La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía

del postmétodo

Module 2
Conceptualizing the learning process

Introduction

Hello again! Welcome to the second week of our course! We hope you have got to
learn everything you needed to learn about the campus and your classmates.

In this module we will start reflecting about our teaching practice with two purposes.
The first one will be to identify those methods or approaches in use in them; the
second, to reflect on our own pedagogical stance.

More often than never, when we teach, we act mechanically, either in the direction of
what we have learnt in the teaching training college or in that which our students
point us to follow in order to help them learn. What, how many times do we stop to
reflect about whether our moves are a mere, automatic reflex triggered by our
teaching training or the product of careful analysis of what our classroom requires
from us?

What we pose here is the need to start identifying what traces from those methods
we have read about in the past still persist in our everyday practice and whether
these are of any use to us or our students. And once we know that, it becomes
necessary to reflect on whether we are equipped with the flexibility we need to let
them stay… or let them go.

This week you are going to analyze a couple of teaching scenarios and exchange your
ideas about them and what they make you think. You will continue with your
e-portfolio with all your notes and the new concepts and ideas you gather, both from
the theory we will read and from your classmates. Also, and most important, you will
continue recording your own process of learning in that portfolio: what you used to
think about a topic, what you have learnt, whether this new learning has made your
ideas shift and in which direction, etc.

And without further ado, let us go to the objectives we have set for this module.

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 1
 Objectives
● Identify existing methods and approaches in your own classrooms
● Analyze your pedagogical stance.
● Compare your own teaching practice with that of others.
● Reflect about your learning process.

Contents
The educational setting: the teacher-classroom relationship. Roles of the teachers:
from “transmitters” to “transformers”. Theory, practice and critical pedagogy.

Conceptualizing the learning process

The role of teachers throughout history: from “transmitters” to

“transformers”

Throughout the history of teaching, the learning process has undergone several
changes in its nature according to epochal circumstances. And very often, teaching
has been described as a science, an art, a job, a career, an occupation, a call, or all of
them combined. What cannot be denied is the subjectivity and the organization it
entails. Such subjectivity consists mostly of different types of knowledge and sets of
rules that teachers collect throughout their practice. Unfortunately, that subjectivity
is seen as experience rather than knowledge, and from the point of view of science is
mostly unreliable. As Donald Freeman says, this experience unites teachers; yet, this
union cannot be considered a disciplinary community. (Freeman, 1998:10)

Also, teaching has an aim, this being the creation of the best conditions for someone
to learn in a limited period of time. But teaching and learning are not, per se,
co-occurrent. There can be teaching without learning happening, and also learning
can happen without anyone teaching on the other end. Teaching can, at most, boost
learning and make it most effective.

And it is teachers who make this possible. Of course, there are several actors in the
educational community, from policy makers to the students’ families; but ultimately,
teachers are those who are on the front line of the process. And their role, just as it
happened with the learning process, has been redefined, reshaped, remoulded over
and over. As Kumaravadivelu states,

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 2
 The teacher has been variously referred to as an artist and an architect;
a scientist and a psychologist; a manager and a mentor; a controller and a
counselor; a sage on the stage; a guide on the side; and more. There is
merit in each of these metaphors. Each of them captures the teacher’s role
partially but none of them fully.
Instead of delving deep into the familiar metaphors, I believe it is much
more beneficial to view the historical role and function of classroom
teachers to understand how the concept of teacher role has developed
over the years, and how that development has shaped the nature and
scope of institutionalized education. (Kumaravadivelu, 2003:7-8)

Then, he goes on to characterize teachers in three different ways: as passive

technicians, as reflective practitioners and as transformative individuals.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Look at the chart below summarizing those three ways. Where would you place yourself in
that continuum? Check the characteristics of each role in the table below.

Figure 1.1 A hierarchy of teacher roles

⦣ ⦣
Teachers as Teachers as Teachers as
transformative reflective passive
intellectuals practitioners technicians
(Kumaravadivelu, 2003:17)

Table 1.1 The Roles of the Teacher: a summary

Teachers as passive Teachers as reflective Teachers as transformative

technicians practitioners intellectuals

Primary role of conduit facilitator change agent

teacher

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 3
 Primary source professional professional professional knowledge +
of knowledge knowledge + knowledge + teacher's teacher’s personal
empirical research personal knowledge + knowledge +
by experts guided action research self-exploratory
by teachers research by teachers

Primary goal of maximizing content all above + maximizing all above + maximizing
teaching knowledge through learning potential socio political awareness
prescribed activities through through problem- posing
problem-solving activities
activities

Primary discrete approach, integrated approach, holistic approach, anchored

orientation to anchored in the anchored in the in the society
teaching discipline classroom

Primary players experts teachers teachers

in the teaching + teachers + experts + learners
process + learners + experts
(in rank order) + community activists

(Kumaravadivelu, 2003:16)

As you have seen, there is a move from the traditional role of teachers as
“transmitters” of knowledge to one of “transformative” professionals, as
Kumaravadivelu himself states in this video:

TO WATCH

The role of teachers

Listen to a fragment of B. Kumaravadivelu 2013 conference where he explains the

changes in the roles of teachers.

https://youtu.be/XRmqgeg2RQM

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 4
 So, where are we headed nowadays? Forwards towards a more transformative
nature or backwards into a transmissional model?

Moving forwards

Forwards, but where to?

If we go forward, we are going to need to reshape our role yet once more. And this
new role will require that we develop observational skills in order to be able to spot
and address the diversity and inequalities present in our classroom. Transformative
teachers must be, in Freire’s words, critical pedagogists (Freire, 1998: 57, 61,75). And
critical pedagogists understand pedagogy is framed within relations of power and
dominance. Schools are, then,

“cultural arenas where heterogeneous ideological, discursive, and social

forms collide in an unremitting struggle for dominance” (McLaren, 1995, p. 30).

and teachers must be empowered to challenge those forces by taking “seriously

the lived experiences that teachers and learners bring to the educational setting”
(Kumaravadivelu, 2003:13). Teachers must be reflective and able to relate
pedagogy to the social issues present in their classrooms, sociopolitically
conscious transformative intellectuals who must help their students both to
learn and to change personally.

Hence, it is necessary to put into work those observational skills we mentioned

earlier, since it is by observing that teachers will be able to develop educational
acts that are contextualized around their own students’ specific wants and
needs. Also, they should be able to present their students with activities which
will not only require them to solve problems but also to raise further
thought-provoking questions that will make them reflect upon inequality and
injustice in their midst and address such issues by putting forth ideas related to
peaceful, meaningful coping strategies to apply both inside and outside the
classroom.

Such teachers will necessarily have to resort to inquiry-oriented planning. By

observing what goes on in their classrooms, they will start asking themselves
questions that will guide their teaching practice, and foster this inquiry-oriented
attitude in their students as well. At the same time, this requires that teachers

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 5
 be flexible enough to come up with tailor-fit tasks that will cater for their
students’ unique needs. And this is not easy to achieve when we adhere to one
single method, since no single method can provide us with one-fit-all strategies.
We must be sensitive to the heterogeneous quality of our classes, to the cultural
diversity of our students, and then be able to make all that diversity coexist
peacefully and work together towards a common goal. We must be active in
terms of questioning each and every phenomena taking place in our classrooms
in order to be able to find ways to transform the reality in them in the direction
of meaningful learning.

Now, how can this be achieved? Kumaravadivelu states that there is no way to
go from one kind of role to the other without constant reflection and cyclic
redevelopment of our practice. And in order for that to happen, we must focus
on the relationship between the theory underlying our practice and practice
itself. And on how we can carry out research on that relationship.

Kamaravadivelu states that while theory is seen as a set of concepts and insights
deriving from many academic disciplines, practice is made up of different strategies
indicated by a certain actor and adapted by teachers to achieve successful learning,
and this division between both presupposes the existence of a “privileged class of
theorists and an underprivileged class of practitioners” (ibid, page 18). So probably we
can say the time has come to bridge the gap between these two classes, and the steel
to build that bridge will come from classroom-based research. As Kumaravadivelu
goes on to say, theory and practice must become a unified, mutually-enriching entity.
Critical pedagogists suggest that teachers stop taking for granted the naturalness of
the theorist/teacher dichotomy and start making new theory.

TO READ

Read the following extract. Keep the main ideas in mind for the next module, where
we are going to read about the different types of knowledge involved in FL
classroom based research.

Any serious attempt to help teachers construct their own theory of

practice requires a re-examination of the idea of theory and theory
making. A distinction that Alexander (1984, 1986) makes between theory
as product and theory as process may be useful in this context. Theory as
product refers to the content knowledge of one’s discipline; whereas,

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 6
 theory as process refers to the intellectual activity (i.e., the thought
process) needed to theorize. Appropriately, Alexander uses the term
theorizing to refer to theory as intellectual activity. Theorizing as an
intellectual activity, then, is not confined to theorists alone; it is something
teachers should be enabled to do as well.
According to Alexander, a teacher’s theory of practice should be based
on different types of knowledge: (a) speculative theory (by which he refers
to the theory conceptualized by thinkers in the field), (b) the findings of
empirical research, and (c) the experiential knowledge of practicing
teachers. None of these, however, should be presented as the privileged
source of knowledge. He advises teachers to approach their own practice
with “principles drawn from the consideration of these different types of
knowledge” (Alexander 1986, p. 146), and urges teacher educators “to
concentrate less on what teachers should know, and more on how they
might think” (ibid., p. 145). In other words, the primary concern of teachers
and teacher educators should be the depth of critical thinking rather than
the breadth of content knowledge.
(Kumaravadivelu, 2013:20)

Wrapping up

Next, Kuramavadivelu invites us to reflect on the topic. Write down your

thoughts in your personal e-portfolio and keep them handy for future reference
(you’ll need them for part of your final task).

What are the benefits, and who stands to benefit, if teachers become effective
producers of their own personal theories? What, in your specific learning and
teaching context, are the possibilities and limitations you face if you wish to theorize
from your practice?
(Kumaravadivelu, 2013:21)

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 7
 TO WATCH

You can watch the whole conference by B. Kumaravadivelu (20139 at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YrvW6p5uG0&t=704s

GOING DEEPER

What have you learnt from this module? Which are the main concepts you have
pinpointed both from the materials studied and your classmates’ opinions?

Remember to make notes and include them in your e-portfolio. You will need them
for the final task.

FURTHER READING

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond methods. Macrostrategies for language

learning. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 8
 REFERENCES

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of the Heart. New York: Continuum.

Freeman, D. (1998). Doing Teacher Research. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond methods. Macrostrategies for language

learning. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Chapters 1 and 2, pages
5-43.

McLaren. P. (1995). Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture. London: Routledge.

British Council India (24th May 2013) TEC13 Day 01: Dr B Kumaravadivelu - Keynote
Address [Archivo de video] Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YrvW6p5uG0&t=704s (fragment 07:30:00 a
12:08:00 available at https://youtu.be/XRmqgeg2RQM)

Licencia Creative Commons

Autor(es): Equipo de la Dirección de Formación Docente Permanente. Dirección

Provincial de Educación Superior, DGCyE. Provincia de Buenos Aires (2023)

Esta obra está bajo una licencia Creative Commons

Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 3.0

DGCyE DFDP La enseñanza situada del Inglés desde la pedagogía del postmétodo 9