Certain Prescriptions for Education as Planned and Practised at UCM

Certain Prescriptions for Education as Planned and Practised at UCM: prepared by John Kendell Graham for consideration by the English Academy when planning Language Learning at UCM

2002

How to enliven the five senses which are all involved in learning: seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling

How to learn

How to unlearn

How to relearn

How to classify information

How to re-classify information

How to evaluate veracity of information

How to change categories when necessary

How to move from the concrete and specific to the abstract and general and back again.

How to look at problems from a new direction/perspective

How to teach ourselves

How to enhance the sense of future by relating past and present to it.

How to develop a ´heritage for the future’

Education in the future tense

Education as subversive force, agency for liberation for human government

Humanizing  vocation of the intellectual

Negation of accepted limits and opening the way to a new future

Language learning set in context of the action to say our own words, to name the world, to become aware of oppression and have education and especially language learning seen as work to achieve liberation, a responsibility as well as a right.

To give some substantive meaning to the compromiso.

“How can the oppressed (including teachers) as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as we discover ourselves as being the ‘hosts’ of oppression can we contribute to the midwifery of our liberating pedagogy. As long as we live in the duality where to be is to be like is to be like the oppressor this contribution is impossible.(Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 25).

It is to be like the oppressor to impose our own learned and very rigid notions of “levels” to learning, to have reading comprehension limited to small chunks, ‘to solve the time/ content problem by only teaching the present tense’ and so to teach the present tense without teaching the past and future at the same time. If we were to keep on doing the same how would we not be confining language learning “to [the] abtractness and sterility of so much intellectual work in academic circles today”(ibid, 11)?

To maintain such views is to feed the opinion generally held of English as a textbook based, grammar-focussed area of study holding only a notional connection with the ‘education for life’ philosophy guiding UCM.

Furthermore, to keep on thinking in these terms it is to limit the creativity, originality and capacity of the students and teachers of English  to develop a curriculum that caters both for our own individual talents, experience and interests and to leave unexplored a potential we might have for collaborative action in the making of a course/or courses of English language learning that provide students and staff with a more generous conception than some seem to have of language learning.

Curriculum Design for English 1-3

1. Guiding Principles

(i)    Making meanings of the world in word and action is the primary purpose of  education.

(ii)  Language is an instrument by and through which we make meanings of our world, an activity involving reading, writing, listening and speaking accompanying and leading to other forms of expression – art, dance, theatre, music, performance, video, drawing, photography, painting, stencil-graffiti etc.

(iii) Student motivation to take responsibility for learning how to make meanings of the world in word and action is the primary educational purpose of UCM.

(iv) Assistance to the student to achieve this primary educational    objective is the major work of teachers at UCM.

2. Operative Practices and Outcomes or ‘Praxis´

(i)    Teacher and Students as co-investigators in dialogue with each other, (teacher-student with students-teachers) both  bound by the ‘compromiso’ in terms of Guiding Principles (ii) and (iii) above, and as elaborated in form of desirable routines: e.g. Workbook with detachable/replaceable pages, Journal for the recording of learning experiences and self-assessment of progress, Agenda/Diary for appointments and extra-curricular English language activities – museum visits, English Club events etc.

(ii)  Teacher and Students as co-participants in decision-making concerning curriculum construction, both of content (what is to be learned) and process (how it is to be learned). A Student Needs Survey is the preliminary step but decision-making and revision of content and process to be built into the classroom dynamic.

(iii) Classroom dynamic takes the form of a spiral

·  topic suggestion/selection,

·  discussion of topic,

·  writing about the topic,

·  reading out the writing,   

·  correcting it,

·  further discussion on the  same or other topic, writing, reading out, correcting, and so on.

·  If discussions are audio or video recorded, then these could be replayed for correction and elaboration.

·  This spiral dynamic can be added to by teacher and student-sourced materials and is a process enabling revision and expansion.

·  These materials can be supplied and the classroom dynamic can be adjusted to the dominant paradigm deciding the role of English language learning at UCM. For example, if the paradigm is ‘instrumento d’estudio’, then English language materials from other subject areas might form the content and classes would be organized around the skills needed to access information in those materials.

·  The scope of skills are outlined in Jordan’s English for Academic Purposes (EAP), although adjustments are needed for it to encounter the non-English language background of UCM students, their unfamiliarity with the concept of individual research, inexperience in the use of dictionaries and other research tools and local variants of  the ‘academic’ genre.

·  Close collaboration in task setting with teachers in other Subject Areas is not only preferred but essential and could lead to Team Teaching between Academies, as is already happening with Physics.

·  Student writing or speaking, whether about subject oriented texts or others self-chosen by students and teachers, increasingly form the basis for instruction, enabling students to become more actively involved in self- correction/learning process, sustaining motivation to learn English, and forming the basis for their own commentary in their Journal.

·  With student permission, and acknowledgement of their authorship, the Journals can form the basis of  publications by UCM, where the educational philosophy directing the university could be presented in relation to English language learning in particular, and the role of language in learning in general (for example, Alumnos de Barbiana, Carta a una Profesora, Editorial PCC, Madrid, 2000 )

·  These publications would also serve as resources for subsequent teaching/learning, like Rosina Conde’s Taller de Expresión Oral y Escrita.

·  In this more general frame, of language as an instrument by and through which we make meanings of the world (Guiding Principles (ii) ), there is room for collaboration with all other Academies, where what could be called Second Language Acquisition is also taking place, and where information relevant to all the fields of study is contained in English language sources.

3. Criteria of Content or Topic Selection

(i)             Education for Life, achieving understandings of the relations between the human, language and the world.

(ii)           Student Needs and Interests

(iii)          Teacher/Area of Study Needs

(iv)          Making a praxis of UCM philosophy

4. Course Objectives

  To learn how to use the English language in order

(i)             to achieve understandings of the relations between ourselves, language and the world,

(ii)           to meet student needs and develop their interests

(iii)          to meet Teacher/Area of Study Needs

(iv)          to make a praxis of UCM philosophy

5. Samples of Topics

(i)             The Human: arranged initially around (i) the body, (ii) its feelings, (iii) its thoughts VIA

·      NOUNS: body parts, feelings, thoughts: desire, fear, hope, love, justice, respect, generosity, happiness, solidarity, beliefs,   equality/equivalence, security, beauty, trust

·      VERBS: to be, to do, to know, to feel, to dream, to have, to grow, to change.

(ii)           The Human Life Cycle: birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage/partnership, career, retirement, death.

(iii)          The Worlds We Live In: home, the family, the delegacions and the city, the  regions and country, the international and global community.

(iv)          Problems and Solutions: sustainability, ecological footprinting, poverty, health, malnutrition, AIDS, unemployment, crime, punishment, political representation & dilemmas of democracy, separation, suicide, neuvo-liberalismo, global market, information technology, indigenous movements, visioning the future.

      6.  Epistemological and Methodological Implications

·      The conception of language learning being presented here subordinates the cognisable objects of language (relatively unknown to students, whether the language is Spanish or English) to the cognisable objects of Education for Life and Students Needs/Interests (relatively well known by students).

·      It contradicts the proposition that it is the grammar of a language which gives it its essentially human characteristics, an opinion and quoted in the English Academy Program and presumably taken from F. Palmer.

·      Every language has a grammatical structure, it is true, but the fluent use of that language does not require a knowledge of its grammar. Sometimes knowing the grammatical structure can produce sentences that while grammatically possible would be dismissed by native speakers as, if not impossible, at least highly unlikely; I desire the sugar, or It’s fifty past ten.

·      Rule-based teaching of English so often produces the response to a student usage of the rule “Well, you could say that – but you wouldn’t” that the value of such an approach must be questioned, even within its own terms. As all languages are made up of thousands upon thousands of discrete items, and if each of these items were to be ‘taught’ according to the ‘rule’ said to be governing them (to which there are often exceptions) then classroom language learning seems impossible.

·      Within what is traditionally thought of as ‘grammar’, the structures are not, as they appear to be in Headway, discrete and sequenceable  but intersecting and inter-related domains of meaning, where the study of one feature, for example the present perfect, necessarily involves the simultaneous understanding of the meaning relations behind other patterns – for example the present, past simple, present perfect continuous. The meaning of each is partly determined by the system of contrasts between it and one, or, more frequently, several others. Any attempt to isolate one structure for the purpose of study (a la Headway) inevitably distorts the language, removing language learning from the Education for Life paradigm informing the proposal I’m making.

·      Furthermore, taking an historical view of the development of the English language, it is clear that the appearance of grammar came late in the piece and was associated with the development of a social-economic-political elite who used language education to consolidate their dominant positions.

·      In any event, ‘Grammar’ consolidated into rules patterns of language use that had developed in the course of human living . Given the many language streams that make up the river of English, it is always dubious to propose that the English language ‘followed’ rules of grammar, and more likely was as it still is the other way around.

·      As in the Dire Straits song ‘Telegraph Road’ the rules entered after the pioneers had made their ways into the woods and prairies and had set down their loads where they thought it was the best and built their homes inthe wilderness. “Then came the churches, then came the schools, then came the lawyers and then came the rules”.

·      To begin with “the rules” reduces the adventure of the language-learning journey, travelled in different ways by different learners. It could even prevent the journey starting at all, mistaking , as it would, the grammar map for the language territory.

·      So the language learning model preferred is that which takes the historically demonstrable facts of language production into consideration and which re-enacts, so far as this is possible, the process by and through which language developed.

·      The starting point of this development was from the sentido of the human. It is the experience of feeling to think to express which gives language its essentially human characteristics. It is from the sensating, intellecting, imagining, projecting, envisaging, experimenting, playful proclivity of the human experience that language obtained the energy for innovation and expansion. It still does, unless or until this sensibility gets anihilated in the process of language learning, as it often  can be. One of the primary objectives for our course/s must be to revive an interest in learning another language, let alone an enthusiasm for doing so.

·      The teacher’s attitude toward this task is, of course, important. However, the student’s attitude or compromiso is the single most important factor.

·      The development of new words to communicate new knowledge. the history of ideas is best seen as the history of languages spoken and written in specific times and places for specific purposes.

·      ‘Languages’ or lexicons not individual words are then the units to be studied. a single word is like one hand clapping and usage not meaning the quarry, a la Wittgenstein.

·      In this respect the concept of ‘the politics of words’, with politics understood as purposive usage, emerges as a feasible and certainly vital area of an English language learning program. Vital because the role played by this politics in the world is so influential in sustaining (oppression) false and obsolete ideas and for seeking and achieving liberation. This is one of the contexts underpinning UCM’s project, as explicitly announced in its rejection of the neuvo liberlismo philosophy now governing most places of formal education, in its appeal to ‘horizontalism’ rather than ‘verticalism’, in its predication of the project on student motivation to learn.

·      Motivation belongs with sentido. achievement of the philosophy in practice calls for praxis between word and action, in its turns calls for tuning of attitude, which leads to extensive attention to the concept of el compromiso. As praxis is experience distant from most students and some teachers it needs to be educated into our being, for example transforming the phrase “que vamos a hacer?” (what can we do?) from a sigh of helpless acceptance to the starting point of an organized response and so the enactment of el compromiso.  El compromiso is a commitment to the achievement of praxis. El compromiso then has the central place in any curriculum. especially language learning.

·      While the concept of “language learning” refers immediately to second language acquisition, it also extends to “academic discourse” in general because for most students that discourse corresponds to a foreign language. Consequently, the following comments on language learning in relation to the learning of English do have relevance to teaching and learning in all courses of study offered at UCM at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.   

·      LANGUAGE LEARNING IN THE ENGLISH ACADEMY. The Present-Practise-Produce (PPP) model, which feeds and is fed by rule-based teaching of English, fails to reflect either the nature of language or the nature of learning. The element of language which may be susceptible to PPP teaching is only a tiny and peripheral part of the language needed for communicative language use.

·      Following Michael Lewis (The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward (Language Teaching Publications) Paperback – January 1, 1993 ‘Implications of a Lexical View of Language’), I propose that we adopt:

§       1. lexical items as the objects of learning and the paradigm of

§       2. Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment as the learning methodology.

·      1. Lexical items are “socially sanctioned independent units of meaning, many of these being multi-word items”.

·      1.1. WORDS (eg push, exit, fruit); 1.2. POLYWORDS (eg “by the way”, “on the other hand”); 1. 3. (RELATIVELY FIXED) COLLOCATIONS or WORD PARTNERSHIPS (eg “an initial reaction”, “to assess the situation”); 1.4. INSTITUTIONALISED UTTERANCES or FIXED EXPRESSIONS (eg “I’ll see what I can do”; “It’s not the sort of thing you think will ever happen to you”); 1.5. SENTENCE FRAMES or HEADS (eg “Considerable research has been done in recent years on the question of…”; “At present, however, expert opinion remains divided”; “some experts believe…”)

·      2. The Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment  “is a methodological possibility for short-term teaching sequences such as individual lessons; it is essential to any long-term teaching strategy because it is neither more nor less than a summary of how learning actually occurs” ( Michael Lewis, my emphasis).

·      FURTHER PROPOSALS FOR CHANGE:

·      1. The construction of a course/courses in English language learning and of all courses of study at UCM around mutually negotiated topics close to the learner’s experience and central to the experience of learning is a preferred option than the one currently in vogue.

·      2. To start with the Human and the Body is to reenact the process underlying the invention and development of language as well as to attend to the site from which all human knowledge derives.

·      3. To focus on the ‘sentido’ is to engage with the feelings and thoughts which both facilitate (desire to learn) and block (fear of failure) learning, not only of English but of all  areas of  knowledge being offered by UCM.

·      4. To extend attention from the Human and our feelings and thoughts to the world we inhabit is to present opportunities for the development of social awareness, including an awareness of our oppression, and to relate what we learn about that oppression (in many ways connected with language) to acts of liberation.

·      5. Clearly the topics suggested could occupy attention for many weeks, months, years and so enable them to be investigated at different levels of language competence and at different levels of knowledge in all of the various disciplines.

    CONCLUSIONS

·      The ‘sentido’ dimension is especially representative of the unfolding nature of education, an idea rooted in the action of ‘leading forth’ and ‘leading out’.

·      Of all ideas, education is the one most in line with the spiral configuration taken by energy.

·      So, the operative concept, model or paradigm informing this proposal is that of the spiral.

·      Engendering a ‘spiral consciousness’ is then one of the aims of learning/teaching of a second language and of learning/teaching of all areas of study.

·      The proposal to the English Academy and to UCM is that this aim direct language learning and all other areas of study.

·      The proposal to UCM at large is that the spiral model  (cf verticalism vs horizontalism) would better secure the praxis being sought throughout the university between the words of the philosophy of UCM and their implementation in educational action.