Humanising an academic postgraduate course

Sandra Piai , University of Sussex, UK

Most ELT courses incorporate a degree of humanistic learning/teaching even if they do not strictly follow one of the 'traditional' methods often associated with Humanism, such as the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, Community Language Learning, etc. Similarly all teachers have their favourite EFL books and exercises/activities with more or less humanistic approaches. Looking back over the last four years when I have been editing the TD SIG newsletter, books such as Readings in Teacher Development (Head & Taylor, 1997) Psychology for Language Teachers (Williams & Burden, 1997) and Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Classroom (Moskowicz, 1978) have been mentioned in contributors' Top Ten Favourite Books on more than one occasion, and, in my teaching, for example, I used to make great use of TPR in YL classes in both Spain and Italy. I also managed to adapt this successfully to low level adult classes (to some of my colleagues' horror), which, on one auspicious occasion, encouraged an Italian business man to give the class a short tap-dancing lesson in English!

In teacher training the humanistic approach is obviously included in the history/background to EFL and there is at least one input session on the different humanistic approaches. But also the fact that teacher-training courses tend to be primarily practical, with trainees' personalities playing an important role, means a humanistic approach to the course in general is equally important. Teaching practice can be extremely stressful if you have never stood in front of a class before, or even if you have, so we need to consider how the trainee can be supported so some of this stress is removed. We also need to consider how input sessions can be personalised and different teaching styles used in order to reach and encourage all the trainees. Talking with different trainer colleagues, past and present, all have said they use humanistic approaches to a greater or lesser degree, ranging from using activities in Ways of Training (Woodward, 1992), to not having a formal timetable so that it really developed into a learner/trainee-centred course. (Although later pressure from Trinity meant a formal timetable had to be at least available.)

Transferring this approach to undergraduate courses can prove more of a challenge. Many of the colleagues I have discussed this with work on both teacher training and undergraduate courses and all mentioned factors on UG courses such as time, student numbers, student expectations, physical surroundings and the course programme which has to be approved by the university. The undergraduate linguistics course that I taught on until last year had between 50 and 60 students attending some lectures, which were held in the physics lecture theatre, so how could a humanistic element be introduced here? With great difficulty, I would suggest, although there are things you can do such as stopping the lecture in places with a rhetorical question which students can discuss with their neighbour, or making a controversial statement and getting the students to discuss it with the people sitting near them - both of which often challenge students' expectations as well as their beliefs about the format of university lectures. The first time I did this, there was a shocked silence, but over the year the students warmed to the idea of becoming more involved in lectures. Follow-up tutorials were easier to humanise. Having only 10-15 students per tutorial group means there are more opportunities for humanistic and communicative activities.

A postgraduate course is a different ball game all together. All MA courses I have encountered, whether as a student or teacher, have been predominately tutor/lecturer-centred. Again, student expectations play an important role and fees for postgraduate courses, which are not exactly cheap, have to be taken into consideration to a certain extent as well. There also tends to be a larger number of overseas students on postgraduate courses, who often expect the tutor to be the font of all knowledge and to give a traditional lecture to which they listen and take notes. So how can a humanistic element be introduced?

When I set up an MLitt in ELT at a university in Scotland last year, I pondered for a long while over this very question and also over whether postgraduate students need to feel, as Rogers (1994, in Harmer 2001) has suggested learners need to feel, 'that what they are learning is personally relevant to them, and that they have to experience learning (rather than just being 'taught') and that their self-image needs to be enhanced as part of the process'. Although, in theory, I would answer 'yes' to all three points, in practice I was so busy during the first semester just with the overall running of the course, sorting out unforeseen problems and so on, that I had to limit myself to trying to personalise lectures through the use of task-sheets and varying the style of presenting lectures to cater as far as possible for different learning styles. At least three or four tasks were incorporated into lectures which involved students working in pairs or groups to complete them, thus encouraging their participation and their personal teaching experiences, as much as possible. I have to add here that I was fortunate in having an extremely small cohort of students the first year (four students: three native speakers and one non-native speaker), which made this style of lecture a lot easier to organise, and active student participation much easier to encourage, although I did adopt the same approach whilst teaching a module on an MA course for an English university. In this case I had a group of 15 students, 14 of whom were from overseas, but these students responded well to the approach, which motivated me to try and take my new course further down the humanistic road in semester two.

Nevertheless, the lectures still tended to be lecturer-centred, but I worked on expanding the tasks so pair or group discussion became even more of a contributory factor in the lecture, and the students were given the responsibility of delivering one of the lectures on learner variables. However, the weekly seminars provided more opportunity to introduce a humanistic approach. During these, the students were expected to give oral presentations of the weekly readings. They were able to choose their reading from the list of recommended articles and to choose the means of presentation, viz poster, OHT, powerpoint or whiteboard plus flash/cuecards, although one powerpoint and one OHT presentation per semester was compulsory. (This would obviously have been more difficult to organise with a larger group of students as the amount of time for presentations per student would have been far less.) Only one student elected to give a poster presentation, but this gave her the chance to use her visual/spatial intelligence, which was obviously very strong, to the maximum.

The other more humanistic aspect that I was able to introduce in the first semester was keeping a reflective diary. As part of the SLA module the students had to study a foreign language of which they had no prior knowledge and keep a reflective diary on the learning experience. This did not prove popular, and the diaries were notably more descriptive than reflective, although with hindsight, when reading through their diaries at the end of the semester, all four found the diary more enlightening than they had thought at the time of writing. However, no-one kept the diary up in semester two which, whilst understandable, was disappointing. Another requirement of the SLA module was to observe different EFL/ESL classes and it was possible to organise some of these observations within the local community, which included a women's ESL group, EAL classes in two local primary schools and French FL classes in a secondary school. We also all attended the Christmas party for students and their families organised by the local ESOL office, so the students had the chance to meet and interact with a mix of teachers and students from completely different learning backgrounds, from highly-motivated and ambitious university students to E. European students, working in hotels and restaurants in the town, to Asian women, many of whom had lived in the UK for over ten years, but had never needed, or had the time, to study English until their families became less dependent on them. This gave the students considerable insight into the different needs, humanistic as well as intellectual, of the different students in the community (many Asian women attended the ESOL group more for the company and social aspect than for the language learning opportunity and the course was organised completely around their needs, such as making doctor's appointments, using the telephone, etc and once a month they held a cookery morning). In fact, the assignment for the first semester was either to compare and contrast the different classrooms they had observed or to critically evaluate the course book they had used during their foreign language class. All four chose the former.

In semester two, I worked on trying to humanise the lectures more. I adapted some ideas from Ways of Training, such as Story Starters, Pre-lecture Unfinished Scripts, which were used for quick reviews of the previous lecture, or as introductions to the present lecture, and also Lecture Keywords. Discussions and reflection on the tasks and activities undertaken in the lectures and seminars were encouraged. Tasks and tasksheets now involved gapfills and problem-solving as a way of getting students interacting with, and contributing more to, the lectures. In March, a weekend away in the north of Scotland at a retreat used by the university was organised. During this weekend the students gave presentations of their ideas and outlines for their dissertations and got general peer and tutor feedback. But perhaps the most important aspect was being able to talk through their ideas and where they were coming from, which gave the opportunity to personalise and take ownership of their dissertations more. We also discussed how the style of lectures had changed in the second semester and I explained how I had been trying to introduce a more humanistic approach. The feedback was generally positive. The students were happy with the way things were going and they liked being more involved in lectures and having group discussions as well as having a choice of how they gave their presentations in seminars. We brainstormed other ways the course could be made more humanistic. (One idea was another weekend away, but we never managed it even though we provisionally booked ourselves in for the end of May). As a result of this, the lecture on learning styles, which included Multiple Intelligences and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, became a workshop. For the follow-up seminar the students analysed their own learning styles in light of Willing's four categories of learning style (in Tudor, 1996). They then reported on this analysis in the next seminar and discussed whether it was what they had expected, whether they had recognised any of these styles in themselves and whether they disagreed or were surprised by any of the results. Everyone was very open to the others' opinions and criticisms showing that a mutual feeling of support and trust had been built up over the year. It was also suggested that they made a mindmap poster of Communicative Language Teaching as a way not only of revising, but also of bringing together all the strands that had been covered in the teaching and learning module. Only one student did this, (interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the student who had given the poster presentation), and she said that until that point she had not particularly liked nor really seen the point of mindmaps. Neither had she really done one before, but once she had started this one she really 'got into it'. Just like her poster presentation, her mindmap was excellent and it certainly showed how simply and successfully the topics and themes covered in the module could be linked together. But perhaps more significantly, it was creative, visually attractive and stimulating, and the work that went into it had helped the student make sense of what we had done in that module and gave her a clearer overall view. The other students were also impressed and requested copies. Perhaps they will try mindmapping themselves in the future.

I did nt start drafting this article until after the course had finished, but when I managed to contact two of the MLitt students and ask them what they remembered most from semesters one and two, one who is now working at a different university in Scotland, said without hesitation the MI/NLP workshop. She continued:

…I have been trying to put some of what I learnt on my Masters into practice, such as humanising the lecture and using MI/NLP in a more academic environment. When a colleague was away last week, I had to give a lecture on British Media, a bit of a challenge, but there were elements of communication between the students and myself allowing students to reflect on what was being covered. It appears that many of the students are now doing an assignment on Media for part of their course. I have tried to use some of the techniques you used on the MLitt, so a big thank you to the humanising approach. How else could I have lectured for 2 hours on Media!!

The other, who is now lecturing at a university in Prague, said:

Two things that I particularly enjoyed doing during your course were the classroom observations throughout Fife and the presentations using Powerpoint. I learnt a lot from them both and the skills that I gained last year have certainly helped me a great deal in Prague.

He also added 'although I disliked keeping a learner journal, I did eventually learn something about myself from this laborious and time-consuming exercise' and 'Needless to say the trip to "The Burn" was a great success and I believe we all thought it was a wonderful weekend and we appreciated having the opportunity to exchange views, thoughts and opinions on the topics for our dissertations'.

In conclusion, I would sum up by saying if you are a humanistic teacher and believe in the humanistic approach, you are going to inevitably have a certain humanistic element in whatever course you teach. A taught postgraduate course can be more problematic than others because of the constraints such as student expectations, the ratio of overseas to home students and, of course, student fees as mentioned above. Other unexpected problems also manifested themselves on the course: despite the discussion and reflection during seminars, and giving students a choice as to their presentations and the learner variables they were personally responsible for presenting in the lecture, when it came to their reflective diaries and the first semester assignment, they needed more structure. I wanted them to find their own way to write up their diaries but they felt they needed more guidance as to what I expected of them and so it was necessary to have quite a formal seminar on introspection, diary-keeping and recommended readings. The first assignment title 'Critically compare and contrast two different language classrooms you have observed in terms of second language learning opportunities. You should take into account learner variables as well as learning theories', was kept deliberately vague so they could write about the classes they were most interested in, (ie they had a choice), but, again, this proved to be a mistake as they all said they felt they needed a more structured assignment so that they knew what was expected of them.

Nevertheless, the feedback at the end of the course was positive. Everyone said how much they had enjoyed the course and appreciated the support they had had and one said he could not believe how quickly the year had gone by. The most significant thing I have learned from it is, vary your approach, use MI to try and stimulate your students' different learning styles, and above all be humanistic and involve your students in decision-making: let them take some responsibility for lectures, try and personalise parts of the course, such as investigating and analysing their own learning styles and their prior learning experiences, but when it comes to assessment make sure it is structured and the students clearly understand what is expected of them.

References:

Harmer, J. (2001) The Practice of English Language Teaching. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education
Head, K. & P. Taylor (1997) Readings in Teacher Development. Basingstoke: Heinemann
Moskowicz, G. (1978) Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Classroom. Newbury House
Tudor, I. (1996) Learner-centredness as Language Education. Cambridge: CUP
Williams, M. & R. Burden (1997) Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge: CUP
Woodward, T. (1992) Ways of Training. Harlow, Essex: Longman