DOGME OUT IN THE OPEN
Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings
The response to Scott's "dogme" critique of materials-driven teaching (IATEFL Issues February 2000) has been both heated and sustained. The website discussion group that was formed as a result has notched up nearly 600 postings (groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme).
Those less convinced by materials-free (or better, materials-light) teaching, have complained about what they see as the dogmatism and inflexibility of the Dogme ELT "vow of chastity" - the first rule of which is that "Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom - i.e. themselves - and whatever happens to be in the classroom." Others have criticised the demands that such rigour places on the teacher.
Proponents of a dogme approach, however, attest to the sense of liberation and empowerment experienced in working solely with the raw material of the classroom, and speak of (re-)discovering the joy of teaching.
What has become apparent to some is that "imported" materials are just one element in a production-line model of education that positions learners as passive consumers of grammar "McNuggets". Central to this delivery model is the belief that learners should be segregated into "levels" - usually on dubious grounds of grammatical accuracy.
By adopting students' "levels" as their basic organising principle, schools sideline the learners' needs, interests and desires, for the sake of conformity to an externally imposed and spuriously quantifiable standard: "It doesn't matter what you say so long as you use the third conditional". Such an approach ignores the socially constructed nature of learning and the socially directed purposes for which language is used. Moreover, it compels teachers to adopt the role of level vigilante, constantly fretting about "mixed ability". The mean-spiritedness of such an approach is well captured in this piece of teachers' book advice:
Don't let the false beginners dominate the real beginners or pull you along too quickly… Encourage them to concentrate on areas where they can improve (e.g. pronunciation) and don't let them think they know it all!
Reacting to this levelling and straitening tendency, the 8th "vow of ELT chastity" argues:
Grading of students into different levels is disallowed: students should be free to join the class that they feel most comfortable in, whether for social reasons, or for reasons of mutual intelligibility, or both. As in other forms of human social interaction, diversity should be accommodated, even welcomed, but not proscribed.
One way of realising this principle would be to adapt some of the practices of Open Space Technology, a humanistic approach to problem-solving in organisations, developed by an American writer, Harrison Owen.
Open Space is an approach to group dynamics designed to maximise the benefits of bringing people together to address a shared issue or concern. Inspired by Owen's experience of coffee breaks as the most useful elements of conferences, it rejects delivery-mode instruction and promotes genuine interaction, peer-teaching and self-discovery.
Organisers agree a general theme for a session, but there is no agenda in Open Space. Participants meet in the round and are invited to post sessions under more specific headings.
People posting a session are responsible for initiating the discussion and for reporting back later. Participants sign up for different sessions and within a given time-frame people can attend one only, or go from session to session, or do nothing at all. The basic principles are that whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, and that the people who turn up for a given session are the right people. As Owen (1998) puts it :"If any situation is not learning rich, it is incumbent upon the individual participant to make it so."
Luke successfully adopted Open Space principles for a whole-school conversation session, with students and teachers peeling off into different rooms in varying numbers to discuss topics nominated by the students. He also used it for in-service staff development workshops. Scott adopted similar principles to organise "social activities" in a school in Alexandria. Both of us have played with the idea of incorporating such principles into curriculum design proper.
Open Space implies a self-organising approach to curriculum design in which language learning is motivated both by the desire to understand and contribute to the construction of subject matter knowledge, and by the need to become a member of an immediate social group. Of course, in choosing their class, learners would need to take account of their (self-assessed) ability to cope with the language: it would be foolhardy, perhaps, for a beginner to embark on, say, Romantic Literature in English, but they should at least have that choice. If we accept that language learning is both an emergent and a complex phenomenon, any attempt to regiment and control it from the outside is foredoomed.
Reference:
Owen, H. (1998). Emerging order in Open Space. www.openspaceworld.org