to the second set of issues: What images of cultural difference and
what forms of cultural exchange are produced in language programs? And finally:
What images of language are conveyed through language programs and how do
these relate to culture and development? In the conclusion I shall return
to the question: What broad considerations does this suggest for language
and development?
The
problem of development
Development
has of course come in for a great deal of criticism over the years. Of particular
significance was the work that showed how much development aid was ultimately
self-interested: it only served to recreate bonds of economic dependency (see,
for example, Preston, 1986). Although
there is considerable debate about when the current notion of development
came in to being , it is nevertheless useful to observe that economic advantage
was for a long time at the heart of much imperial education policy. According
to the 1854 Despatch from the East India Company, which was to set the educational
policy in India and elsewhere for the rest of the century and beyond, and
which put firmly in place a principal of the moral duty to educate and a policy
of vernacular education, there were more material reasons for providing education
to the Indian population, since such an education will teach the natives of
India the marvellous results of the employment of labor and capital, rouse
them to emulate us in the development of the vast resources of their country,
guide them in their efforts and gradually, but certainly, confer upon them
all the advantages which accompany the healthy increase of wealth and commerce;
and, at the same time, secure to us a larger and more certain supply of many
articles necessary for our manufactures and extensively consumed by all classes
of our population, as well as an almost inexhaustible demand for the produce
of British labor. (Bureau
of Education, 1922, p. 365)
A
critique that only looks at economic concerns, however, has a number of shortcomings:
Since it is based on the premise that the notion of development was disingenuous
because it in fact sought economic servility rather than independence, it
suggests that where economic gain can be shown to have occurred, presumably
this was then development. But as many other critiques suggest, alongside
the notion of economic development, many other problematic relations are put
into play, including development as: patronising charity politics, a eurocentric
model of progress, and a discourse that represents and produces the Other.
Criticising
aid programs for their failure to incorporate local needs and ideas, Morris (1991) argues that
development aid is frequently an attempt to assuage "the collective guilt
induced by the legacy of our colonial predecessors" (p.1). Thus, rather
than being aimed principally at helping in the process of development, its
central concern is with assisting Europeans with their guilt over the past.
This view, Morris suggests, rests on what he sees as "a peculiarly Christian
insistence on the ultimate triumph of altruism" (p.3). Like landed gentry
handing out food at the gates of their mansions, this aspect of development
has more to do with using charity to improve how one feels about oneself rather
than actually trying to change inequitable conditions.
A
major focus of critique is that models of development have been profoundly
eurocentric, conflating development, modernization and westernization, and
promoting particular worldviews, cultures and technicist rationalism. Thus,
the whole notion of development was based on the notion that in order to become
more developed, societies needed to follow a ‘western’ pattern of modernization,
politics, economy, education, language policy, and so on. The assumptions
of European and American superiority that underpin such a view have a long
history: According to McGee (1995), "in
the sense of the assumption of European supremacy, New Zealand, Australia
and American attitudes towards their Pacific neighbours are no different from
the French or the British towards Indo-China or the Middle East during the
colonial period" (p.194). Thus, even if colonial exploitation is no longer
the context in which development is promoted, the assumptions about the path
it should take remain the same.
While
the eurocentrism of development models frequently leads to a singular path
of upwards development, it also simultaneously produces images of the Other,
images of non-development that need to be overcome. Arturo Escobar (1995), in his fierce
critique of the ways in which "the ‘Third World’ has been produced by
the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early
post-World War II period" (p.4), argues that development discourse "
has been the central and most ubiquitous operator of the politics of representation
and identity in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the post-World
War II period" (p.214). According to Escobar these areas of the world
have suffered "a succession of regimes of representation" that originate
in colonialism and continue into the discourses of modernity. "From the
will to civilization in the nineteenth century to today, violence has been
engendered through representation" (p.214). Thus, as Escobar reminds
us, "in many places there are worlds that development, even today and
at this moment, is bent on destroying" (p.226). It is this concern that
can be taken up by a focus on the language of development, an issue to which
I shall return.
Sustainable development
Despite
these critiques of the concept of development, there remains a need to have
available some notion of possible development, betterment or improvement.
The notion of sustainable development has, to some extent, stepped into the
gap here, linked as it is to notions of local involvement, continuity, and
ecological soundness. The notion of ‘sustainable development’, however, is
by no means unitary or uncontested. Streeten (unpublished manuscript cited
in Goulet, 1995) suggests a
range of different meanings of sustainable development: 1. The maintenance,
replacement and growth of capital assets; 2. Maintaining the physical environment
for people’s well-being; 3. Developing a resilient system that can resist
shocks and strains; 4. Avoiding burdening future generations with debts; 5.
Political and administrative sustainability (participation); 6. Handing over
projects to local participants. All share the common goal of concern for the
future and the viability of the project in the long term. On the other hand,
they differ in terms of their focus on capital accumulation, the environment,
resistant systems, avoiding debt, involving local participants, and handing
projects over. Language in sustainable development programs may be viewed
along similar lines, covering anything from an economically sustainable program,
or a hope that external funding will go on forever, to a focus on local involvement,
handing the program over to local management, or even making discussion of
the larger context of sustainable development part of the curriculum. I shall
return to these issues later.
But
not only are the meanings of sustainable development varied; it is also a
contested notion. As Redclift (1994) points out,
to the extent that sustainability is wedded to the notion of development,
it represents something of a high-water mark of the modernist tradition. And
yet, since many proponents of sustainable development also argue that sustainable
development must be based on local, cultural understandings of the environment,
development and change, sustainability also seems wedded to a more postmodernist
vision of difference. Thus there is an interesting tension between the modernist
progressivism of development discourse and the postmodern particularism of
aspects of sustainability. Other critiques have also pointed out that this
move to take greater account of local participation still nevertheless continue
with many of the great exclusions that marked modernist development discourse.
Thus, feminist critiques of sustainable development have pointed to the continued
exclusion and marginalization of women from development paradigms (Harcourt, 1994).
It
has also been suggested that sustainable development has become something
of an unquestioned given, a notion so linked to the moral discourses of enviromentalism
that it is hard to question its practices. Adams (1995) suggests that
in spite of the multiple meanings of the notion, sustainable development has
"colonized academic discussion of development", and is rarely given
any careful scrutiny or critical analysis (p.87). The discourse of sustainable
development, he argues, has its origins not so much in development theory
as in "Northern environmentalism" (p.88), and thus it is tied more
to a form of environmental moralising than to more direct concerns for local
participation in local based projects for improvement of different conditions.
Looking at the ways in which sustainable development derives from "technocentrist
environmentalism", Adams argues that it "shares the dominant industrialist
and modernist ideology of ...developmentalism", based as it is on rational
capitalist planning models (pp. 89-90). Thus, sustainable development may
be seen "as simply one more transient label on the trickle of capital
flows of aid donors from the industrialized North, and something that allowed
‘business as usual’ by international capital" (p.99).
Escobar (1995) argues along
similar lines when he suggests that the introduction of the notion of sustainable
development, "inaugurated a period of unprecedented gluttony in the history
of vision and knowledge with the concomitant rise of a global ‘ecocracy’"
(p.193). According to Escobar, sustainable development remains locked within
a logic of management, a world in which "The Western scientist continues
to speak for the Earth" (p.194), a view of the world in which ‘development
experts’ can help poor countries move smoothly towards development by a process
of rational planning. Adams (1995) also links
sustainable development to Northern ‘preservationism’ as it seeks to protect
and conserve: "By the 1970s, international conservation was as much part
of the growing global hegemony of western culture as capitalist economic development
and industrialization were part of the project of ‘developmentalism’"
(p.93). This notion of ‘preservationism’ is a crucial one here since it links
both to the broader question of representation and to concerns in language
maintenance (see below). Such preservationism may be seen as part of an Orientalist
drive to create a notion of an idealised past in which all was sustainable:
"Efforts in the post-colonial world to reinvent a pre-colonial Eden that
never existed in fact have been no less violent in their scripting of identity
than those that practice domination in the name of development" (Manzo, 1995: 238). I shall
return to these issues later.
To
conclude this brief discussion of (sustainable) development, it is worth reiterating
the point that although we need some model of possible development here (the
argument is not that development cannot or does not happen), there are also
several problematic elements of development discourse that raise important
questions for the following discussion of language and culture: Development,
it seems almost by definition, seems to imply an upward, linear path of development
that is easily conflated with notions of modernization and westernization;
the addition of a notion of sustainability or of alternative development does
not do enough to destabilise the discursive relations this puts in place;
development puts into play a series of representations which continue to construct
the recipients of development aid as backward, underdeveloped, static, traditional;
sustainable development and related constructs often lead to a model of ‘preservation’.
The
problem of language
While
we need to problematize the notions of development and sustainable development,
we are also faced by a particular challenge related to language: what models
of language in the world are we using to understand the role of language education
in development? In this section, then, I shall discuss a range of possible
understandings of English in the world in order to see how they relate to
questions of development. These models I shall term the colonial celebratory,
laissez-faire liberalism, modernization, imperialism, linguistic hybridity,
and postcolonial performativity.
Colonial-celebration
I
do not intend to dwell on this position in detail since a number of us have
already documented it at length (see, for example, Bailey, 1991; Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1998b). Simply put,
this is a position that trumpets the benefits of English (or, of course, other
languages in other contexts) over other languages, suggesting that English
has both intrinsic (the nature of the language) and extrinsic (the functions
of the language) qualities superior to other languages. I use the term colonial
in conjunction with celebratory here because I believe these celebrations
of the spread of English, its qualities and characteristics, have a long and
colonial history, and form part of what I have elsewhere called the ‘adherence
of discourses’ (1998b), the ways in which particular discourses adhere to
English. Although I am giving this position short thrift here, it is worth
observing that it is backed up by a very long history of glorifying English,
and that it remains extremely popular, as shown by the public response to
writers such as Honey (1997). Most importantly,
this view has no place for a sense of diversity: to promote diversity is simply
to deny people access to the most important language of our time, English.
Modernization
The
second framing of English sees its significance less in terms of inherent
internal qualities and more in terms of the roles that English is deemed to
play in the process of development and modernization. There are several ways
in which these connections are drawn: First, English is assumed to be a language
that is better suited for modern use, for science, technology, global communication,
and so forth. Hogben’s (1963) proposal
for Essential World English, for example, suggests a global role for English
in which it serves people around the world as a "medium of communication
about what will matter to most of us in what we hope will be the One World
of Tomorrow" (p.7), a universal second language "for informative
communication across their own frontiers about issues of common interest to
themselves and others" (p.20), while other languages play a role as "a
home tongue for love-making, religion, verse-craft, back chat and inexact
topics in general" (p.20). This pernicious dichotomy survives in many
more recent formulations of English as the global language of communication,
with local languages relegated only to the role of local, personal, traditional
topics. According to Hogben all language planners agree that we need a bilingual
world "in which one language has priority by common consent as the sole
medium of informative communication between speech communities which properly
prefer to retain their native habits of discourse for reasons which have little
or no relevance to the exacting semantic demands of science" (pp. 28-9).
As Dua (1994) has argued
in the context of India, such a formula needs to be resisted if other languages
are to be given a chance to play other than these ‘traditional’ roles.
This
construction of English as the language best suited to the modern world is
constantly bolstered by images of English that associate it with computers,
technology, science, tourism, diplomacy, internationalisation, globalisation,
modern financial markets, the internet, e-learning, whatever is new. Such
images are constantly produced in advertising for language schools, English
language teaching conferences, textbooks, and other products associated with
English. We live now amid a vast number of visual and graphic associations
between English and modernization. Finally, English is linked to processes
of modernization not only as the most modern of languages, but also through
its supposed role as the means to social and material change. Thus, as in
the discussion above of English as the key to poverty, the very presence and
use of English is seen as indelibly linked to processes of modernization.
As I suggested, any such connections need to be demonstrated not assumed;
and the role of English in potentially changing people’s lives must be seen
in the context of the potential harms it may bring to other languages, and
the role it may play in the reproduction of inequality.
Recent
debates in the Philippines about the notion of English for Global Competitiveness
point to some of these concerns. As Ordoñez (1999) put it "English
continues to occupy the place of privilege — it being the language of the
ruling system, government, education, business and trade, and diplomacy...
English for global competitiveness fits into the type of education that would
conform to the requirements of an export-oriented economy pushed by the IMF-World
Bank for the Philippines" (p.19). Ordoñez goes on to suggest that "The
role of Philippine education ... seems to be that of supplying the world market
economy with a docile and cheap labor force who are trained in English and
the vocational and technical skills required by that economy. As it is we
do have a decided advantage in the export market of domestic helpers and labourers.
Cite their knowledge of English as that advantage" (p.20). Santos (1999) suggests that
"to push our global competitiveness as a people and as a nation with
and through English Studies, we must be sensitive to the cultural violence
that the pursuit of such a goal had wrought on our people in this ending century,
and must yet impose on majority of our people at the present time" (p.25).
Such discussions raise much more serious concerns for how we might understand
relationships between English, development and modernization.
Laissez-faire
liberalism
The
most common line on English within the fields of English language teaching
and applied linguistics tends to take a more ‘neutral’ line than either the
colonial-celebratory or modernization arguments, espousing what I call a liberal
laissez-faire attitude. The most recent example of this line of thinking is
David Crystal’s (1997) globally
marketed book on the global spread of English. What Crystal tries to argue
for is a complementarity between a support for the benefits of English as
a global means of communication and the importance of multilingualism, a balance
between the dual values of "international intelligibility" and "historical
identity". On the one hand we have all the advantages created by the
spread of English: ease of communication, global travel and communication
etc; while on the other we work to sustain local cultures and traditions.
All we need in this way of thinking is to celebrate universalism while maintaining
diversity. The TESOL organization also reflects this naive liberal idealism
in its mission statement "to strengthen the effective teaching and learning
of English around the world while respecting individuals’ language rights".
Unfortunately
the very seductiveness of this easy formulation makes its social and political
naivety dangerous. Reviewing Crystal’s book, for example, John Hanson (former
director-general of the British Council) is able to view everything in terms
of individual choice. For Hanson, the spread of English is the result of "countless
millions of acts of choice, by students, teachers, employers and the employed
who have no interest in the health, future, spread, or whatever of the English
language. What ‘drives’ them is a view of their job prospects, their relationship
with the rest of the world, their excitement in youth culture, a wish to be
insiders, to be in touch" (1997: 22). Such a view of individual agency
and choice fails to account for social, cultural, political and economic forces
that compromise and indeed produce such choices. And such a view leads all
too easily back to a colonial-celebratory mode: "English speakers, relax:
English is streets ahead and fast drawing away from the rest of the chasing
pack...On it still strides: we can argue what globalisation is until the cows
come home — but that globalisation exists is beyond question, with English
its accompanist. The accompanist is, of course, indispensable to the performance"
(ibid.).
Once
again, these liberal laissez-faire views are inadequate because they fail
to account for the power of English, and thus the inequitable relationship
between English and local languages. A simplistic view of complementary language
use — English will be used for international and some intranational uses,
while local languages will be used for local uses — does not take into account
the far more complex social and political context of language use. As Dua (1994) points out,
looking at the context of India, such a view is quite inadequate: "the
complementarity of English with indigenous languages tends to go up in favour
of English partly because it is dynamic and cumulative in nature and scope,
partly because it is sustained by socioeconomic and market forces and partly
because the educational system reproduced and legitimatizes the relations
of power and knowledge implicated with English" (p.132). Phillipson (1999) has recently
argued that Crystal’s attempt to describe the global spread of English in
‘neutral’, ‘apolitical’ terms results in nothing but "an uncritical endorsement
of capitalism, its science and technology, a modernization ideology, monolingualism
as a norm, ideological globalization and internationalization, transnationalization,
the Americanization and homogenization of world culture, linguistic, culture
and media imperialism" (p. 274). Thus, the ideology of laissez-faire
liberalism, with its emphases on personal choice, neutrality and complementarity
may be seen as potentially the most dangerous of these three paradigms.
Language ecology, language
rights, linguistic imperialism
Arguing
against apolitical understandings of English, Dua (1994) goes on to
argue that "It must be realized that language is basically involved with
class, power and knowledge. Unless the newly emerging classes associated with
the Indian languages organize themselves into counter-hegemonic struggle and
fight for a different political, social and cultural arrangement of power
and knowledge, they will not only fail in constraining the expanding and strengthening
hold of English but also contribute to the marginalization of their languages
and cultures. They will thus betray the cause of both the language and cultural
renaissance and the destiny of [hu]mankind" (p.133).
A
number of approaches to language planning have developed frameworks for starting
to address such concerns. Tollefson’s (1991) ‘historical-structural’
approach to language planning views language policy as "one mechanism
by which the interests of dominant sociopolitical groups are maintained and
the seeds of transformation are developed" (p.32). Tollefson’s ultimate
interests in looking at language policy are to work towards a more equitable
world: "To understand the impact of language policy upon the organization
and function of society, language policy must be interpreted within a framework
which emphasizes power and competing interests. That is, policy must be seen
within the context of its role in serving the interests of the state and the
groups that dominate it" (p.201). Tollefson goes on to argue for the
importance of an understanding of language rights. This means that we need
to go beyond a general respect for diversity and instead view access to education
and other domains of use of the mother tongue as a fundamental human right:
"A commitment to democracy means that the use of the mother tongue at
work and in school is a fundamental human right" (p.211).
A
similar perspective has also been developed by Robert
Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. Drawing on Tsuda’s
(1994) distinction between a "diffusion-of-English paradigm" and
an "Ecology-of-language paradigm", Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas
(1996) argue that rather than accepting policies that promote the global spread
of English, we should work towards the preservation of language ecologies.
This notion of language ecology suggests the importance of "the cultivation
and preservation of languages" (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1996:
441) in a way parallel to how we understand natural ecologies. M?hlhäusler (1996) has developed
this idea considerably, arguing that the introduction of languages and literacy
into particular language ecologies may have devastating affects on other languages
and their uses. Taken alone, however, the language ecology metaphor is limited
since it relies so heavily on a notion of what is ‘natural’ and therefore
on what may at times appear a conservative notion of preservation (and compare
my earlier comments about ‘preservationism’ and sustainable development).
Conservation may easily slide into conservativism. Like M?hlhäusler and Tsuda,
therefore, Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas consider two components essential
to this view of language ecology: the external threat posed by dominant languages
such as English (linguistic imperialism), and the grounds for arguing for
internal support for minority languages (language rights).
A
term that Skutnabb-Kangas (1998) makes central
to her view of the inequitable allocation of language rights is ‘linguicism’.
Linguicism, she argues — akin to racism and ethnicism — is a sort of "linguistically
argued racism" (1998: 16), a process by which an unequal division of
power is produced and maintained according to a division between groups on
the basis of the language they speak. Phillipson has taken up this term and
looked specifically at one form of such linguicism, namely what he calls "linguistic
imperialism", and particularly English linguistic imperialism. It is
important to view Phillipson’s arguments on linguistic imperialism in this
light, for although his concerns about the global spread of English can be
taken on their own, they are also deeply connected with this threat to linguistic
human rights. What Phillipson tries to do is to show that there are significant
relationships between frameworks of global imperialism — that is to say continuing
relationships of global inequality in terms, following Galtung (1980) of economic,
political, military, communicative (communication and transport), cultural
and social imperialism — and the global spread of English. English linguistic
imperialism Phillipson defines in the following way: "the dominance of
English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution
of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages
(1992: 47). That is to say, the dominant role of English in the world today
is maintained and promoted through a system both of material or institutional
structures (for example through English maintaining its current position as
the dominant language of the Internet) and of ideological positions (arguments
that promote English as a superior language).
The
important point with Phillipson’s view is to understand what it can and cannot
do. As he suggests, the issue for him is "structural power" (p.72),
not intentions, and not local effects. He is interested in "English linguistic
hegemony" which can be understood as "the explicit and implicit
beliefs, purposes, and activities which characterize the ELT profession and
which contribute to the maintenance of English as a dominant language"
(p.73). Thus, it is the ways that English is promoted through multiple agencies
and to the exclusion of other languages that is the issue. What this of course
lacks is a view of how English is taken up, how people use English, why people
choose to use English. As Canagarajah (1999a) comments, "In considering
how social, economic, governmental, and cultural institutions effect inequality,
his perspective becomes rather too impersonal and global. What is sorely missed
is the individual, the particular. It is important to find out how linguistic
hegemony is experienced in the day-to-day life of the people and communities
in the periphery. How does English compete for dominance with other languages
in the streets, markets, homes, schools, and villages of periphery communities?"
(pp. 43-44). Thus, if a framework such as Phillipson's is used only to map
out ways in which English has been deliberately spread, and to show how such
policies and practices are connected to larger global forces, it can be useful.
But the moment it slips into apparently implying effects of such promotion,
it is limited. What Phillipson shows, therefore, is how and for what purposes
English is deliberately promoted and spread. What he does not show is the
effects of that spread in terms of what people do with English. It is perhaps
the very power of Phillipson’s framework that is also its weakness.
The
main mode of opposition to this external threat posed by dominant languages
is through a notion of language rights (Phillipson
and Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996; Phillipson, 1998; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1998). Reviewing
various documents on human rights, they suggest that there is little provision
for the positive right to education in a mother tongue. Thus, Skutnabb-Kangas
argues, "we are still living with linguistic wrongs" which are a
product of the belief ("monolingual reductionism") in the normality
of monolingualism and the dangers of multilingualism to the security of the
nation state. Both, she suggests, are dangerous myths. "Unless we work
fast", she argues, "excising the cancer of monolingual reductionism
may come too late, when the patient, the linguistic (and cultural) diversity
in the world, is already beyond saving" (p.12). What is proposed , then,
is that the "right to identify with, to maintain and to fully develop
one’s mother tongue(s)" should be acknowledged as "a self-evident,
fundamental individual linguistic human right" (p.22). These "universal
linguistic human rights should be guaranteed for an individual in relation
to the mother tongue(s), in relation to an official language (and thus in
relation to bilingualism), in relation to a possible language shift, and in
relation to drawing profit from education as far as the medium of education
is concerned" (1998: 22; emphasis in original). This, then, is a powerful
argument in favour of the support for diversity in terms of fundamental human
rights. Where laissez-faire liberalism supports diversity in terms of pluralism
for its own sake, and within a framework a comfortable complementarity with
other languages, the language rights argument supplies a moral imperative
to support minority languages as they are threatened by other languages. It
is the strength of this position that gives weight to Tollefson’s (1991) demand that
an applied linguist committed to democracy must also show "a commitment
to the struggle for language rights" (p.211).
Powerful
though such arguments are, there are also some concerns here. First, there
is at times a tendency to slip into simplistic dichotomizations: Skutnabb-Kangas
(1998), for example, talks of the way language perpetuates the division between
"the A-team, the elites of the world, and the B-team, the dominated,
ordinary people" (p.16). Such dichotomising between the "haves and
have-nots" can obscure social realities far more than they reveal them.
Second, there is a related tendency to then suggest that those that have rights
have full access to all aspects of language, while those without such rights
do not: "Linguistic majorities, speakers of a dominant language, usually
enjoy all those linguistic human rights which can be seen as fundamental,
regardless of how they are defined. Most linguistic minorities do not enjoy
these rights. It is only a few hundred of the world’s 6-7,000 languages that
have any kind of official status, and it is only speakers of official languages
who enjoy all linguistic human rights" (Phillipson,
Rannut and Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994: 1-2; emphasis in original).
My concern here is that while an important struggle is being fought here on
one front, on another there is a problem that the belief that speakers of
"official languages" enjoy "all linguistic human rights"
may overlook many other concerns to do with access and representation in language,
concerns that are significant for speakers of both official and non-official
languages (see Pennycook, 1998a).
Others
concerns have to do with the difficulties in translating broad appeals to
language rights into legal definitions, and in using the notion of human rights
as a universal concept. Coulmas (1998), for example,
draws attention to the problems involved in defining what a language and a
speech community is (see also Pennycook, 1998a) and the problems
in getting states to adhere to such necessarily vague definitions. "While
general proclamations of linguistic human rights may not do much harm,"
he suggests, "it is doubtful that they can be translated into law"
(p.72). Rassool (1998) and I (Pennycook, 1998a) have also
questioned the possibility of using human rights discourse as an unacceptably
fundamentalist claim to morality in the contemporary world. Rassool argues
that the complex, interconnected nature of the modern world means we have
to investigate other ways of looking at questions of language rights: "in
the light of these dynamic changes taking place globally and nationally can
the argument for a universalizing
discourse on cultural and linguistic pluralism be sustained?" (p.98).
Finally, Coulmas also asks whether the notion
that language shift is necessarily a catastrophe may be a passing ideological
fashion, based as it is on a "nineteenth-century romantic idea that pegs
human dignity as well as individual and collective identity to individual
languages" (1998: 71). Thus, while these perspectives take us far beyond
the apolitical stances outlined above, while it is clearly the case that many
languages are under threat, and while there are strong arguments to be made
in favour of educational and other rights in mother tongues, there remain
questions about the extent to which a model of linguistic imperialism and
language rights is adequate for the task of understanding how languages are
used.
Linguistic hybridity
Rajagopalan (1999) critiques
the notion of linguistic imperialism and suggests that "the very charges
being pressed against the hegemony of the English language and its putative
imperialist pretensions themselves bear the imprint of a way of thinking about
language moulded in an intellectual climate of excessive nationalist fervour
and organized marauding of the wealth of alien nations — an intellectual climate
where identities were invariably thought of in all-or-nothing terms"
(1999: 201). Thus Rajagopolan is suggesting that the critical discourse employed
by notions such as linguistic imperialism draw on the same modernist European
frameworks that have been the cause of precisely what they seek to critique.
In place of linguistic imperialism, Rajagopalan argues for a ‘world Englishes’
perspective that focuses on how languages change and adapt. This perspective
(see, for example, Kachru, 1990), which has
become something of an orthodoxy within applied linguistics, looks at the
many new and changing forms of English around the world, suggesting that rather
than an imperial imposition, the many new Englishes (Indian, Singaporean,
Nigerian etc) are hybrid forms produced by appropriating English.
Although
such an argument provides a useful corrective to an over-deterministic position
on linguistic imperialism, there are dangers with this position. While acknowledging
the problems with the absolutism of the notion of linguistic imperialism (LI),
Canagarajah (1999b) also takes
the world Englishes ‘linguistic hybridity’ (LH) position of Rajagopalan to
task for its apolitical relativism. "While LI is deterministic in perceiving
these constructs as always pliable in the hands of dominant forces, LH is
anti-nomian, in seeing them as perpetually unstable, and resisting control.
While LI is activist in struggling against hegemonic discourses to reconstruct
a more democratic order, LH leads to apathy (as languages are seen as deconstructing
themselves, transcending domination) or even playfulness (as the provision
of new meanings to these constructs is treated as subverting the status quo)."
(1999b: 207). Thus, in avoiding the determinism of some critical stances,
we need to be cautious not to slide back into apolitical relativism. We must
be cautious not to lose sight of the very real forces of global capital and
media while also seeking to understand the response to cultural and linguistic
spread and not assuming its instant effects.
Postcolonial performativity
In
trying to find a possible way of thinking about English that acknowledges
the significance of both the linguistic ecology/ imperialism/ rights perspective
and the notions of appropriation and hybridity, I have started thinking in
terms of what I term postcolonial performativity. Like Canagarajah (1999a), I think
we need both a political understanding of the global role of English and a
means to understand contextually how English is used, taken up, changed. The
notion of appropriation is crucial to postcolonialism, since a central part
of the postcolonial is not only a critique of the ‘metropolitan’ categories
of knowledge and culture, but also a taking over of and reuse of language,
culture and knowledge. But postcolonialism also demands that we work contextually.
Thus, in trying to explore further what I earlier (1994) termed the ‘worldliness
of English’, postcolonial performativity suggests that to understand what
role English plays in particular contexts we need specific sociologies of
those contexts. If we start to pursue such questions in terms of local contexts
of language, it becomes possible to consider using English not so much in
terms of some inevitable commonality, but rather — as with Judith Butler’s (1990) understanding
of gender as something performed rather than pregiven — as another form of
‘performativity’.
Thus
we need both a more complex understanding of globalization and a more complex
understanding of language. Appadurai (1990) suggests the
"new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping,
disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing
center-periphery models" (p.296). This position moves towards the "conceptualization
of global culture less in terms of alleged homogenizing processes (e.g., theories
which present cultural imperialism, Americanization and mass consumer culture
as a proto-universal culture riding on the back of Western economic and political
domination) and more in terms of the diversity, variety and richness of popular
and local discourses, codes and practices which resist and play-back systematicity
and order" (Featherstone, 1990: 2). >From
this point of view, both the liberal approach of Crystal, with its global
and local languages in mutual relationship, or the more critical view of Phillipson
and others, with its local diversity threatened by global homogeneity, may
be inadequate. But so too is a view that suggests that forms of language and
culture are easily taken up and changed. Thus, while never losing sight of
the very real forces of global capital and media, we need, at the very least,
to understand the response to cultural spread and not assume its instant effects.
As Claire Kramsch (1993) suggests,
we need to start thinking here of what is produced in cultural encounters,
not just homogeneity or heterogeneity, imperialism or resistance, but rather
what ‘third cultures’ or ‘third spaces’ are constantly being created.
The
problem of culture
Finally,
I want to suggest that one of the major problems that continues to constrain
successful language development (and other) projects is a lack of adequate
models for understanding and working with cultural difference in language
education. There are two principal concerns here: First, language education
has for too long been considered within a framework of language teaching methods,
which on the one hand discounts the much larger concerns of development and
language discussed above, and on the other hand, constructs language teaching
in terms of a Eurocentric path of upward progress. Second, much work in language
education and applied linguistics has operated with simplistic categorisations
of difference that construct identity along lines of fixed characteristics.
The developmental model
of Methods
The
history of language teaching has been dominated by a Eurocentric version of
the upward progression of teaching methods. The popular version of this myth
is that much of language teaching prior to the 20th century and most language
teaching outside the Western industrialised nations has been conducted according
to a so-called grammar-translation methodology. In the wealthy industrialised
nations this was then replaced by a revolution in language teaching that focused
on the Direct method, followed by a series of methods, starting with audiolingualism,
developed during and after WWII and employing structural linguistics and behaviourist
psychology, and then various contenders for method status, including the audiovisual
method, cognitive code, a cluster of new methods that emerged in the 1970s
including the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, and Total Physical Response; and
finally the modern era of communicative language teaching and task-based learning.
There
are several problems with this version of the history of language teaching
as an upward history of methods. First, the notion of methods itself is a
highly problematic, reductive way to think about language teaching (Pennycook, 1989). As Clarke (1983) suggests,
"the term ‘method’ is a label without substance" (p.109). This leads
to a narrow focus on what language teaching comprises (thus ignoring large
domains of language teaching, such as which languages get taught, or what
the cultural and ideological content of language teaching may be). Second,
this history is an ethnocentric and developmentalist history. It is a result
of a particular telling of history, a product of the "method boom"
(Stern, 1985: 249) of the
1970’s, an attempt to justify this faddish, market- and career-driven era
in North America by attempting to locate it within an unfolding history. Most
importantly, to the extent that this history presents an upward path of development,
from weaker methods to more modern teaching, it suggests a problematic progressivism,
whereby whatever is happening now is presumed to be superior to what happened
before.
Such
claims are often made by contrasting a modern "scientific approach to
the study of language and of language learning" with a past guided only
by tradition (Richards
and Rogers, 1986: 8). Yet, as Kelly’s (1969) work suggests,
the history of language teaching has been far more cyclical than linear: "Nobody
really knows what is new or what is old in present day language teaching procedures.
There has been a vague feeling that modern experts have spent their time in
discovering what other men[sic] have forgotten" 1969: ix). Thus, in the
international context this view of methods reproduces highly problematic scales
of relative development. As Tang and
Absalom (1998) suggest, much of the discussion of ELT in China
"concentrates on the ‘backwardness’ of Chinese EFL in the eyes of critics
who contrast it with Western methods often applied in ESL and second language
teaching" (p.118). Most of this writing, they suggest, "has become
polarised, focussing on the contrasts between the ‘traditional’ aspects of
Chinese EFL and the ‘progressive’ aspects of Western second language teaching"
(p.119).
The Othering of learners
If
on the one hand there has been a tendency to work with developmental models
of teaching methods that ignore alternative ways of teaching, and indeed consign
them to the category of ‘traditional’, there has also been a major tendency
to operate with static models of cultural difference, static definitions of
culture that dichotomise a West/East, Them/Us polarity of difference: what
I have termed maps of the other. Such maps have a long history and centre
around the process of fixing the Other. I could give dozens of such examples
(see Pennycook, 1998b) but I shall
illustrate my point with just one, drawn from an article on Chinese education
in A Cyclopedia of Education published in 1911 (Monroe, 1911), in which
Isaac Headland, professor in the Imperial University, Peking, explains that
there is nothing in the Chinese course of study in the
way of mathematics or science, or indeed in any line of thought, which will
tend to develop the thinking faculties, such as reason or invention, and hence
these faculties have lain dormant in the Chinese mind. They have never invented
anything. They have stumbled upon most of the useful, practical appliances of
life, and among these upon the compass, gunpowder, and printing, and, though
noted for their commercial astuteness, have lacked all power to develop them
into a commercial success. (p.635)
Here
we see repeated the classic colonial images of a dormant and passive people,
unable to think scientifically or produce commercially (two of the great virtues
of imperialism). Many such fixed cultural images have their origins in colonial
relations (see Pennycook, 1998b). As Alatas (1977) illustrates
in his book The Myth of the Lazy Native, the image of lazy Malays, Indonesians
and Filipinos was a view that developed under colonial rule as colonists combined
their derogatory images of native peoples with the view that they were lazy
if they did not participate in the colonial economy. This idea that native
peoples were lazy "was an important element in the ideology of colonial
capitalism. It was a major justification for territorial conquest, since the
degraded image of the native was basic to colonial ideology" (p.215).
Cultural fixity is not tied only to ‘negative’ images, however; other fixed
images may, to a degree, be seen as ‘positive’, such as "the friendly,
fun-loving Filipinos" or "the happy, gentle Thais", common
images revealed in a study by the Asian
Society (1979) of how Asia is represented in 260 American
textbooks.
I
have summarised the common constructions of difference to be found in applied
linguistic and ELT writing in the table above. Such ‘maps of the Other’ can
be seen as instances of Orientalism. Two recent articles have specifically
drawn this connection between Orientalism and ELT in Japan. Drawing on the
work of Said (1978) Susser (1998) convincingly
shows how a great deal of writing on ESL/EFL in Japan can be described as
Orientalist. Analysing writing on Japan according to the Said-inspired categories
of Othering (dichotomous productions of Self and Other; East and West; Confucian
and Christian), stereotyping (fixed assumptions about Japanese as group-oriented,
hierarchical, authoritarian, passive, silent); representing Japan typically
as homogeneous and harmonious; and essentializing by talking of ‘Japan’, ‘the
Japanese’. Susser concludes this comprehensive study of texts on Japan by
suggesting that "there is considerable Orientalism in the ESL/EFL literature
on Japan" (p.63). Thus, he suggests, the point "is not that there
are occasional stereotypes or factual errors; ... these fictions have been
woven into a pervasive discourse that shapes our descriptions and then our
perceptions of Japanese learners and classrooms" (p.64).
Kubota (1999) also looks
critically at ways in which Japanese and other cultures are constructed in
relationship to ELT. She points to the ways in which attempts to understand
cultural difference in language education "have tended to dichotomize
Western culture and Eastern culture and to draw rigid cultural boundaries
between them. They have given labels such as individualism, self-expression,
critical and analytic thinking, and extending knowledge to Western cultures
on the one hand, and collectivism, harmony, indirection, memorization, and
conserving knowledge to Asian cultures on the other" (p.14; emphasis
in original). As Kubota points out, such views are based on a form of cultural
determinism that reproduces colonial relations of Self and Other (and see
Pennycook, 1998b). Distinctions
such as extending knowledge vs conserving knowledge, for example, reproduce
the distinction between changing, developing and modern cultures on the one
hand, and static, conservative and traditional cultures on the other. As Kubota
goes on to show, the Japanese themselves have also played a role here with
their own particular productions of the uniqueness of Japanese culture.
Even
approaches that critique the cultural stereotypes prevalent in so much writing
on cultural difference in education still frequently reproduce the same cultural
dichotomizations. Thus Littlewood’s (1999) exploration
of learner autonomy in South East Asia criticises cultural stereotypes but
goes on to reproduce them in a series of charts with the proviso that they
are only tendencies and do not apply to everyone. Such an approach may criticise
the stereotype, but at the same time it reproduces the same patterns of difference,
thus failing to take into account the ways in which these categorisations
reproduce cultural fixity (see Pennycook, 1998b). Thus while
some work suggests a certain caution and argues that we should not overgeneralize,
or that these characteristics only apply to some people, this fails to account
for the question of representation, and the problem that such models still
produce forms of cultural fixity.
An
irony here is that work that seeks to ask the important question of appropriacy,
often then falls into this trap of reproducing cultural dichotomies. ‘Is communicative
language teaching appropriate in Vietnam?’, therefore, becomes a question
with the answer ‘no’ because ‘Western’ culture is like this and ‘Eastern’/Vietnamese
culture like that (cf. Achren and Keovilay, 1998) . Similarly, Adrian Holliday, in his key book,
on ‘Appropriate methodology’, problematizes simplistic cultural dichotomies
while at the same time putting into play broad dichotomous frameworks of collectionist
vs integrationist orientations suggesting that language educators in the public
sector in the less industrialized countries are "essentially collectionist",
rendering them predefined before they have had a chance to move.
Towards
appropriable pedagogies
To
conclude, I shall try to pull together the interrelated themes I have been
discussing here. I suggested that there are a number of difficulties in trying
to understand relationships between language and development. The notion of
development itself is a problematic category, all too often implying an upward,
linear path of progress that is easily conflated with notions of modernization
and westernization, and a series of representations which continue to construct
the recipients of development aid as backward, underdeveloped, static, and
traditional. As with views of English or of English language teaching as modern,
preferable and new, developmentalism divides the world in detrimental ways.
Sustainability has opened up new directions but does not escape the problematic
forms of representation put into play by developmentalism. Like the language
ecology paradigm and the static dichotomization of cultural difference, we
are left only with the possibility of ‘protectionism’.
In
addition, there has been inadequate work on establishing how language education
might be related to forms of development or change. Sustainable development
may be related to language projects in terms of keeping a language project
going, making sure that there will be funds for it to continue, that there
is enough local expertise for a project to continue, that a language development
project fosters independence and not dependence. But all these are internal
links that address the sustainability of a language project, not external
links that show how language education may be related to development. What
I want to ask, by contrast, is this: If we can assume that language and sustainable
development mean more than merely sustaining a language program, if, by analogy
with other issues in sustainable development that ask about the environment,
the legacy more broadly to future generations, then, I think we have a rather
different set of questions to pursue. How might language development projects
be seen not in terms of their own sustainability but in terms of wider questions
of sustainable development? I am concerned here not about the economy and
environment so much as issues to do with language and culture. How does a
certain language program relate to the sustainability and development of other
languages and cultures in the context in which it operates? How in working
in the area of language and development can we envisage a version of development
that avoids Eurocentrism, developmentalism, preservationism?
If,
for example, we consider Moffatt’s argument that an
implicit aspect of all definitions of sustainable development is "the
moral conviction and ethical desirability that the current generation should
pass on their inheritance of natural and cultural wealth, not unchanged, but
undiminished in potential, to support future generations" (p.32), then
we need to ask how (English) language education might try to achieve such
goals. If sustainable development ultimately hinges on an argument for the
ethical desirability of passing on an undiminished potential of cultural wealth,
this needs to be related more explicitly and carefully to changes in language
and literacy practices. Language in sustainable development needs to be understood
as both locally contingent and globally related, involving local participants
in shaping their globally connected lives. As Rassool (1999) puts it in
her discussion of literacy and sustainable development:
If…the concept of sustainable development highlights
the responsibility that we all share in shaping the world of the future, then
it follows that people must be provided with the skills, knowledges and
expertise to shape their own development priorities. Literacy defined within
the framework of sustainable development would therefore include a broad and
critical knowledge base, and an understanding of how societies function, and
the complex ways in which they are linked with global processes. As such, the
economic and political context should be created in which literacy provision
can be organized in a coherent and equitable way for all citizens within
different societies as part of the process of political enfranchisement (p.97).
It
may also be useful to distinguish between development in terms of having more
and being more (Goulet, 1995). The first
is always important as both a significant material base for survival and a
progressive improvement of the material conditions of life. But it is also
limited as a vision because it is too easily tied to an empty acquisitional
materialism, in which development is simply greater access to material goods.
The other side of the equation, then, concerns what it means to ‘be more’,
to have more possibilities. It is this vision that is expressed educationally
in Roger Simon’s (1992) notion of
a ‘pedagogy of possibility’. It is this that gives us a sense of education
not merely about providing the means of access to material goods but about
the possibility of envisioning other possible worlds. For language education,
then, we are faced by a an ethical question that asks not only does, say,
English provide access to social and economic advance, but also whether teaching
English opens up more possible worlds. How we understand the role of language,
and in particular of English, in this process will depend very much on the
models we use, from colonial celebratory, modernization or laissez-faire liberal
views that fail to problematize the role of English and its relationship to
other languages, to linguistic imperialism, language rights, language hybridity,
and postcolonial performative perspectives that give us ways of understanding
language in its political and ethical contexts. It depends very much how we
view English in relation to culture and development. What forms of culture
and knowledge may be related to English will depend very much on our different
views of English and then on how we go about teaching it.
Adrian Holliday’s (1994) work, as well as a number of other discussions
of teaching approaches in crosscultural contexts, aims to develop teaching
methodologies appropriate to the social and cultural context, based on much
greater understanding of classrooms and much greater collaboration between
what he sees as the ‘two wings’ of ELT. The notion of appropriacy, however,
while seemingly a desirable goal, may still put into play problematic dichotomies
and static forms of difference. Indeed, in the context of appropriacy models
of language variation, Fairclough (1992) has suggested
that they "help to endow prescriptivism with a relatively acceptable
face" (p37). In the guise of proposing appropriate competencies or performances
for different social contexts (rather than one normative vision), they nevertheless
operate with a normative and concealed notion of what is right and proper.
Such models, therefore, tend towards homogeneous and static descriptions of
difference.
Having
looked at ways in which language is taken up, played with, and creatively
used in classrooms in Vietnam, Kramsch and
Sullivan (1996) move beyond a call only for appropriate pedagogy:
"we can envisage the potential of an appropriate pedagogy which would,
at the same time, be a pedagogy of appropriation, based on the unique privilege
of the non-native speaker to poach on the so-called authentic territory of
others, and make the language their own" (p. 210). This notion of appropriable
pedagogy can help tie together the notion of language as postcolonial performativity,
of culture as difference, of sustainable development being about creating
the possibilities for being more. This syncretic model of cultural interaction
works with a version of cultural difference that acknowledges that cultures
are heterogeneous, diverse and dynamic; that cultural relations produce hybrid
forms; that people actively appropriate cultural forms (rather than either
accept or reject them); and that the product of such appropriation may be
different from and greater than the sum of its original parts (heterosis).
Finally,
then, we need always to consider the larger context of what we are doing,
the cultural, political, social and economic implications of language programs.
What might language development in English mean for other languages? What
might it mean for the representation of culture? What forms of culture and
knowledge may it privilege and what may it deny? What world is opened up by
an education through English? How might English be a language that allows
us to be more rather than just to have more? How can the relationship between
outside and inside participants foster appropriability? What might a model
of post-development discourse (cf. Escobar, 1995) look like?
How might the notion of language as postcolonial performative start to inform
language in development programs? How can we work towards an understanding
of culture as difference and of pedagogy as appropriable?
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http://www.languages.ait.ac.th/hanoi_proceedings/pennycook.htm
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2.-
WHAT IS RADICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM?
In response to a request from Omar, Dr Ernst von
Glasersfeld, has been kind enough to post this article that we want to SHARE
with all of you:
An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical
Ernst
von Glasersfeld
Scientific Reasoning Research Institute
University of Massachusetts
Man, having within himself an imagined World of lines
and numbers, operates in it with abstractions, just
as God, in the universe, did with reality.[1]
Giambattista
Vico
When
the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico published his treatise on the construction of knowledge,[2] it triggered
quite a controversy in the Giornale de' Letterati d'Italia, one of the most prestigious scholarly journals at the time. This was in the years 1710-12. The first reviewer, who remained anonymous, had carefully read the
treatise and was obviously shocked by the implications
it had for traditional epistemology-- all the more so because, as he conceded, the arguments
showed great learning and were presented with
elegance. He was therefore impelled to question Vico's position, and he very politely suggested
that one thing was lacking in the treatise: the proof that what it asserted was true.[3]
Today, those constructivists who are "radical" because they take their theory
of knowing seriously, frequently meet the same objection--except
that it is sometimes expressed less politely than at the beginning
of the 18th century. Now, no less than then, it is difficult to show
the critics that what they demand is the very thing constructivism must do without.
To claim that one's theory of knowing is true, in the traditional sense of representing
a state or feature of an experiencer-independent world, would be
perjury for a radical constructivist.
One of the central points of the theory is precisely that this kind of "truth", can never be claimed
for the knowledge (or any piece of it) that human reason produces.
To mark this radical departure, I have in the last few years taken to calling my orientation a theory of knowing rather than a "theory of knowledge".
I agree whole-heartedly with Noddings when she says, at the beginning
of her contribution to this volume, that radical constructivism should be "offered as a post-epistemological perspective". One of
the consequences of such an appraisal, however,
must be that one does not persist in arguing against it as though it were or purported to be a traditional theory of knowledge.
Another consequence--for me the more important one--is that constructivism needs to be radical and must explain that one
can, indeed, manage without the traditional notion
of Truth. That this task is possible, may become more plausible if I trace the sources of some of the ideas that made the enterprise seem desirable.
In retrospect, the path along which I picked up relevant ideas (somewhat abbreviated and idealized) led from the early doubts of the Pre-Socratics, via Montaigne, Berkeley, Vico, and Kant, to thinkers who developed instrumentalism and pragmatism at the turn of
this century, and eventually to the Italian Operational School and Piaget's
genetic epistemology.
The Way of the Sceptics
To Xenophanes (6th
century B.C.) we may credit the insight that even if someone succeeded
in describing exactly how the world really is, he or she would have no way
of knowing that it was the "true" description.[4] This is the major argument
the sceptics have repeated for two thousand five hundred years. It is based
on the assumption that whatever ideas or knowledge we have must have been
derived in some way from our experience, which includes sensing, acting, and
thinking. If this is the case, we have no way of checking the
truth of our knowledge with the world presumed to be lying beyond our experiential
interface, because to do this, we would need an access to such a world
that does not involve our experiencing it.
Plato
tried to get around this by claiming that some god had placed the pure ideas inside
us and that experience with the fuzzy, imperfect world of the senses could only
serve to make us "remember" what was really true.
Thus, there would be no need (and no way) to check our knowledge against an independent
external reality. Consequently, in Plato's famous metaphor, the man who is led out
of the cave of his commonplace experience is blinded by a splendid vision.
But his vision is the pure realm of an interpersonal soul and not the fuzzy
world perceived by the senses.[5]
From my point of view, Plato created an ingenious poetic or "metaphysical"
myth, but not a rational theory of knowing.
The sceptics position, developed into a school under Pyrrho at the end of the next century,
was diligently compiled and documented by Sextus Empiricus about
The British Empiricists then helped to harden the sceptical doctrine by their detailed analyses.
First, Locke discarded the secondary (sensory) properties of things as sources
of "true" information about the real world.
Then, Berkeley showed that Locke's arguments applied equally to the primary properties (spatial
extension, motion, number,etc.), and finally Hume delivered an even
more serious blow by attributing the notion of causality (and other relations
that serve to organize experience) to the conceptual habits of the human
knower. The final demolition of realism was brought about when Kant suggested
that the concepts of space and time were the necessary forms
of human experience, rather than characteristics of the universe. This meant
that we cannot even imagine what the structure of the real world might be
like, because whatever we call structure is necessarily an arrangement in
space, time, or both.
These
are extremely uncomfortable arguments. Philosophers have forever tried to dismantle
them, but they have had little success. The arguments are uncomfortable because
they threaten a concept which we feel we cannot do without. "Knowledge"
is something of which we are quite sure that we have a certain amount, and
we are not prepared to relinquish it. The trouble is that throughout the
occidental history of ideas and right down to our own days, two requisites
have been considered fundamental in any epistemological discussion of knowledge.
The first of these requisites demands that whatever we would like to call
"true knowledge" has to be independent of the knowing subject. The
second requisite is that knowledge is to be taken seriously only if it claims
to represent a world of "things-in-themselves" in a more or less veridical
fashion. In other words, it is tacitly taken for granted that a fully structured
and knowable world "exists" and that it is the business of the cognizing
human subject to discover what that structure is.
The weakness of the sceptics' position lies in its polemical formulation.
It always sounds as though the traditional epistemologists' definition of knowledge were the
only possible one. Hence, when Montaigne says "la peste de l'homme c'est l'opinion
de savoir" (mankind's plague is the conceit of knowing)[6], it sounds as
though we ought to give up all knowing. But he was referring to absolutistic
claims of experiential knowledge and was discussing them in the context
of the traditional dogmatic belief that religious revelation is
unquestionable. He had in mind absolute truth, and he was castigating those
who claimed that a rational interpretation of experience (of which "scientific
observation" is, after all, a sophisticated form) would lead to such
truth. He certainly did not intend to discredit the kind of know-how that
enabled his peasants to make a good wine.
In short, what the sceptics failed to stress was that, though no truths about a "real"
world could be derived from experience, experience nevertheless supplied
a great deal of useful knowledge.
The Changed Concept of Knowledge
Unbeknownst to Kant, who in the 1780s hammered this limitation in with his Critiques of pure
and practical reason, Giambattista Vico had come to a very similar conclusion
in 1710. The human mind can know only what the human mind has made, was
his slogan and, more like Piaget than Kant, he did not assume that space
and time were necessarily a priori categories, but suggested that
they, too, were human constructs (Vico, 1858).
Pursuing this way of thinking, one is led to what I have called "a reconstruction of
the concept of knowledge" (von Glasersfeld, 1985). Some reconstruction is
needed because, on the one hand, one can no longer maintain that the
cognizing activity should or could produce a true representation of
an objective world, and on the other, one does not want to end up with
a solipsistic form of idealism. The only way out, then, would seem to be a drastic
modification of the relation between the cognitive structures we build
up and that "real" world which we are inclined to assume as "existing"
beyond our perceptual interface.[7] Instead of the
illusory relation of "representation", one has to find
a way of relating knowledge to reality that does
not imply anything like match or correspondence.
Neither
Vico nor Kant explicitly mentioned such a conceptual alternative.
It was supplied, however, in Darwin's theory of evolution by the concept of fit. Once this relational
concept has been stripped of its erroneous formulation in the
slogan "survival of the fittest" (cf. Pittendrigh, 1958; von Glasersfeld, 1980),
it offers a way around the paradox of the traditional theory of knowledge.
As far as I know, this was first suggested by Willam James (1880).[8] Georg Simmel
(1885) elaborated it, and Aleksandr Bogdanov (1909) developed it
into a comprehensive instrumentalist epistemology. Hans Vaihinger
(1913), who had been working at his "Philosophy of As If" since
the 1870s and who probably was quite unaware of Vico, reintroduced the idea
of conceptual construction.
Piaget's Contribution
Today, in retrospect, these and other authors can be cited as "sources" of constructivism.
However, the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing today, Jean
Piaget started from Kant and arrived at his view of cognition as a biologist
who looked at intelligence and knowledge as biological functions
whose development had to be explained and mapped in the ontogeny of organisms.
In interpreting Piaget, it is important to remember that his publications range over an astounding
variety of topics and are spread over more than half a century.[9] As with any
versatile and original thinker, his ideas did not cease to develop
and change (Vuik, 1981). It is, therefore, not surprising that one
can spot contradictions in his work. An obvious instance is his theory of stages,
which was gradually superseded by his theory of equilibration
(cf. Rowell, in press). Thus it is not too difficult to dismiss Piaget on
the strength of one or two quotations; or, what is even more frequent, on
the strength of what superficial summarizers have said about him. It is also
likely that arguments about what Piaget actually believed will continue
and that different scholars will provide different interpretations.
In my view, the following basic principles of radical constructivism emerge
quite clearly if one tries to comprise as much as possible of
Piaget's writings in one coherent theory − but I would argue for these principles even
if they could be shown to diverge from Piaget's thinking.
1.-
a)
Knowledge is not passively received either through the senses or by way of
communication;
b)
Knowledge is actively built up by the cognizing subject.
2.-
a) The function of cognition is adaptive, in the
biological sense of the term, tending towards fit or viability;
b)
cognition serves the subject's organization of the experiential world, not
the discovery of an objective ontological reality.
One
cannot adopt these principles casually. If taken seriously, they are incompatible with the traditional notions of knowledge, truth, and objectivity, and they require a radical reconstruction
of one's concept of reality. Instead of an inaccessible realm beyond
perception and cognition, it now becomes the experiential world we actually
live in. This world is not an unchanging
independent structure, but the result of distinctions that generate a physical and a social environment to which, in turn, we
adapt as best we can.
Consequently, one cannot adopt the constructivist principles as an absolute truth, but only as a working hypothesis
that may or may not turn out to be viable. This is the main reason
why the constructivist orientation is unequivocally post-epistemological
(Noddings, this volume).
The Concept of Viability
To
relinquish the inveterate belief that knowledge must eventually represent something that lies beyond our experience
is, indeed, a frightening step
to take. It constitutes a feat of decentering that is even more demanding than the one accomplished by a few outstanding thinkers
in the 16th century who realized that the earth was not the center of the universe. Because it goes against an age-old habit,
it is immensely difficult to accept
that, no matter how well we can predict the results of certain actions we take or the "effects" of certain "causes"
we observe, this must never
be interpreted as a proof that we have discovered how the "real" world works.[10]
The key to this insight lies in what Piaget formulated in the phrase "l'objet se laisse faire" ("the
object allows itself to be treated"; 1970; p.35) At the symposium on the occasion of his 80th birthday he repeated the phrase and explained it further: "When one comes to have a true theory,
this is because the object permitted it; which amounts to saying that it contained something analogous to my actions."
(Inhelder et al. 1977; p.64)
In this context − as in so many in Piaget's works − it is important to remember that an "object" is never a
thing-in-itself for Piaget, but something that the
cognizing subject has constructed by making distinctions and coordinations in his or her perceptual field (Piaget, 1937).
That is all very well, one might say, but how does it come about that the reality we construct is in many ways remarkably
stable? And, one might also ask why, if we ourselves construct our experiential reality, can we not construct any reality we might like? The first question was answered in a categorical way by George Kelly: "To the living creature, then, the universe is real, but it is not inexorable unless he chooses
to construe it that way" (1955;
p.8). The living creature, be it fish, fowl, or human, thrives by abstracting regularities and rules from experience that enable
it to avoid disagreeable situations and,
to some extent, to generate agreeable ones. This "abstracting of regularities" is always the result
of assimilation. No experience is
ever the same as another in the absolute sense. Repetition and, consequently, regularity can be obtained only by disregarding certain differences. This notion
of assimilation is at the core of Piaget's scheme theory. No schemes could be
developed if the organism could not isolate
situations in which a certain action leads to a desirable result. It is the focus on the result that distinguishes a scheme from
a reflex and makes possible the form of learning
that Piaget called accommodation. It takes place when
a scheme does not lead to the expected result. This produces a perturbation, and the perturbation may lead either to a modification of the pattern that was abstracted
as the "triggering situation" or to a modification of the action. All this, I want to emphasize, concerns the experiential world of
the acting organism, not any "external"
reality. And the patterns a cognizing organism can and does abstract from experience depend on the operations
of distinction and coordination the
organism can and does carry out.[11] This was brilliantly demonstrated for a variety of organisms more than
fifty years ago by Jakob von Uexküll (1933/1970).
The second question − why we cannot construct any reality
we like − can be raised only if the concept of viability is misunderstood or ignored. The absurdity of solipsism stems from the denial of any relation between knowledge and an experiencer-independent world.
Radical
Constructivism has been careful to stress that all action, be it physical or conceptual, is subject to constraints. I can no more walk through
the desk in front of me than I can argue that black is white at
one and the same time. What constrains me, however, is not quite the same in the two cases. That the
desk constitutes an obstacle to my physical movement is due to the particular distinctions my sensory system enables me to make
and to the particular way in which I have come to coordinate them. Indeed,
if I now could walk through the desk, it would no longer fit the abstraction
I have made in prior experience. This, I think, is simple enough. What is not so simple
is the realization that the fact that I am
able to make the particular distinctions and coordinations and establish their permanence
in my experiential world, does not tell me anything other than the fact
that it is one of the things my experiential reality allows me to do. Using
a spatial metaphor, I have at times expressed this by saying that the viability
of an action shows no more than that the "real" world leaves us
room to act in that way. Conversely, when my actions fail and I am compelled to make a physical or conceptual accommodation, this does not warrant the assumption
that my failure reveals something
that "exists" beyond my experience. Whatever obstacle I might conjecture, can be described only in terms
of my own actions. (In this context, it is important to remember that the
constructivist theory holds that perception is not passive, but under all
circumstances the result of action; cf. Piaget,
1969.)
The
constraints that preclude my saying that black is white are, of course, not physical but conceptual. The way we
use symbols to handle abstractions we have
made from experience, requires among other things that we exclude contradiction (cf. von Glasersfeld, in press). Consistency,
in maintaining semantic links and in avoiding
contradictions, is an indispensable
condition of what I would call our "rational game".
The Question of Certainty
The
domain of mathematics is in some sense the epitome of the rational game. The certainty of mathematical results has often been brought up as an argument against constructivism.
To indicate that the theoretical infallibility of mathematical operations (in practice, mistakes may, of course, occur) cannot be claimed as proof that these operations give access to an ontological reality, I have compared this generation of certainty to the game of chess. At the painful moment when you discover that your opponent can put you into a "checkmate" position,
you have no way of doubting it and your
shock is as real as any shock can be.
Yet, it is obvious that the certainty you are experiencing springs from nothing but the conceptual relations that constitute
the rules of the game; and it is equally obvious that these conceptual
relations are absolute in the sense that if I broke them and thus destroyed
the certainty they generate, I would
no longer be playing that particular game.
The
comparison with chess has caused remonstrations, and I would like to clarify my position. I still believe that the certainty in mathematics springs from the same conceptual source, but this
does not mean that I hold mathematics to be like chess in other ways. The
biggest difference is that the elements to which the rules of chess apply
are all specific to the game. Flesh and blood
kings cannot be put into "mate" positions, equestrian knights move unlike their chess namesakes, and living queens show their power in ways that are inconceivable on the chess board.
In contrast, the elements to which the rules of mathematics are applied, are not free inventions. In counting, for example, the elements start out as ordinary things that have been abstracted from ordinary experience, and the basic abstract concepts, such as "oneness" and "plurality",
have a life of their own before they are incorporated
in the realm of mathematics. It is precisely this connection with everyday experience and conceptual practice that leads to the contention that mathematics "reflects" the
real world.
The "imagined world of lines and numbers" of which Vico speaks in
the quotation I have put at the beginning of this
essay, is in no sense an arbitrary world.
At the roots of the vast network of mathematical abstractions are the simple operations that allow
us to perceive discrete items in the field
of our experience, and simple relational concepts that allow us to unite them as "units of units".
On subsequent levels of abstraction, the representations of sensory-motor material of everyday experience (Piaget's "figurative" elements)
drop out, and what remains is the purely "operative", i.e.,
abstractions from operations.
None
of this is developed in a free, wholly arbitrary fashion. Every individual's abstraction of experiential items
is constrained (and thus guided) by social
interaction and the need of collaboration and communication with other members of the group
in which he or she grows up.
No individual can afford not to establish a relative fit with the consensual domain of the social environment.[12]
An analogous development takes place with regard to mathematics, but here the social interaction specifically involves those who are active in that
field. The consensual domain into which
the individual must learn to fit is that of mathematicians, teachers, and
other adults insofar as they practice mathematics. The process of adaptation
is the same as in other social domains, but there is an important difference in the way the degree of adaptation can be assessed. In the domain
of everyday living, fit can be demonstrated by sensory-motor evidence of successful
interaction (e.g. when an individual asked to buy apples, returns with
items that the other recognizes as apples).
The only observable manifestation of the demand as well as of the response, in the abstract reaches
of the domain of mathematics, are
symbols of operations. The operations themselves remain unobservable. Understanding can therefore never
be demonstrated by the presentation of results
that may have been acquired by rote learning.[13]
This
is one of the reasons why mathematics teachers often insist (to the immense boredom of the students) on the exact documentation of the algorithm by means of which the result was obtained. The flaw in this procedure is that any documentation of an algorithm is again
a sequence of symbols which in themselves do not demonstrate the speaker's
or writer's understanding of the symbolized operations. Hence, the production
of such a sequence, too, may be the result of rote learning.
Other
contributions to this volume will illustrate how a constructivist approach to instruction deals with this problem. They will also show that
the constructivist teacher does not give up his or her role as a guide − but this leadership takes the form of encouraging and orienting the students'
constructive effort rather than curtailing
their autonomy by presenting ready-made results as the only permitted path. Here, I would merely stress the sharp distinction
which, in my view, has to be made between
teaching and training. The first aims at the students' conceptual fit with the consensual
domain of the particular field, a fit which, from the teacher's perspective,
constitutes understanding. The second aims at the students' behavioral
fit which, from the teacher's perspective, constitutes acceptable performance. This is not to say, that rote learning and the focus on adequate performance should have no place in constructively oriented instruction. But it does mean that, where the domain
of mathematics is concerned, instruction that focuses on performance alone can be no better than trivial.
Concluding Remarks
If
one seriously wants to adopt the radical constructivist orientation, the changes of thinking and of attitudes one has to make are formidable. It is also far from easy to maintain them consequentially. Much like physical habits, old ways of thinking are slow to die out and tend to return surreptitiously.
In everyday living we don't risk much if we continue to speak of lovely sunsets and say that tomorrow the sun will rise at such and such a time − even though we now hold that it is the earth
that moves and not the sun. Similarly, there is no harm in speaking of knowledge, mathematical and other, as though it had ontological status and could be "objective"
in that sense; as a way of speaking this is virtually
inevitable in the social interactions of everyday life. But when we let scientific knowledge turn into belief and begin to think of it as unquestionable
dogma, we are on a dangerous slope.
The critics of Copernicus who argued that his system must be "wrong" because it denied that the earth is the center
of the universe, could not claim to be "scientific"
− they
argued in that way for political and religious reasons. Science, as Bellarmino pointed out, produces hypotheses, and as such, they may or may not be useful. Their use may also be temporary. The science we have today, holds
that neither the earth nor the sun has a privileged position in the
universe. Like the contemporary philosophers of science,
constructivists have tried to learn from that development and to give up the traditional conception of knowledge as a "true" representation of an experiencer-independent
state of affairs.
That is why radical constructivism does not claim to
have found an ontological truth but merely
proposes a hypothetical model that may turn out to be a useful one.
Let me conclude with a remark that is not particularly relevant to the teaching of mathematics but might be considered by educators in general.
Throughout the two thousand five hundred years of Western epistemology, the accepted view has been a realist view. According to it, the human knower can attain some knowledge of a really existing
world and can use this knowledge to modify
it. People tended to think of the world as governed by a God who would not let it go under. Then faith shifted from God to science
and the world that science was mapping
was called "Nature" and believed to be ultimately understandable and controllable.
Yet, it was also believed to be so immense that mankind could
do no significant harm to it. Today, one does not have to look far to see that this attitude has endangered the world we are actually experiencing. If the view is adopted that "knowledge"
is the conceptual means to make sense of experience, rather than a
"representation" of something that is supposed to lie beyond it, this shift
of perspective brings with it an important corollary: the concepts and relations in terms of which we perceive and conceive the experiential world we
live in are necessarily generated by
ourselves. In this sense it is we who are responsible for the world we are experiencing. As I have reiterated many times, radical constructivism does not suggest that we can construct
anything we like, but it does claim that within the constraints that
limit our construction there is room for an infinity of alternatives. It therefore
does not seem untimely to suggest a theory of knowing that draws attention
to the knower's responsibility
for what the knower constructs.
References
Anonymous
(1711), Osservazioni, Giornale de'Letterati d'Italia, 5(6). (reprinted in Vico, 1858; p. 137-140 ).
Bogdanov, A. (1909) Science and philosophy. In (anonymous editor), Essays on the philosophy of collectivism, Vol.1. St. Petersburg.
Diels, H. (1957) Die Vorsokratiker. Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Feyerabend,
P. (1987) Farewell to reason. London/New York: Verso.
Inhelder, B., Garcia,
R., & Voneche, J. (1977) Epistemologie
genetique et equilibration. Neuchatel/Paris: Delachauz
et Niestle.
James,
W. (1880), Great men, great thoughts, and the environment, Atlantic Monthly, 46, 441-459.
Kelly,
G.A. (1955) A theory of personality - The psychology of personal constructs. New York: Norton.
Kitchener,
R. (1989), Genetic epistemology and the prospects for a cognitive sociology of science: A critical synthesis,
Social Epistemology, 3(2), 153-169.
Maturana,
H. (1980) Biology and cognition. In H.Maturana & F. Varela, Autopoiesis: The organization of the living. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Montaigne,
Michel de (1972) Essais, Vol.2. Paris: Librairie Generale Francaise.
Piaget,
J. (1937 La construction du reel chez l'enfant. Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestle.
Piaget,
J. (1969) Mechanisms of perception. (Translation by G.N.Seagrim) New York: Basic Books.
Piaget,
J. (1970) Le structuralisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Pittendrigh,
C.S. (1958), Adaptation, natural selection, and behavior. In A.Roe & G.G.Simpson (Eds.),
Behavior and evolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Plato,
Great dialogues of Plato (1956). New York: New American Library.
Popkin,
R. (1979) The history of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Rowell,
J.A. (1989), Equilibration and the teaching of science, Synthese, 1989; in press.
Simmel,
G. (1895) Ueber eine Beziehung der Selectionslehre zur Erkenntnistheorie, Archiv für systematische Philosophie, 1, 34-45.
Vaihinger,
H. (1913) Die Philosophie des Als Ob. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard.
Vico, G.-B. (1858)
De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710) Naples:
Stamperia de' Classici Latini.
von
Glasersfeld, E. (1980), Adaptation and viability, American Psychologist, 35(11),
970-974.
von
Glasersfeld, E. (1985), Reconstructing the concept of knowledge, Archives de Psychologie, 53, 91-101.
von
Glasersfeld, E. (1989) Abstraction, representation, and reflection. In L.P.Steffe (Ed.) Epistemological
foundations of mathematical experience. New York: Springer, in press.
von
Uexküll, J. 1970 Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (with Georg Kriszat). Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer. (Originally published in 1933).
Vuyk,
R. (1981) Overview and critique of Piaget's genetic epistemology, Vols. 1 & 2.
New York: Academic Press.
Footnotes
1. Vico's reply to his critics, included in the 2nd edition
of De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, 1711; reprinted in Vico (1858) p.143. [back]
2. De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, Naples, 1710; reprinted
with Italian translation, 1858. [back]
3. Giornale de'Letterati d'Italia, 1711, vol.V, article
VI; reprinted in Vico (1858), p. 137. [back]
4. cf. Hermann Diels (1957), Xenophanes, fragment 34. [back]
5. cf. Plato's "The Republic" in Great Dialogues
of Plato (1956), p. 312ff. [back]
6. Montaigne wrote this in his Apologie de Raymond Sebond
(1575-76); cf. Essais, 1972, vol.2,, p.139. [back]
7. Though most philosophers, today, would agree that the
ontological realm is perceptually inaccessible, they balk at Kant's suggestion that it is also conceptually inaccessible to us. They are
therefore still stuck with the paradox
that they have no way of showing the truth of the ontological claims they make. [back]
8. This reference was brought to my attention by a personal communication from Jacques Voneche (Geneva, 1985). [back]
9. See, for instance, Kitchener's recent article (1989)
on Piaget's early work on the role of social interaction and exchange. [back]
10. Paul Feyerabend's recent comment (1987) on the famous
letter Cardinal Bellarmino wrote in the context
of Galileo's trial, makes this point in exemplary fashion: "To
use modern terms: astronomers are entirely safe when saying that a model has predictive
advantages over another model, but they get into trouble when asserting that it is therefore a faithful image of reality. Or, more generally:
the fact that a model works does not by itself show that reality is structured
like the model." [back]
(p.250)
11. The focus on "operations of distinction"
is a major contribution
of Humberto Maturana's biological approach to cognition (1980); the notion as such, however, is implicit in much of Piaget's work, e.g,, his Mechanisms of perception (1969). [back]
12. Lest this be interpreted as a concession to realism,
let me point out that, in the constructivist view,
the term "environment" always refers to the environment as experientially constructed by the particular
subject, not to an "objective"
external world. [back]
13. Thinking, conceptual development, understanding, and
meaning are located in someone's head and are never
directly observable. A formidable confusion
was generated by the behaviorist program that tried to equate meaning with observable response. [back]
©
1996 Associazione Oikos
http://www.oikos.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.- ACTION RESEARCH IN THE FOREGN LANGUAGE
CLASSROOM
The following article was
selected as the Best Article (three way tie) innterrichtspraxis for 1999.
A Role
for Action Research in the Foreign Language Classroom
Jamie Rankin
Princeton University
We are convinced that
the disposition to study, as objectively as possible, the consequences of our
own teaching is more likely to change and improve our practices than is reading
about what someone else has discovered regarding the consequences of his
teaching. The latter may be helpful. The former is almost certain to be. (Corey
70)
A novice TA walks into my office and asks for advice.
He's having a difficult time getting his second-semester Beginning German class
to interact with him (or each other, for that matter) in any sort of engaging
way. His students take part in the various communicative tasks that he gives
them, but often grudgingly, or so it appears to him; and when he moves from
communicative tasks to teacher-fronted instruction on forms, most of them seem
to lose interest altogether. The prevailing atmosphere is dull and unmotivated,
a far cry from the action-packed, fun-filled atmosphere he was hoping for. He
thinks the problem might lie with his "transitions," the explanations
and commentary joining task to task, or perhaps with the temperament of the
class itself, or a combination of both. What can he do to engage his students?
How can he sustain their attention more consistently during his grammar
explanations?
Another TA, also teaching Beginning German for the
first time, comes to me with a different sort of question. His students are for
the most part affable and actively participating, but he is troubled by his own
uncertainty regarding how he should correct their spoken errors. On the one
hand, he feels compelled to address every mistake that occurs (and there are
many), for fear that uncorrected errors will hinder his students' progress. If
the errors go unchecked, he reasons, they may lead to bad habits that will be
increasingly difficult to break. He also might be sending confusing signals to
observant students who notice others' errors and are expecting him to step in
with a correction. But on the other hand, he senses that to point out every
error would undermine the communicative nature of the class, and violate the
atmosphere of camaraderie and friendship that he has been working hard to
develop. Correcting his students over and over again could only breed
self-consciousness and anxiety. What should he do? Will non-correction lead to
"fossilization"? Or will negative affect outweigh the advantages of
correctness? To what degree is the classroom atmosphere, with its potential for
positive or negative motivation, a factor in the on-going process of second language
acquisition (SLA)?
My
first reaction to such questions, of course, is to suggest something--anything--that
will "fix the problem," mostly in the sense of assuaging the anxieties
of worried TAs. But I need to be careful: How I deal with their concerns sends a message
not only about the issue at hand, but about learning how to teach in general.
If my mentoring style is aligned with what Michael Wallace (Training)
calls the "craft" model, then I will have a TA watch me (or another
teacher) conduct a class and learn inductively how an experienced teacher
deals with such issues. Like an apprentice learning from a master artisan,
the TA in this scenario will observe carefully, ask questions, and then model
his performance after the mentor's style. If my teaching philosophy tends instead toward
what Wallace terms the "applied science" model, then I will direct
the TA to the (voluminous) published research on recommended teaching behaviors,
task design, and classroom interaction. Here he will read what academic researchers
have demonstrated in controlled studies, and extrapolate from these generalizations
to his own classroom experience.
Either course of action poses problems. While there is
much to be said for observing and imitating as part of the pedagogical process,
several teacher-trainers (Edgar Stones and Sidney Morris, for example, as well
as Wallace) point out that the "craft" model is dangerously static.
Teachers-in-training who are encouraged to adopt the teaching style and techniques
(and thus the pedagogical solutions) of another teacher may find themselves
less able to develop their own instructional voice and presence and are perhaps
less likely to reflect critically on their own teaching. Donald Schön, in turn,
argues that the "applied science" model has serious shortcomings as
well, notably that the kind of knowledge necessary for effective professional
practice--teaching and otherwise--is inherently different from the quantifiable
results of empirical research, valid and reliable though these may be.
Certainly these misgivings apply to the situations
described above. Classical SLA studies on task design, classroom input, and
error correction demonstrate what is statistically true for an abstraction
known as "the language learner," but to do so they must cancel out
the particulars of the learners they investigate. Yet what my TAs are wrestling
with here are those very particulars: particular language learners who interact
with them as teachers and each other as students in unique and unpredictable
ways, and in doing so manifest particular problems. While one can appreciate
the statistical reliability of process-product research with its emphasis on
general application ("do x, and y will result"), the
controlled research environment that produces these results, for all its
usefulness in such studies, bears little resemblance to real-life pedagogical
circumstances. As Frederick Erickson points out, the education research on
"effective teaching" is of decidedly limited use to a teacher who
cannot translate it into the context of a specific classroom, which generates
"its own unique system" (133). Perusing such studies will make these
TAs better informed, certainly, but not necessarily more effective.
Rejecting both the implications of the "craft"
model and the questionable presuppositions about teaching and learning
behaviors that underlie the "applied science" model, Schön argues
forcefully for what he calls "reflective practice"--thinking about
the decisions that one makes while carrying out one's job (teaching, in this
case), in order to determine the underlying patterns, biases, and intuitions
that influence what one does. Wallace (Training) expands this concept to
include the integration of received knowledge--the texts of "applied
science"--into the overall reflective process. In this way the
shortcomings of the "applied science" model can be avoided, while the
genuine contributions to knowledge made by researchers working in other
paradigms can be duly recognized and appropriated.
But for all its merits, "reflective
practice" is often too amorphous to help novice teachers with the specific
problems they encounter. Yes, they need to gain insight into the recurring
patterns of their teaching style; but the pressing need is for insight into the
immediate problem. And yes, they should learn how to reflect on their own
teaching in light of other research findings; but often their problems demand
specific answers, not the generalizations of classical applied research. In
other words, they need to engage in reflection that is directed toward their
current problems--reflection that is informed and reliable enough to point them
toward realizable goals, and (I would add) that is both nurtured and critiqued
by means of collaboration.
These desired qualities of
reflection--problem-oriented, collaborative, aimed at tangible
intervention--point to a model of analysis and reflective practice known as
Action Research. While Action Research (AR) has taken on an increasingly
prominent role in mainstream education, ESL, and other professional training
environments, it has been curiously absent (save for a brief glance in Richard
Johnstone) in the discourse on foreign language teacher training. This strikes
me as odd, not only because AR can be easily extrapolated to foreign language
TA training (the focus of considerable attention in the literature), but
because the foreign language (FL) classroom seems to me to be an ideal
environment for the kind of analysis and reflection that AR promotes. In the
following I seek to explore this potentially rich relationship by tracing the
conceptual development of AR and then describing several levels of analysis
that could accompany its application in FL classrooms.
Action Research:
The Problem of a Definition
Until quite recently, the development of AR was framed
almost exclusively by the mainstream education literature, primarily in the
context of elementary and high school teaching. Almost exclusively, to
be sure: oddly enough, or perhaps predictably, depending on one's estimation of
education theorists, the definition that captures most succinctly what I take
to be the essential nature of AR is embedded in a discussion of
"participatory action research" applied to industry and agriculture.
Chris Argyris and Schön define AR as follows:
Action research takes its
cues--its questions, puzzles, and problems--from the perceptions of
practitioners within particular, local practice contexts. It bounds episodes of
research according to the boundaries of the local context. It builds
descriptions and theories within the practice context itself, and tests them
there through intervention experiments--that is, through experiments
that bear the double burden of testing hypotheses and effecting some
(putatively) desirable change in the situation. (86)
In short, AR calls for a practitioner to develop a
theory within a system, with the goal of doing something to improve that
system: theory leading to intervention, research resulting in action.
Applied to an educational context, AR directs the
teacher to examine his or her own classroom systematically and act on the
insights gained. The teacher observes the situation as it currently exists,
determines a course of action, implements it, notes the results through
continued observation, and in the process seeks additional areas for change. AR
is reflection-based, action-oriented, and, as this description suggests,
cyclical. But beyond these basic components, educators differ as to what,
precisely, AR should entail. Louis Cohen and Lawrence Manion echo Argyris and
Schön by defining AR as "small-scale intervention in the functioning of
the real world and a close examination of the effects of such
intervention" (174). Wallace (Action Research), writing as a
teacher-trainer in ESL programs, describes it as "basically a way of
reflecting on your teaching" (4), in stark contrast to Stephen Kemmis and
Robin McTaggart, for whom AR is "a form of collective
self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants on social situations in
order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational
practices ... the approach is only action research when it is collaborative"
(5). Kemmis and McTaggart's persistent emphasis on
social justice as a goal, and collaborative group effort as a necessary means
toward it, places their version of AR squarely in the domain of what Sharan
Merriam calls "critical research ... an ideological critique of
power, privilege, and oppression in areas of educational practice" (4),
and distances it from AR theorists like Wallace, for whom the terms
"action research," "reflective practice," and "teacher
research" are roughly synonymous.
Indeed, the diverse proponents of AR can be located on
a continuum between these two ideological poles. In close proximity to Wallace
are Jack Richards and Charles Lockhart, whose "action research cases"
amount to little more than small-scale quantitative research done by an
individual teacher. Nunan likewise sees AR primarily as a means to improved
in-service teacher training through self-awareness and reflection. Working
within the British tradition of AR, John Elliott takes a more centrist
position; he envisions structural as well as pedagogical change occurring as
administrators and teachers collaborate to promote better educational
environments. Sharon Oja and Lisa Smulyan adopt much the same position, seeing
AR as a means of achieving administrative improvement. Moving further toward
Kemmis and McTaggart, we find Graham Crookes, who argues that AR should
transcend in-class teacher research in order to deal with deeper societal
structures as they are institutionalized in schools. The essays collected in
Susan Noffke and Robert Stevenson, beginning with Noffke's paper on
"Action Research and Democratic Schooling," adopt an even more
political (and often polemical) tone.
These ideological biases work their way into what
purport to be objective histories of AR. Kemmis and McTaggart, for example, in
close ranks with Noffke and Stevenson, trace the roots of AR back to the work
of Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist who encouraged his clients to engage in
cycles of of achieving greater social justice. After situating AR firmly within
this framework, the authors briefly mention the classroom adaptations of AR by
Steven Corey, an educator in the 1950s, and go on to propose models for
potentially radical social transformation by way of schools. Centrists on the
AR political spectrum such as Oja and Smulyan give equal narrative attention to
Lewin and Corey, while Mary Olson, writing expressly to promote "the
teacher as researcher" rather than an agent of societal change, casts only
a cursory glance at Lewin,
focusing instead on Corey as "the acknowledged
early proponent of action research" (9)--hardly the role he plays in
Kemmis and McTaggart's project.
But for all their differences, proponents of AR show
consensus on one point: The critical observation and measured change of the
teaching-learning environment is to be carried out by teachers themselves--not
by outside observers who use others' classrooms as research sites. This focus
on the teacher as researcher resonates profoundly with a larger corpus of
teacher research, much of which follows the procedural model of AR.
One encounters throughout the genre a widespread
dissatisfaction with the long-accepted view that "knowledge" about
what transpires in classrooms is the privileged domain of university-based
researchers who produce "research on teaching" rather than
encouraging teachers to engage in their own "teacher research," to use
the distinction made by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle. Cochran-Smith
and Lytle cite the Handbook of Research on Teaching as representatively
culpable on this point. Although several of its 35 review articles mention
researcher-teacher collaborations, "none are written by school-based
teachers, or, as far as we can determine, are published accounts of teachers'
work cited" (7).
The perception among many teachers is that prevailing
educational theory comes from outsiders who presume to understand the
"inside" complexities of the classroom--note the spatial metaphor of Inside/Outside
by Cochran-Smith and Lytle, and in the titular reference to
"elsewhereness" in Garth Boomer--without actually having taught in
it. Many argue that the prescribed "methods" of outsiders do not
correspond to the way teachers think about their own Praxis, and that
the generalizability of professional research seems to be at odds with the
particular knowledge teachers have about their own teaching (Elliott 45-46).
The complaint of one practicing teacher provides a representative commentary:
The reports [of
professional researchers] were often couched in jargon and statistics and were
published in journals that rarely reached staff room shelves. Above all I felt
frustrated that teachers lacked the language to argue coherently with the
researchers. We seemed to live in separate worlds. A prestigious research
industry seemed to be thriving at the expense of school practitioners rather
than in support of them. (Anning 57)
In reaction to this trend, many teachers have opted to
pursue their own avenues of research, focusing on what they know best--their
own classrooms. Some have written on their own, some have done so in the
context of graduate-level education seminars, while others have banded together
to form teacher collectives: Robert Burgess, The Research Process in
Educational Settings: Ten Case Studies; Gail Burnaford, Joseph Fischer and
David Hobson, Teachers Doing Research: Practical Possibilities;
Cochran-Smith and Lytle, Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge;
David Hustler, Anthony Cassidy and Ted Cuff, Action Research in Classrooms
and Schools; Marian Mohr and Marion MacLean, Working Together: A Guide
for Teacher-Researchers; Jon Nixon, A Teacher's Guide to Action Research;
Noffke and Stevenson, Educational Action Research: Becoming Practically
Critical; and Olson, Opening the Door to Classroom Research. Several
of the titles bear vivid witness to the writers' desire for autonomy and
recognition: Glenda Bissex and Richard Bullock, Seeing for Ourselves;
Dixie Goswami and Peter Stillman, Reclaiming the Classroom; or Joe
Kincheloe, Teachers as Researchers: Qualitative Inquiry as a Path to
Empowerment.
In addition to an insistence on the validity of
teacher knowledge, a common feature of these studies and others like them is a
commitment to qualitative research, certainly the dominant paradigm in AR, and
a key to its potential strengths and weaknesses. Qualitative research is
commonly contrasted with quantitative, though the two are more closely linked
than is sometimes admitted--quantitative research builds upon subjective
interpretations of results, and qualitative studies routinely make use of
traditionally quantitative metrics. But the two paradigms do show a difference
in approach to their research questions, and indeed in the kinds of questions
they choose to address. Where quantitative studies aim at statistical
generalizability through careful measurements and controls, qualitative
research focuses on the unique dynamic of a bounded social system with highly
complex particulars. Quantitative study aims at probability, qualitative study
at plausibility. Delineating the province of qualitative case studies, Robert
Stake provides a useful comparison:
In quantitative
studies, the research question seeks out a relationship between a small number
of variables...Efforts are made to operationally bound the inquiry, to define
the variables, and to minimize the importance of interpretation until data are
analyzed.... In qualitative studies, research questions typically orient to
cases or phenomena, seeking patterns of unanticipated as well as expected
relationships.... The dependent variables are experientially rather than
operationally defined. Situational conditions are not known in advance or
controlled. (41)
Quantitative study begins with a hypothesis, controls
the variables so that a cause and effect relation can be traced (if indeed
there is one), and waits until the data are in to confirm or disconfirm the
original hypothesis. Qualitative study, by contrast, observes the phenomena in
question with no initial explanation necessarily in mind, reflects on those
observations, and begins to form hypotheses as patterns emerge. The hypotheses
are refined or jettisoned as the data continue to accumulate, so that only
gradually does the researcher come to interpret and understand the agenda of
the individual case. Where quantitative research begins and ends with its
hypotheses, interpretive research allows them to emerge along with the data,
"studying social life as it unfolds" (Gubrium and Holstein 12). (To
delve into the pros and cons of quantitative vs. qualitative research would
exceed the scope of this paper; but see Elliot Eisner and Alan Peshkin for a
useful introduction to the topic; Jerome Kirk and Marc Miller, and Matthew
Miles and A. Michael Huberman on validity issues; Richard Winter for a critique
of the epistemology underlying quantitative research; and Jaber Gubrium and
James Holstein for a survey of post-positivist critiques of qualitative
research.)
The distinction between quantitative and qualitative
inquiry is important in considering how to carry out AR projects to their full
potential, since AR can include both paradigms. Many of the issues one faces in
the classroom (e.g., task design, learner differences, and error correction)
have been dealt with in quantitative studies. But to apply these insights to a
particular classroom dynamic (e.g., Why do certain materials seem to engage
some small groups but not others? Should the teacher let John and Mary work
together, even though their proficiency levels are so disparate? What about the
student who insists on correcting his peers' mistakes?), one must engage in
some form of reflective, qualitative analysis. To take a real-life example: Roy
Lyster's recent study strongly suggests that explicit corrective feedback is
preferable to non-implicit recasts of erroneous utterances. But though his data
are no doubt accurate, qualitative considerations suggest--perhaps even more
strongly--that implementing Lyster's proposal consistently in a real classroom
could be disastrous. Whatever the quantitative studies may show to be generally
true, the results are of little use if a teacher cannot benefit from them in a local
system. And to understand the relation of general ideas to particular social
contexts, we must engage in qualitative research.
Action Research and Methodology
Both of the issues discussed above--teacher research
as an "insider" project, and qualitative inquiry as the appropriate
paradigm for its application--are incorporated by AR into a conceptually useful
research model. We can now regard it in more detail, following the outline
suggested by Kemmis and McTaggart.
The starting point of AR is a classroom problem or
simply a desire on the teacher's part to improve learning. Having decided on
the focus of the research, the teacher engages in a period of observing and
reflecting, using a variety of tools--personal diaries, post-class notes, video
and audio tapes, collaborator observation, and student interviews, to name the
more common types--in order to view the classroom from as many perspectives as
possible. The goal is to determine not only what is going on, but also the
underlying reasons for it--to discern, as Erickson suggests, between
"behavior" and "action":
A crucial analytic
distinction in interpretive research is that between behavior, the
physical act, and action, which is the physical behavior plus the
meaning interpretations held by the actor and those with whom the actor is
engaged in interaction. The object of interpretive social research is action,
not behavior. (126-27)
In other
words, the teacher cannot be satisfied merely with counting up test scores on
vocabulary quizzes, or noting the number of times a student raises her hand to
be called on, or checking for frequency of error types. Those are
behaviors--and potentially interesting behaviors, depending on the questions
one may want to ask about them--but not actions, in Erickson's terms. The teacher seeks rather to
understand why students remember and use certain words, or volunteer to
speak, or display interlanguage variability, and the teacher does so by making
connections between student, input, and classroom interaction. Interpretive research procedures are
especially important, as the teacher gathers data, searches for possible
patterns, forms hypotheses, looks for (dis)confirmations, gathers more data,
refines the hypotheses, and so on.
When the teacher feels that there is enough
interpreted data to suggest what may work in the situation, a plan can be
developed for specific action. Kemmis and McTaggart emphasize that at this
stage, collaboration is crucial; the teacher should work together with
colleagues to formulate a plan of action and profit from their collective
experience. The planning stage is also where the relevant research
literature--quantitative and qualitative--can provide useful ideas and suggest
new connections. The plan may take the form of new tasks, or a new way of
introducing or sequencing them; new configurations for small-group work; a more
consciously controlled ratio of teacher-talk to student-talk; new ways of
dealing with texts or listening comprehension or writing skills; strategies for
error correction; or any one of an almost infinite set of possibilities.
Once the plan has been formed, the next step is to
carry it out and, while doing so, to engage once again in careful observation
of how the classroom matrix is affected (if at all) by the changes adopted.
"Action in the sense intended here is deliberate and controlled--it is a
careful and thoughtful variation of practice, and is critically informed"
(Kemmis and McTaggart 12). During this observation phase the teacher should
once again collect as much data as possible by means of diaries, interviews,
recordings, and collaborator observation, so that these data may be compared
with those gathered during the initial observation cycle. Only then can the
teacher reflect on the plan and the effectiveness of its implementation, and
begin to consider another plan that will further improve the teaching-learning
situation. This cycle--Observe, Plan, Act, Reflect, Observe,
...--constitutes for AR what Evert Gummesson calls the hermeneutic spiral, a
visual metaphor appropriated by numerous AR practitioners for how the model
should inform classroom practice.
If there is a weak link here, it is in the application
of qualitative research principles to the observation/reflection segment of the
spiral. Unfortunately, much of the current AR literature shows little
appreciation of the rigor expected in other interpretive disciplines, such as
anthropology, ethnography, or social history. The lack of connection between AR
in its current state and these fields (to be fair, the snubbing is generally
mutual) has resulted in many published AR case studies that fail to evince the
self-critical and context-sensitive stance of naturalistic interpretive work
done elsewhere. This point needs to be emphasized for teachers considering AR
projects, and one way of doing so is to consider the ways in which qualitative
analysis can throw light on what happens in the unique environment of a FL
classroom.
Action Research and the Foreign Language
Classroom
It might just be possible for someone observing a
language classroom to assume that with the exception of students chattering
away in German, there is no fundamental difference between the L2 classroom and
what one might encounter in any "normal" L1 classroom. The L2 itself
as a classroom feature is, in this view, merely an additional component of an
otherwise typical learning environment. But is this the case? Consider: every
class has a topical focus (biology, history, math) that sets it apart from
other classes; but under normal circumstances, there is a common language in
use that serves as a medium for all classroom interaction, regardless of the
topic. A chemistry lab may exhibit unique physical features (Bunsen burners and
test tubes) and discipline-specific vocabulary ("binding" and
"polymers"), but there is still a shared language, not at all unique
to chemistry, that is used for questions, instructions, jokes, disruptions, and
(when necessary) panicked commands to flee the smoke-filled room. To turn the example
around: it would be a strange art class indeed in which all communication--content
teaching, questions, clarifications, and complaints--took place solely by means
of hand-drawn sketches.
Yet in a communicative foreign language class, this is
surprisingly close to what happens. The very thing to be learned (and which,
presumably, the students have not yet mastered) is also the means of learning
it. The pedagogical object is simultaneously the pedagogical medium.
Thus the foreign language classroom is not at all a "normal"
classroom with an added feature called L2, as if "uses foreign
language" were roughly equivalent with "uses colored chalk." It
is rather a qualitatively different pedagogical environment, in which, as
Willis Edmondson notes, "the foreign language may be
the content of instruction, the goal of instruction,
the medium of instruction, the medium of classroom management, the medium of
everyday (non-pedagogic) talk, and the medium for practising target
discourse" (162). As such, it requires a unique set of interpretive lenses
for observation and understanding.
There is an imbalance of knowledge and power lurking
within these "coexisting discourse worlds," as Edmondson refers to
the various roles of the FL in such a classroom. If we could in fact find an
art class in which all interaction took place not by means of words but with
spontaneous sketches, we would note a disparity between the teacher's and the
students' expressive abilities. The fluid drawing skills of the former would
contrast markedly, perhaps painfully, with the primitive, awkward efforts
produced by the latter.
The teacher would wield an altogether different kind
of power over the class than in "worded" classroom settings, and the
students would find themselves in a correspondingly unequal position to
respond. It is in this sense that the L2 in a foreign language classroom not
only pervades the discourse of the classroom, as would an engaging topic of
discussion. Rather, it changes the rules of how discussion itself becomes
constituted--who takes the floor, who responds, who gets noticed, what can be
expressed and at what level of expertise, and how all of these discourse
phenomena are regulated and negotiated by the actors involved. The unequal abilities
of students and teacher, and among students themselves, fundamentally alter the
ways in which the social dynamic of the FL classroom emerges.
The teacher faces a host of performance issues: How
can I hold students' attention? give feedback without annoying, frustrating, or
confusing the speakers? monitor the comprehensibility of my speech and still
come across as spontaneous and natural? Students face similar (and perhaps more
daunting) challenges: How can I make myself known here without using my "real"
language? maintain my voice and personality while making sounds that don't feel
at all like my own? show how hard I've worked if the best I can produce sounds
like a toddler's babbling? Or as the case may be: How can I cover up my lack of
preparation without words to help me? The power that comes from language
control shifts to those who are adept at language manipulation, and those
seeking this power--teacher or student--must learn to play the language game
with new rules. It is precisely this constant shifting of meaning and power
that makes interpretive study of the FL classroom so difficult, and at the same
time so very fascinating.
My purpose here is not to review the means of
interpretive analysis in general, since there are competent guidebooks
for doing so (see, for example, John Lofland and Lyn Lofland, Analyzing
Social Settings); nor to provide an account of practical methods of
observation or description, several of which have appeared recently (e.g.,
Robert Emerson et al., Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes; Merriam, Qualitative
Research and Case Study Applications in Education; Stake, The Art of
Case Study Research; Wallace, Action Research for Language Teachers;
see also Claire Kramsch, Context and Culture in Language Teaching). I
wish rather to suggest some possible applications of interpretive analysis to
several examples of FL classroom "problems," in order to show how an
AR project might begin, and in doing so to bring up several interpretive
factors that might play a role in the initial stages of its development.
Humor
On numerous occasions, TAs have approached me with
questions of how to deal with inappropriate uses of humor in the classroom,
say, in the form of sexist jokes, or crude references to WWII atrocities. Besides
quick-fix reactions (which in some cases, I hasten to add, may be justified and
even preferable), there is potential here for a useful AR project. The social
manipulation of humor is always a multi-faceted and elusive phenomenon and
therefore a prime candidate for interpretive study.
Hoping
to capitalize on the humorous potential of juxtaposing contradictory meanings
or foiling listeners' expectations, students--and often teachers--in L2
settings will make elaborate use of code-switching (moving from L1 to L2 or
vice versa), cross-linguistic puns, and cross-cultural dissimilarities in order
to be funny, out of a variety of motivations. A recent student of mine delighted in spouting
out was auch immer! and als ob! as soon as he learned these
phrases, thanks to the cultural cachet of whatever! and as if!
that accompanied the appearance of Clueless. Sometimes what might be
called an L2 sarcasm evolves: the speaker says something he or she doesn't
necessarily mean, but hopes will strike others as funny simply because an
unexpected (L2) form of expression was employed. Rendering a familiar (L1) joke--any
joke--by means of newly acquired L2 elements can fall into this category of
discourse.
An observer trying to understand the interactional
patterns in such a classroom would have to analyze the humor carefully (who
uses it, who responds to it, what themes or topics its users exploit, and the
relative positions of the actors on the interlanguage spectrum) in order to
assess the underlying motivations. Moreover, the observer would need to bear in
mind that in a social context of limited linguistic possibilities (and hence
perceived powerlessness), and one in which "playful" use of language
is encouraged, students will deploy various strategies--including immature
behavior--to make themselves noticed (cf. P. Harder, "The Reduced
Personality of the Language Learner"). Whereas in another context a
student might show more social maturity or at least restraint, the pressure to
gain attention by any means available in the confined world of the L2 classroom
can lead to potentially offensive expression--expression which, because of its
"foreignness," may not even sound offensive to some participants,
occupied as they are in reformulating the message mentally in order to
comprehend it, rather than in evaluating its propriety. The AR intervention,
whatever it is, must take these factors into account.
Authority
An instructor's struggles with authority reflect a
common problem for teachers at all levels of expertise. As Erickson notes:
[Classroom social
organization] is a matter of local meanings and local politics, of teaching as
rhetoric (persuasion), and of student assent as the grounds of legitimacy for
such persuasion and leadership by a teacher. (133)
Issues such as "legitimacy" become
problematized when the "rhetoric" itself is not only a means of
communication, but the very object of study, as noted above. Besides
negotiating their authority in the usual pedagogical context, foreign language
TAs must continually (re)interpret their status as language
"providers," doling out language in measured doses. With the
potential for interactive meaning that develops as students gradually work
their way up the interlanguage ladder comes the potential for classroom control.
In the process of SLA, students acquire not only the structures and vocabulary
assigned from the textbook, but also the means to joke around, impress each
another, insert their personalities into task performance, and otherwise
establish their social identity within the classroom. They are quick to seize
the reins of power by whatever linguistic means possible, and can change a
structured drill into casual banter, make comments that subvert the teacher's
legitimacy, or ask questions that might reveal the teacher's incompetence--all
in order to "gain control over the norms of interaction and interpretation
established by the teacher" (Kramsch 52).
But the teacher continues to wield significant control
nonetheless, as long as some sort of "target-language-only" rule has
been established and (tacitly) agreed upon. The teacher chooses the tasks to be
performed in class, and these may lie within or without the students'
competence; the teacher shapes the students' interactional repertoire by
divulging or withholding certain gambits or idioms, and dictates the language
register that becomes the classroom norm. In view of students' uneven
production and comprehension levels, the teacher must decide to whom the
lessons will be "pitched," whose responses will be corrected most
frequently, and who will be allowed to dominate the floor with questions or
comments. I say "decide" as if such behaviors were based on conscious
choice, but of course in most cases these teacher behaviors are based on
unreflective reactions. If such issues are the focus of an AR project, then
rigorous, critical observation is essential to note these patterns and to
improve the "language democracy" of the classroom.
Footing
A third and final example is a problem that classroom
observers frequently encounter, but teachers themselves rarely perceive--and
one for which an AR project can serve as an effective means of teacher
training. I will call it, for lack of a better name, "What's going on
here?" and define it as the sense one has that someone in the classroom
simply does not grasp what is happening. The teacher, for example, introduces a
task; the students respond by performing a task--but not the task the teacher
had in mind, or at least not in the way the teacher intended. The teacher makes
a comment or tells a joke; a student replies with what appears to be a complete
non sequitur. One could simply label the phenomenon
"miscomprehension," but that would not do it justice. I suggest
that it has more to do with Erving Goffman's notion of
"footing" and the way that expectations of meaning careen back and
forth in a FL classroom and sometimes veer off track.
In Goffman's view, footing is how people perceive and
adjust their stance with respect to the discourse in which they are involved.
While functioning as "speakers" and "hearers," they take on
a variety of subroles within these categories. A speaker may act as what
Goffman calls a "principal" by addressing others from a position of
authority within a social hierarchy, "active in some particular social
identity or role, some special capacity as a member of a group, office,
category, relationship, association ... some socially based source of
self-identification" (145). In a discussion, for example, the person who
begins calling on people to voice their opinions takes on a
"principal" role as the organizer of the discussion. A teacher
likewise assumes the role of "principal" when calling on students by
name, thereby demonstrating the authority to control which students talk and in
what order. If not "principals," participants may be
"authors" by simply stating what they themselves wish to say. In
Goffman's terms, an author is someone "who has selected the sentiments
that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded" (144) so
that the focus is on the message, not on any status it might imply. But
speakers are not always principals or authors; they can also instantiate words
that others have already produced. As is often the case with FL teachers, they
may recite dialogues from a textbook, quote model sentences to display
grammaticality or correct pronunciation, or repeat language from an audiovisual
source.
Problems arise when students are unsure which
"footing" an utterance is meant to convey--whether the utterance is
intended to show hierarchy ("I'm giving instructions here"), or
provide an example, or be taken as a genuine conversational gambit with the
teacher speaking as "author." Students may in fact comprehend the
words uttered by the teacher, but misconstrue the footing of the exchange
altogether. And if the footing is unclear, or worse, thought to be understood
but in fact miscomprehended, students will find themselves adrift in a sea of
apparently unconnected words and behaviors. The teacher will speak as
"principal," for example, assuming an authoritative role to provide
corrective feedback; but the student, not recognizing the verbal signals in L2
of such a stance, assumes that the teacher speaks here as "author"
and responds with a casual reply to the contents rather than the expected
repetition of the correction. Or the teacher will pose what is intended to be a
"communicative" question, focusing on content, only to find students
repeating it or re-casting it in another tense, or in some other way treating
it not as the utterance of an "author" but of a "principal"
who wants to exploit its pedagogical value. Such "misfootings" can
run in both directions, of course. Foreign language teachers routinely
misapprehend students' interactional intentions, so that both groups fail to
negotiate successfully what Dell Hymes calls the "genre" of an
exchange, i.e., whether it is to be construed as a conversation, sarcasm,
corrective feedback, or model sentence.
A pair of examples from Beginning German: The teacher
has given students the task of jotting down a list of verb infinitives at
random, then writing the past participle next to each verb, so that students
working in pairs can form a narrative in the past tense that connects these randomly
selected verbs in some creative way. As the teacher moves around the room to
listen in on what students are saying, she hears one student end a sentence
with gefahrt. Choosing not to correct the mistake overtly, she responds
with a corrective recast ending in gefahren. The student looks
flustered, so the teacher reminds her more explicitly that the past participle
of fahren is gefahren, and encourages her to repeat the corrected
sentence. The student does so, but still looks confused. Only later does the
reason become clear: the student was reading her partner's list, not her own,
and was in the process of pointing out the partner's mistake. The teacher heard
only the initial reading and assumed that the student was speaking on her own
as "author," when in fact the student was quoting someone else's
language. The problem here was not the meaning or form of the word, but the
footing of its utterance.
In another example, the teacher wishes to set up a
listening comprehension drill that will focus attention on the "t" in
simple past weak verbs. He intends to read several statements and questions
that mix present and simple past weak verbs, and asks his students to indicate
if the action described is jetzt or schon passiert, depending on
what they hear. The teacher begins with a question: Hörtest du etwas?,
hoping for a response of schon passiert. But the students unanimously
interpret this as the utterance of an "author," rather than a quote,
and begin looking around to see what could have
prompted the teacher to ask the (apparently real)
question: "Did you hear something?" They understood the question with
no difficulty; but they missed the teacher's footing indications entirely.
"Hearers" can have problems as well. Goffman
distinguishes among three groups: the true "addressees" of a speaker;
"bystanders," who may overhear a conversation but refrain from
consciously listening in; and "eavesdroppers," who intentionally
listen while others engage in conversation (131ff.). Kramsch points out the
numerous shifts that can take place for "hearers" in an example
involving a teacher and several students during an English lesson in a German
school (38ff.). The class is responding to a text dealing with the language
function of "expressing likes and dislikes":
Bernd: Peter don't
like jazz music.
Atnam: (raises his
hand)
Teacher: Atnam.
Atnam: That was
wrong.
Teacher: Why? Can
you say it in the right way?
Atnam: Peter, Peter
don't likes, likes ...
Teacher: (writes on
chalkboard: Jenny likes jazz music. Peter does not like jazz music.) Hatte
zunächst die Namen vertauscht. Jetzt haben wir's umgekehrt, ist genau falsch
'rum.
Manfred: Is' doch
egal. (38, citing Butzkamm 80)
The teacher in this case calls on one student to
correct the utterance of another, thereby framing her interaction with the
students as "principal" to "addressees." But whereas in a
normal conversational context, any nearby hearers (as "bystanders")
would be expected to avoid listening in, the teacher assumes that the other
students in the class, though not speaking, are actively comprehending and
processing the exchange. She expects them, in Goffman's terms, to take on the
role of "eavesdroppers." As the conversation progresses, the teacher
misinterprets what the called-on student wishes to correct, which results in
the teacher writing something on the board that, while grammatically correct,
is factually wrong. The teacher then switches codes and comments on the mistake
in her own (and the students') L1, speaking now as an "author" to
whomever might be listening, and thereby re-aligning the students either as
collective "addressees," who now participate on her level, or as
"bystanders"--but who in either case perhaps feel that this is the
first "real" communication that has taken place during the episode.
The teacher's comments prompt a student to assure the teacher that it doesn't
matter, making that student an "author," using the commonly shared
L1. The entire exchange lasts perhaps 20 seconds, but those few moments
encompass a dizzying swirl of footing-switches, and one may well wonder if the
rest of the class was keeping up with the dance.
To position this analysis in the framework of AR, we
could imagine that this teacher might decide that code-switching was a problem
in the class and begin an AR project to foster more consistent use of L2. The
teacher would engage in qualitative analysis of the class, and would (we hope)
arrive at some of the insights discussed above. A quantitative researcher, by
contrast, might simply note that Manfred switched to L1 and count the number of
times this happened or the number of L1 words uttered. But the kind of
observation that informs AR emphasizes not the behavior (code-switching) but
the action behind it (a footing shift in response to multiple inputs) and seeks
change with that perspective in mind.
Reliability and Validity
These ways of observing and interpreting must be
joined with some methodological means of ensuring the reliability and validity
of the AR project's conclusions. If one is trying to note patterns of response
to humor, or indications of authority struggles, or recurrent instances of
footing problems, how does one know (a) if one is "seeing" what's
really there, and (b) if one is interpreting it correctly?
In quantitative inquiry
("I propose that giving a short vocabulary quiz every day will improve my
students' ability to use these words spontaneously"), there are
well-established standards and criteria for evaluation: random selection of
subjects, control for extraneous variables, statistical analysis, and the like.
But for interpretive analysis ("Why do my students tend to use certain new
words, but not others?"), no generally accepted standards exist, as any
perusal of AR case studies will quickly make clear. Yet there is a consensus
among qualitative researchers elsewhere on at least two essentials:
triangulation of observation and analysis, and attempts to disconfirm the
emerging hypotheses. Numerous studies, some of which are cited above, describe
these standards in detail (notably Miles and Huberman, and Kirk and Miller).
Erickson suggests that a qualitative research report can meet the demand for
validity and reliability if it shows the relations drawn between concrete detail and abstract assertion; displays the range of
evidence for the assertions; and makes explicit the author's own interpretive
stance. (153)
At the very least, one should try to ensure that multiple
perspectives are regarded in deciding on the problem to be analyzed, the
intervention to be attempted, and the interpretation to be derived. A primary
component of this is collaborative group discussion, as enjoined by Kemmis and
McTaggart. There are additional ways of achieving validity, however: frequent
classroom observations with detailed field notes for later discussion,
participant interviews, and classroom audio and video tapes, to name a few.
Assuming these measures are part of the AR project design, they must be cited
and explained when writing up the results of the project. Kirk and Miller
maintain that "reliability depends essentially on explicitly described
observational procedures" (41). Readers can then judge for themselves the
validity of the observations and the plausibility of the interpretive findings.
My commentary on AR's history, methodology, and
conceptual application is intended to be informative on its own; but it is also
meant to serve as a backdrop for two case studies to follow. During a recent spring
semester, two sections of German 102 became the sites for AR projects carried
out by graduate student TAs, each of whom focused on one of the pedagogical
problems described at the outset of this paper. These students read much of the
background material related above during a fall-semester seminar and decided
collaboratively to engage in AR case studies involving their own teaching under
my supervision. The basic format of Kemmis and McTaggart's program served as
our methodological template, but in addition we adhered to several guidelines
proposed by Oja and Smulyan (12 ff.):
Collaboration
While not insisting that AR involve constant
collaboration, as do Kemmis and McTaggart, we recognized the value of working
together and pooling our experience in hopes of improving individual Praxis.
For both projects, this meant weekly meetings devoted to discussion of the data
we had gathered from the classrooms, in order to comment on specific issues and
consider more general questions that emerged from the classroom situations. We
visited each others' classes, as mutually agreed upon, and engaged in frequent
informal discussion about the project topics.
Focus on Practice
While theoretical writings on AR formed the initial
phase of the project, the principal subject of our weekly discussions remained
the actual classroom situations in which the TAs found themselves. The goal was
the improvement of those situations by means of reflective changes in action,
using the AR cycle of Plan, Act, Observe, Reflect. We decided to aim at one
complete cycle during the semester, culminating in a clearly-defined action
response to the perceived problem.
Project Support
My role was that of coordinator and collaborator: I
organized the project, provided materials on AR and the nature of qualitative
analysis in general, and then guided each teacher through the AR cycle. During
several phases I functioned chiefly as "triangulationist," observing
what was going on in the classroom prior to, and during, the intervention portion
of the cycle.
Professional Development
Numerous teacher trainers (such as Leo Bartlett,
Johnstone, Richards and Lockhart, and Wallace) agree that AR can be a useful
component in teacher training and development, both for the researcher and his
or her potential reading audience. Elliott has both groups in mind when he
notes that AR often forces us to reconsider our underlying assumptions about
teaching and learning, challenging "the fundamental beliefs embodied in
existing practices about the nature of learning, teaching and evaluation"
(9). Those who engage in the research and those who read it thoughtfully must
face inevitable challenges to their "fundamental beliefs" about
teaching in ways that transcend the usual exhortations of a teacher trainer.
It became evident over the
course of our project that this process was taking place with all those
involved. Teacher behaviors that would have been difficult to define, let alone
change by means of feedback,
underwent a process of modification from within, based on the TAs' own perception of the
classroom problems and desire for change. The results were
so positive that we felt it would be of benefit to let other teachers and
teacher-trainers "listen in" on the process and consider how they
might adapt the AR model to their own use. In doing so, we wish to underscore
an important difference in how one reads quantitative as opposed to qualitative
studies. Where quantitative studies postulate generalizability and encourage
replication, qualitative studies acknowledge the very particular and local
character of each study, and encourage reflective comparison. Erickson points
out that in qualitative research, "the search is not for abstract
universals ... but for concrete universals, arrived at by studying a
specific case in great detail and then comparing it with other cases studied in
equally great detail" (130). We hope that the examples presented here will
be of help in precisely that way--by stimulating readers to consider their own
classroom situations with an eye to reflection and intervention.
There was no attempt made to impose a particular
format on the writing-up of these studies, nor was there any requirement to
consult secondary literature, as the studies themselves indicate. The TAs were
encouraged simply to relate in as much detail as possible the impetus for their
AR cycle, and the processes of observation, planning, and acting that ensued.
The results are not intended to be models of qualitative analysis, or even (for
that matter) of AR, but rather examples of how a project like this can work out
in practice. We became acutely aware of the limitations imposed on us by the
same "real life" we were trying to observe. There was no time to
carry out multiple cycles of AR, as originally intended; videotape recorders
and microphones occasionally refused to function; scheduling problems made
collaborative observation a very real challenge; and throughout the process,
the "fuzziness" that lies at the heart of interpretive study was the
cause of no little frustration. And yet as the studies developed, we were able
to see that real change is possible, that reflection is a powerful teaching
tool, and that collaborative effort can be full of rewards.
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Kincheloe, Joe. Teachers as Researchers:
Qualitative Inquiry as a Path to Empowerment. London: Falmer, 1991.
Kirk, Jerome, and Marc Miller. Reliability and
Validity in Qualitative Research. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986.
Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in Language
Teaching. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Lewin, Kurt. "Action Research and Minority
Problems." Journal of Social Issues 2 (1946): 34-46.
Lofland, John, and Lyn Lofland. Analyzing Social
Settings. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995.
Lyster, Roy. "Recasts, Repetition, and Ambiguity
in L2 Classroom Discourse." Studies in Second Language Acquisition
20 (1997): 51-81.
Merriam, Sharan. Qualitative Research and Case
Study Applications in Education. San Francisco: Jossey, 1998.
Miles, Matthew, and A. Michael Huberman. "Drawing
Valid Meaning from Qualitative Data: Toward a Shared Craft." Educational
Researcher 13 (1984): 20-30.
Mohr, Marian, and Marion MacLean. Working Together:
A Guide for Teacher-Researchers. Urbana: NCTE, 1987.
Nixon, Jon. A Teacher's Guide to Action Research.
London: Grant, 1981.
Noffke, Susan, and Robert Stevenson, eds. Educational
Action Research: Becoming Practically Critical. New York: Teachers
College-Columbia U, 1995.
Nunan, David. "Action Research in the Language
Classroom." Richards and Nunan 62-81.
Oja, Sharon, and Lisa Smulyan. Collaborative Action
Research: A Developmental Approach. London: Falmer, 1989.
Olson, Mary, ed. Opening the Door to Classroom
Research. Newark: Intl. Reading Assn., 1990.
Richards, Jack, and Charles Lockhart. Reflective
Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Richards, Jack, and David Nunan, eds. Second
Language Teacher Education. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Schön, Donald. Educating the Reflective Practitioner.
San Francisco: Jossey, 1987.
------. The Reflective Practitioner: How
Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic, 1983.
Stake, Robert. The Art of Case Study Research.
Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995.
Stones, Edgar, and Sidney Morris. Teaching
Practice: Problems and Perspectives. London: Methuen, 1972.
Wallace, Michael. Action Research for Language
Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
------. Training Foreign Language Teachers: A
Reflective Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Winter, Richard. Action-Research and the Nature of
Social Inquiry: Professional Innovation and Educational Work. Aldershot:
Avebury, 1987.
Wittrock, Merlin, ed. Handbook of Research on
Teaching. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Selected AR Internet Resources
(as of 9/99):
http://www.behs.cchs.usyd.edu.au/arow/Reader/rmasters.htm [a history of AR]
http://educ.queensu.ca/~ar/oerc97/ [graduate student AR reports]
http://educ.queensu.ca/~ar/ [links to more AR sites]
http://www.parnet.org/home.cfm [participatory AR site at Cornell University]
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/ [on-line journal for teacher research]
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/sawd/ari/ari-papers.html [AR international online journal]
© 1999 by the American
Association of Teachers of German.
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4.- SEMINARIO DE
Our dear
SHARER Graciela Pascual has got an invitation for all of us:
1º Seminario-Taller
organizado por
Red de Capacitadores en Lenguas Extranjeras
ELT: Making our teaching
practice more reflective and more creative
Módulo
1: Improving your students' pronunciation
by Miriam Germani & Lucía Rivas
Phonology in the EFL classroom
Sábado 6/05/06
Módulo
2: Reflective Learning through TBL (Task-Based Learning)
by Aurelia García & M.G.di Franco
...the pleasure of 'real' learning!
Sábados 20/05/06 y
24/06/06
Módulo
3 Young Learners...teaching with
a smile in your heart!
by Grace Bertolini (from Buenos Aires)
Practical techniques for teaching children
Sábado
03/06/06
Total 40 horas reloj: 24
horas presenciales (6 hs por encuentro) 16 horas: para elaboración de trabajos
y tutorías.
Se otorgarán certificados de Asistencia y de Aprobación con puntaje. Resolución
Ministerial de Prov.de
FEES: Socios y Estudiantes $ 25 x encuentro, $ 90 x 4 encuentros ;
No-Socios $ 40 x encuentro, $ 140 x 4 encuentros.
Solicite planillas de inscripción a los Tel 414313 / 423473 o por
mail a adrianaca@ar.inter.net , grapa8@yahoo.com , griseldaiglesias@cpenet.com.ar
-----------------------------------------------------------
5.- II
JORNADAS DE LECTURA Y ESCRITURA EN CATAMARCA
Our dear
SHARERS from the Organizing Committee of Cátedra UNESCO announce:
Cátedra UNESCO para el mejoramiento de la calidad y equidad de la
educación en América Latina con base en
II
Lectura y Escritura: Caminos para la construcción del mundo
28, 29 y 30 de Junio de 2006 - Avda. Belgrano 300 - Catamarca - República
Argentina
Destinatarios
- Docentes e Investigadores de Letras, Lenguas, Lenguas Extranjeras,
Filosofía, Ciencias de
Areas Tematicas
- La escritura académica y científica
- La incidencia de la reflexión lingüística en la producción y comprensión de
textos
- Sujeto, representación y estética en la lectura
- Comprensión y producción de textos en los diferentes niveles educativos
- Lectura y escritura del discurso literario
- Implicaciones pedagógicas en la enseñanza de la lectura y la escritura
- Lectura y escritura en lenguas extranjeras
- Sociedad, espacio e historia: lecturas posibles
- Lectura, escritura y nuevas tecnologías
- Lectura crítica de los medios
Tipos de Actividades:
Conferencias plenarias, Paneles, Presentación de libros, Trabajo en
Comisiones
Especialistas que confirmaron su participación:
Dra. Elvira Arnoux (Universidad de Buenos Aires,) Coordinadora de la sede
Argentina de
Dra. María Cristina Martínez (Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia,)
Coordinadora General de
Panel a cargo de
Panel a cargo de
Presentación del libro: La lectura y la informática.
Caminos al conocimiento, de Lidia Aguirre de Quevedo (comp.)
Aranceles: Estos valores regirán hasta el 12 de mayo.
- Docente con Ponencia $ 60,°°
- Docente Asistente $ 30,°°
- Alumno con Ponencia $ 15,°°
- Alumno Asistente Sin Cargo
Los participantes de la ciudad de Catamarca deben abonar los aranceles en
Secretaría de
Los participantes de afuera de Catamarca deben hacerlo a
Desde el 12 de mayo y hasta el 02 de junio los aranceles se incrementarán $ 20
en cada categoría. La ficha de inscripción debe ser enviada por este medio
hasta el 02 de junio. Correo electrónico: jornadaslecturayescritura2@yahoo.com.ar
------------------------------------------------------------
6.- MAESTRIA EN EDUCACIÓN EN
Our dear SHARER Laura Radetich has sent us all this
information:
Maestría en Educación. Pedagogías críticas y problemáticas
socioeducativas.
Preinscripción:
Hasta el 31 de mayo está abierta la preinscripción a
El programa se desarrollará en la sede de
Quienes podrán inscribirse en
1. Los egresados de Carreras de Licenciaturas o Profesorados
Universitarios en Ciencias de
2. Los egresados de Institutos Terciarios de formación de
Profesores para Enseñanza Media, Técnica y Superior.
3. Los graduados de otras carreras universitarias, con formación
pedagógica certificada, previa aceptación de
Los alumnos del posgrado pertenecerán a algunas de estas dos
categorías:
A. los que cursarán los seminarios y actividades del posgrado en
forma no arancelada por ser egresados de alguna de las carreras de grado de
esta Facultad
B. los que, cumpliendo las condiciones de titulación y formación
para la inscripción indicadas en A deberán pagar matrícula y aranceles atendiendo
a
En qué consiste el cursado de
1 Seminario de Pedagogías Críticas y 1 Seminario de Problemáticas
Socioeducativas comunes y obligatorios a todos los alumnos
2 Seminarios Electivos - de diferentes áreas
2 Seminarios Orientados al tema de tesis a elegir entre la oferta
de este posgrado o de otras instituciones
1 Seminario de
Investigación en educación
1 Pasantía en instituciones, informe de trabajo de campo o similar
16 Reuniones Tutoriales
1 Taller de Escritura de Tesis
Áreas de Trabajo Academico de
1. Área Educación, Pedagogía Y Praxis. Teoría y praxis pedagógica en el conocimiento
educativo.
2. Área Sociología De
3. Area Educación, Institucion Escolar y Politicas Públicas
4. Area Educación, Cultura y Subjetividad.
Direccion De
Personal Docente
Personal docente permanente
Mgr. Silvia Llomovatte,
Profesora UBA, Dra. Flora M. Hillert ,
Profesora, UBA
Lic. Dora González; Profesora, UBA, Mgr. Carina Kaplan, Profesora, UBA
Mgr. Graciela Morgade, Profesora, UBA, Lic. Daniel Suárez;
Profesor, UBA,
Dr. Pablo Pineau, Profesor, UBA, Lic. Julia Silber, Profesora
UNLP,
Mgr. Marcela Mollis , Profesora, UBA, Dra. Silvia Grinberg , UNSAM
Personal docente invitado
Prof. Carlos Cullen, Mgr. Pedro Krotsch. Dr. Pablo Gentili, Mgr.
Miryam Feldfeber
Dra. Sandra Carli, Dr. Etelvina Sandoval, Dr. Ángel Pérez Gómez,
Dr. Daniel
Schugurensky
Para informaciones y preinscripción:
1. Dirigirse a
maestria_educacionysociedad@filo.uba.ar
ó
al teléfono 4432-0606 (int. 188) después de las 14 hs preguntando por Julieta.
2. Mención del título
de grado o terciario, el año y la institución, breve descripción de la
trayectoria profesional o académica y de los motivos de elección de esta maestría.
------------------------------------------------------------
7.- CONCURSO DOCENTE
El
Rectorado del IES en Lenguas Vivas "J. R. Fernández" invita a
presentar antecedentes, a los interesados en hacerse cargo del dictado de las
siguientes materias:
Lengua
Inglesa III - 6 hs cátedra - miércoles y jueves de
Traducción
Técnico-Científica II - 5 hs cátedra - martes de
Lengua Inglesa
IV - 4 hs cátedra - jueves de
Fecha
límite de entrega en Secretaría General: viernes 12 de mayo, 16 horas.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
8.- THE SECOND ANGLIA EXAMINATION SYNDICATE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS
Our dear SHARER Mónica Blanco Kunz wants
to invite us all Anglia´s Second Congress:
The Second Anglia Examination Syndicate International
Congress And Exhibition
For ELT Professionals
Optimising The Various Roles Of ELT Managers, Teachers
And Learners
11 - 12 August 2006 - Morning & Afternoon
Universidad
Argentina de
Organised By:
Anglia Examination Syndicate
Chichester College
Kesington Schools Of English
In Collaboration With:
Universidad
Argentina de
This 2-day Mega-Event will offer a balanced programme
of stimulating and high quality presentations.
All delegates will have an opportunity to meet
colleagues from different parts of Argentina and abroad in order to establish
links and contacts, thus creating or extending already existing professional
interests. They will also have the chance to find out about the latest ELT
publications and services in a large resources exhibition area
for ELT-related promotional stands.
Welcome Chris Kunz To Argentina!!
Join This Unmissable 2-Full-Day Mega-Event and rub
shoulders with around-the-world top-notch ELT Gurus
The following Speakers have confirmed their
participation:
Chris
Kunz, Omar Villarreal, Ana Maria Rozzi De Bergel, Oriel Villagarcia, Griselda
Beacon, Patricia Gomez, Celia Zubiri, Alicia Lopez Oyhenart, Laurie Sullivan,
Alfred Hopkins, Jamie Duncan, Laura Szmuch, Karina Duarte, Mariela Lucente,
Andrea Coviella, Gabriela Diaz, Claudia Alvarez, Viviana Cassouto, Nancy Rossi,
Valeria Goluza,
Maria
Laura Araneo, Marcela Villan, Hector Eduardo Garzon, Analia Kandel, Carlos
Galizzi, Susana Trabaldo, Lorena Roque,
As well as many, many more to come...!!
Mega-Raffle Prizes within easy eeach of a fair share
of the audience!!
Special Treat For All Participants!!
A Superb Raffle Prize: 4-Week Course At Chichester
College, England For January 2007
Certificates Of Attendance Issued by Chichester
College, England.
For Congress details and Online Registration, Visit www.angliaexams.com
Call For Papers Open Until 31 May 2006
With the Support of:
Universidad
Argentina De
Universidad
Tecnologica Nacional
Universidad Caece
British Tourist Authority (Visit Britain)
Asociación
De Profesores De Ingles Del Conurbano Bonaerense
Share E-Magazine
English And Fun
The Buenos Aires Players - E-Teaching On Line
Richmond Publishing - Macmillan Publishers - Oxford
University Press
Patricia Gomez Arts & Education - Resourceful
Teaching - On The Road –
Sullivan & Associates - Net-Learning - Red
Intelectual Magazine - TWC International
Apple Consultancy - Ameghino Bookshop - New Tools For
Teachers- Wise –
ELT Today - Bright Minds School Of English - Instituto
Babel - The Bridge School Of English - Excel Educational Services - The Buenos
Aires Journal
Anglia Examination Syndicate - info@angliaexams.com - +54 11 4246-3547
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
9.- A COURSE
ON TEACHING ADULTS
Our dear SHARER Mady Casco has sent us
this announcement:
"At Home -Buenos Aires" is running the
following Methodology Workshops on:
Adults
as Learners of a Foreign Language
(12 hour-workshop) created and conducted by Mady
Casco
Contents:
Main issues when teaching adults
Andragogy & Constructivism
Motivation & Anxiety
Different Approaches to teaching a foreign language to
adults
Adults learning English in companies
Scaffolding authentic material
Integrating the four skills
Turning a
reader into a topic-based unit
Using video and DVD
Using Music in the class
When? 2-session workshop: May 13th & May 27th or
July 1st & July 15th (from 9 to 15.30)
3-session workshop: June 10th, June 24 and July 8th (9
to 13)
Where? "At Home - Buenos Aires" Av Santa Fé
3946 - Capital Federal
For further information: contact info@athome-buenosaires.com / madycasco@netizen.com.ar www.athome-buenosaires.com or call
4833-2965
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
10.- NEWS
FROM THE BRITISH COUNCIL
Mary Godward, Manager Knowledge and Learning, British Council
Argentina writes to us:
(1)
Crossing Borders is an exciting new initiative that uses information technology to
link young writers in Africa with experienced mentors in the UK. The project is
funded by the British Council in London, designed and managed by the Department
of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and enabled by a
network of British Council offices in Africa. Participants in the project are
drawn from Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, S. Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ghana
and Southern Africa. Mentors represent a wide range of cultural backgrounds and
writing practice, creating a project that is rich in cultural exchange as well
as practical strategies for writing development. Crossing Borders is
creating a new, international community of writers who communicate through the
development of new writing to share their knowledge and experience.
The
third edition of Crossing
Borders magazine is now available online at http://www.crossingborders-africanwriting.org/magazine/issue3/
and includes:
· · Editorial by Becky Clarke
· · Feature article by Becky Clarke on
'What an Agent Does'
· · Blame the Cooker by Syned Mthatiwa from
Malawi
· · Did You Know Lebo? by Wame Molefhe from
Botswana
· · Flushed Out by Bunmi Julius-Adeoye
from Nigeria
· · One Woman's Price by Millicent
Muthoni from Kenya
· · When Silence Speaks by Batsirai Easther Chigama
from Zimbabwe
· · Diaspora by Phillippa Yaa de
Villiers from South Africa
(2)
The
Learn English Professionals British Council website has always offered high
quality listening material which could be used only at a PC. With the
increasing popularity of portable MP3 players, the site has also started
offering downloadable materials which can be listened to on the move. If you
would like to test any, please go to http://www.britishcouncil.org/professionals.htm
(3) Offshoots: We have just received a copy of the
latest Offshoots - a series of CDs produced by the British Council over
the last three years, based on seminars which took place in the UK. This one
includes:
· Enterprising universities
· Exploiting genetic knowledge
· Leadership in school education
· Higher education management
· Tackling corruption worldwide
If any
of you would like to borrow them, please contact Ignacio Aguilo at the British
Council Argentina (Ignacio.aguilo@britishcouncil.org.ar)
(4) Night Haunts - Writer Sukhdev
Sandhu’s web project
Sukhdev
Sandhu, one of the writers featured in New Writing 12 and film critic of
the Daily Telegraph, is writing for the Night Haunts web project. The
introduction of the web site provides a brief description of the project:
Night
Haunts unfolds in monthly episodes through 2006 on a specially designed
website. In this contemporary nocturnal journal, Sandhu prospects in the London
night with the people who drive its pulse from cleaners to praying nuns,
security guards to the Samaritans. In each episode, Sandhu reflects on the
nature of the urban night. Has night life been corroded by light and
entertainment? What are the invisible forces that pulse through the sleeping
city? Is real darkness possible anymore?
I am
sure many of you will find the site very interesting and may even encourage
your students to look at it! The address is www.nighthaunts.org.uk
and, if you would like to be kept informed on the new episodes, you can
subscribe to their e-mail alert service.
Enjoy
the reading…
Mary Godward
Manager Knowledge
and Learning - British Council
M T de
Alvear 590 - 4th Floor - C1058AAF Buenos Aires -Argentina
T +54
(0)11 4311 9814 - F +54 (0)11 4311 7747 - mary.godward@britishcouncil.org.ar
www.britishcouncil.org.ar
-----------------------------------------------------------
11.- ENCUENTRO DE CAPACITACIÓN DOCENTE SOBRE
PROBLEMÁTICAS DEL AULA EN TIEMPOS DE CRISIS
Our dear SHARER Cristina de
Encuentro de Capacitacion Docente
El 19 y 20 de mayo se llevará a cabo el Encuentro de Capacitación
Docente, organizado por Acuarell Capacitación y que otorga puntaje docente.
Dirigido a Docentes y profesionales de educación, ambas jornadas
estarán destinadas a talleres para abordar temas vinculados a:
prevención de la violencia en el aula, estrés docente, sesiones de
coaching con profesionales especializados para trabajar el abordaje de
problemáticas del aula,
Inteligencia emocional hacia la alfabetización emocional y cambio
del clima del aula.
Técnicas superadoras de conflictos escolares.
Serán algunos de los temas que se desarrollarán durante las dos
jornadas. Para mayor información dirigirse a: Acuarell Capacitación - Tel.
4827-5235 en el horario de
------------------------------------------------------------
12.- THE BUENOS AIRES
JOURNAL - REVISTA ONLINE EN INGLÉS Y CASTELLANO –
Our dear SHARER Alfred Hopkins writes to
us:
º Our latest interviews at http://www.aglat.com/voz
include a controversial U.S. writer, MickeyZ, opposed to the war
machine,Meredith, who is involved in the women's peace movement, and Mercedes
Meroño, vice president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (in Spanish).
º Keep in touch: we are organizing a
creative writing contest!
Alfred Hopkins http://www.a-hopkins.com 15 62 52 10 28
The Hopkins Creative Language Lab's
theatre and storytelling workshop meets this Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. at Salta
755, Buenos Aires city. If you didn't attend last Saturday's demonstration
class you are welcome to try a free class any Saturday.
º Those who like the movies might be
interested in this: we are filming short silent movies for a palmtop web site.
Anyone interested is invited to act, propose a script, direct, or film. The
address: http://www.video-scratching.com
Contact: seymour@a-hopkins.com
Phone: 15 62 52 10 28
------------------------------------------------------------------------
13.- WORKSHOP IN CORRIENTES
Our dear SHARER Peie from YES Bookshop sent us
these details about a forthcoming course she is organizing:
Course: TEACHING RESOURCES AND STORYTIME
Lecturer: Grace Bertolini
May 20th - Duration: 1 Day
Further information: yesbooks@gigared.com
Fee: $ 35 till May
12th.
2 or more people: $
33 each / ACPLI members $ 30
Certificates of
attendance will be issued
------------------------------------------------------------
14.- SHAKESPEARE ON SCREEN AT THE BRITISH ARTS CENTRE
Our dear SHARER Cecilia Fernández, Arts Manager British Council
– Argentina, has sent us this invitation:
British Arts Centre de
Conferencias BAC/Mayo : Shakespeare on Screen - Dictada por Daniel Rosenthal
Lunes 8 de Mayo de 2006, 19 hs - Suipacha 1333 -
Entrada libre y gratuita - Dictada en inglés
Great Story, Shame About the
Poetry!"
How Hollywood Plays Fast and
Loose with Shakespeare
For more than 50 years, American
film-makers have taken huge liberties with Shakespeare's plays - abandoning the
originals language and setting but retaining and reshaping the plots and
characters to create a range of
Westerns, gangster thrillers, high-school comedies and dramas, and even
science-fiction. Using comparative clips from orthodox Shakespeare films and
American genre adaptations, author and lecturer Daniel Rosenthal will
illustrate what we learn about Shakespeare and Hollywood when:
"The Tempest" takes a journey
into outer space in "Forbidden
Planet"(1956), "Macbeth" becomes a gun-toting criminal in
"Joe Macbeth" (1955) and "Men of Respect" (1991),
"Othello" is transformed into a teenage basketball star in
"O" (2000), "King Lear" is a Liverpool crime lord ("My
Kingdom", 2001) or cattle baron ("King of Texas", 2002),
"The Taming of the Shrew" plays out at a high school in Seattle in
"10 Things I Hate About You" (1999)
Daniel Rosenthal was born in London in
1971 and educated a University College School, London and Pembroke College,
Cambridge. He is author of "Shakespeare on Screen" (Hamlyn, London,
2000; published in Spanish by the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires in May
2006) and the editor of the annual "Variety International Film
Guide". He is working on a major new history of the National Theatre of
Great Britain. He has been a freelance interviewer and feature writer since
1996, writing on film and theatre for The Times, Independent and Observer.
Con el apoyo de British Council. Para ampliar la información
consulte siempre nuestra página web www.britishartscentre.org.ar
Suipacha 1333 / Tel 4393-6941
/ www.britishartscentre.org.ar
/ bac@aaci.org.ar
Martes a Viernes de
--------------------------------------------------------------------
15.- BRAZ-TESOL 10th NATIONAL CONVENTION
Our dear
SHARER Sara
Walker at sara@sarawalker.com.br wants to
invite all SHARERS to:
BRAZ-TESOL
10th National Convention "Teaching, Learning, Leading" ,
July
8-11 2006, Brasilia , Brazil
BRAZ-TESOL 10th National Convention "Teaching,Learning, Leading" will
be held at the Convention Center in Brasilia Brazil from July 8-11 2006, with
around 1,500 participants.
Full information and forms can be fiound on the BRAZ-TESOL website at www.braztesol.org.br
. Commercial and sponsorship information is also
available on the site.
Further information from Shaun Dowling sddowling@uol.com.br or Sara Walker sara@sarawalker.com.br
--------------------------------------------------------------------
16- NINTH IATEFL CONFERENCE IN CHILE
Our
dear SHARER Gabriela Silva, Projects
Officer - British Council Chile,
has written to us:
IATEFL
Chile is organising the 9th IATEFL Conference: "E-L-T: Enthusiasm Language
Teaching"
The Conference will be held in Santiago de Chile on 18 & 19 July 2006 at
Universidad Central. The topic of this
conference focuses on the enthusiasm and motivation for learning and how it can
be taken into the language classroom. We invite teachers, trainers, and all ELT professionals to share
successful experiences and present works
and research done in the field.
For any
enquiries please email info@iatefl.cl
IATEFL - Chile was founded in 1992 by the British Council, The British
Institute, the North American Institute, and the Association of British
Schools (ABSCH). The aim of our
work is to offer opportunities for professional development for teachers of
English, through the organization of
conferences, seminars, and workshops.
Gabriela Silva - Projects Officer - British Council
Eliodoro Yanez 832, Santiago, Chile
gabriela.silva@britishcouncil.cl
- T +56 (2) 410 6914 - F +56 (2) 410
6929
--------------------------------------------------------------------
17.- PRESENTACIÓN
DE UN LIBRO EN
El Lic. Juan José Llach , se referirá a su obra y harán uso de la palabra el Ministro de
Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología, Lic. Daniel Filmus, el académico Prof. Alfredo
M. van Gelderen y
--------------------------------------------------------------------
We would
like to finish this issue of SHARE with a message that a dear SHARER (and one
of our first subscribers) from Corrientes has sent us
Queridos Omar y Marina,
Esto podrá parecer muy "cursi", pero me gustó mucho me pareció
dulce y es una manera de decirles Gracias por todo lo que nos dan en cada
edición del SHARE MAGAZINE.
Dicen que
Con el cariño de siempre.
Susana Lawless
HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEK
Omar and Marina.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SHARE is distributed free of charge. All announcements
in this electronic magazine are also absolutely free of charge. We do not
endorse any of the services announced or the views expressed by the
contributors. For more information about the characteristics and
readership of SHARE visit: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/ShareMagazine
VISIT OUR WEBSITE : http://www.ShareEducation.com.ar
There you can read all past issues of SHARE in the section SHARE
ARCHIVES.
------------------------------------------------------------------------