1. wEEK 5: CRITICAL APPROACHES AND POST-METHOD ERA IN TESOL ENGLISH 345

2. Announcements, announcements… About the field trip to a TESOL Workshop on Saturday, October 13th … http://www.itbe.org/fall.php TESOL Convention at IL (Febr. 11-12) Post a Progress Report on your blogs about your final project. See me today if you have any questions about your Final Project (15 min. Project Time at the end of the class).

3. AGENDA Reading Reflections Blog Discussion Presentations by Katie and Kristina Representations of Teaching, Classes and learning: A group work October 13th a TESOL workshop TESOL Presentation due

4. Jenn thinks… After reading Chapter 4 in Kuma, I understood a lot more about some of my classroom experiences. I found that I encountered some mismatches before in my classrooms and that mismatches were what had me getting so frustrated with my teachers at times. Now knowing that what really was happening were mismatches, I look back at situations with some of my teachers differently. I can easily see how mismatches can occur. Kuma explains how there are ten different kinds of mismatches, which makes it even more likely that teachers and students will encounter mismatches in their learning. I feel mismatches are even more likely to happen when working with learning other languages. As Kuma mentioned it is important to note that mismatches will always happen, they are always identifiable, and they are also always manageable.

5. Brook states… Throughout my education here at ISU, I have heard a lot about what I should and should not do in the classroom regarding teaching methods, strategies, classroom mangagement, providing feedback, etc. That is all well and good, but I know that I will only truly understand what works best when I am thrown into a classroom to fend for myself. The pedagogy of practicality, in Kuma's view, "seeks to overcome some of the deciencies inherent in the theory-versus-practice, theorists’-theory versus-teachers’-theory dichotomies by encouraging and enabling teachers themselves to theorize from their practice and practice what they theorize." A theory of practice must actually be practiced by individual teachers so they can work out the kinks and thus facilitate in the education of their students in the best possible way.

6. Josh says… To me, linguistic, cultural and pedagogic mismatches are a gateway to the other mismatches that are both unavoidable in the classroom and easy to manage as well. Understanding that mismatches are unavoidable is a good way to help the teacher study the different mismatches so he or she can identify them when they occur in instruction and work to fix them in a timely manor before the process of instruction is lost. As Kuma said, most mismatches, if caught early enough, can be turned into meaningful classroom instruction in his example of the linguistic mismatch with the abbreviation of AC for air conditioner.

7. Josh continues… Along with that, I believe that learning these mismatches can work in several different settings outside of the TESOL domain such as secondary education. Especially when teaching in an urban school district, there are thousands of children who bring a different lexical experience to the classroom and have different subsets of linguistic skills coupled with different grammatical ideas based on previous classes or social constructions. Chinese English, Black English, Hispanic English and other groups of student dialects all account for variety within the classroom rather or not the speaker is a native English speaker or not. This makes me wonder if these mismatches should be taught in an adapted format throughout non TESOL instructional methods classes.

8. Adriene says… I found this chapter (Kuma 4) incredibly interesting and found that it can apply to many types of classrooms. I have often sat in a class and wondered why the teacher continued to explain a topic that seemed irrelevant or was over taught. After reading the chapter I now wonder if there was a mismatch in perception on the material between the teacher and myself. Kumaravadivelu states on page 77 that often this type of situation occurs where the perceptions of the teacher and learner are mismatched. Kuma also states that this can increase the gap between teacher input and learner intake. Input refers to the written data of the target language and intake is what goes in and not what is available to go in. In other words, if the student does not see the usefulness of the teacher input, the chance of the student retaining that information is lowered.

9. Cara says… We can walk into our classroom on the very first day of school armed with exactly what material we are going to teach, how we are going to do so and what general theories we plan on using, but the reality is that once we start putting these ideas into practice, theoretical approaches may end up going out the window in favor of methodology that is more relevant to the actual context through which we are teaching. This is a really scary thought. It means that no matter how well we strive to prepare ourselves, we cannot generate the most useful approaches to teaching until we actually teach. Therefore, an educator’s ability to quickly adapt to different situations he or she faces in the classroom and practice improvisation will be extremely important when working towards creating a realistic, teacher-generated theory.

10. TOWARD A POSTMETHOD PEDAGOGY What is post-method pedagogy? --a model in teacher education that promotes context-sensitive education based on a true understanding of local linguistic, social and cultural peculiarities --raises teachers sociopolitical awareness and enables teachers to construct their own theory of practice --a model that treats learners as co-explorers

11. What is your definition of a language teacher? What is your definition of student? How do you define classrooms and classroom interaction? VISUAL ARTIn groups of three, Draw your definition of student, teacher and classroom interaction from a post-method pedagogy perspective

12. POSTMETHOD PEDAGOGY A PEDAGGY OF PARTICULARITY --ANTITHETICAL TO THE NOTION THAT THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE SET OF PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES AND PROCEDURES --NO HOLISTIC EVALUATION OF A PARTICULAR SITUATION --CONTEXT-SENSITIVE --SEE PAGE 539

13. PEDAGOGY OF PRACTICALITY Deals with the relationship between theory and practice and enable teachers theorize from their own practice (sense-making) Judge the professional theories offered by experts. Follow our class’ motto: “Adapt, don’t adopt.” See page 542 A theory building/sense-making activity: WHAT THEORIES DO YOU HAVE ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNIG BASED ON YOUR OWN TEACHING EXPERIENCES?

14. Pedagogy of Possibility Derived from Paulo Freire’s work on Critical Pedagogy The model acknowledges students’ identities/social positioning (i.e. their race, gender, class, ethnicity) Encourages that teachers and students question status quo which subjugates them. See Weedon’s quote on page 543 and Norton’s quote on 544. Watch the following videos on CP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFOhVdQt27c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFOhVdQt27c

15. Post-method pedagogy promotes… Context sensitive Location-specific Political Rejects the advocacy of pre-determined set of generic principles and procedures

16. Post-method learner Post-method Teacher In groups, write down how you describe…

17. Critical Domains and Approaches in TESOL (Pennycook) Approaches in language education is political C. approaches engages us to problemitize taken for granted beliefs (Fallacies: A second language can only be learned by native speakers; Students are not supposed to use L1 in a second language classroom; Standard English is the correct English. and it is the only English that should be taught to L2 speakers)—These ideologies are there to maintain power inequalities. Language learning cannot be autonomous.

18. Pedagogy of Engagement “An approach to TESOL that sees such issues as gender, race, class, sexuality, and post colonialism as so fundamental to identity and language…” Critical approaches is no way reducible to teaching techniques, methods, or approaches Critical thinking should not be confused with critical approach. While CA aims to develop a political understanding of the location and teaching aimed at transformation, C. thinking is an apolitical approach that develops a questioning attitude in students.

19. Gee says “ English teachers stand at the very heart of the most crucial educational, cultural, and political issues of our time.”—Second paragraph of p.346

20. Assignments SIOP Model readings Post your Final Project report on your individual blogs.