How Relevant is Humanistic Language Teaching Methodology in India?
Judy Baker (Australia), Rick Cooper (India), Mario Rinvolucri (UK), Eleanor Watts (UK)
Judy Baker is a freelance trainer who now lives in Sydney. She is especially interested in NLP in education and has co-written ‘Unlocking Self Expression Through NLP with Mario Rinvolucri. Her love of India, especially Calcutta, began three decades ago. E-mail: judith.leila@yahoo.com.au
Richard Cooper is Executive Director of International Training Consultants Ltd and India, editor of Jetwork and is based in Bombay. E-mail bandrabandstand@mac.com
Mario Rinvolucri teacher, teacher trainer and author. He has worked for Pilgrims for over 30 years and used to edit Humanising Language Teaching. Regularly contributes to The Teacher Trainer Journal. His recent books include: Creative Writing, with Christine Frank, Helbling, Multiple Intelligences in EFL, with Herbert Puchta, Helbling, Unlocking Self-Expression through NLP, with Judy Baker, Delta Books, New edition of Vocabulary, with John Morgan, OUP, Humanising your Coursebook, Delta Books, Using the Mother Tongue, with Sheelagh Deller, Delta Books, Ways of Doing, with Paul Davis and Barbara Garside, CUP, Imagine That with Herbert Puchta and Jane Arnold, Helbing, Creative Writing with Christine Frank, Helbing. Mario's first CD Rom for students, Mindgame, was written with Isobel Fletcher de Tellez, and engineered and published by Clarity, Hong Kong in 2000. E-mail: mario@pilgrims.co.uk
Eleanor Watts is a freelance teacher trainer, teacher and writer now living in UK. It was her good fortune to live in India as a child and to run a small school in Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s. She has written more than thirty primary school textbooks for India, Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa, published by Orient Longman, Longman and OUP. Books for teachers include The Blackboard Book, an ideas book for teachers in low-resource contexts, published by Sangam and Storytelling in ELT, published by OUP. Children’s books include the Ajanta Apartments stories, published by Orient Longman. E-mail: eleanorwatts2003@yahoo.co.uk
Menu
Background
Mario Rinvolucri
Judy Baker
Rick Cooper
Eleanor Watts
Bibliography
This article, written by four Pilgrims trainers, arose out of an invitation by the Orient publishing company to do two day workshops on humanistic teaching techniques in six of India's metros ( a "metro" is a megalopolis with more than 15 million inhabitants ). Cooper and Baker know India well, Watts has deep knowledge of India having been brought up there, while Rinvolucri is a brash newcomer to the Sub-Continent. Readers will doubtless sense this difference in awareness and knowledge when they read the four contributions.
I have just spent my first week in India doing mass workshops for senior teachers as a guest of Orient-Longman as part of a teacher training tour of India and I am awash with contradictory emotions. As the new boy on the block I need to ask some pretty elementary questions about the applicability of the EFL teaching methodology that we offered our India colleagues in these workshops.
The “export” of teaching techniques from one culture to another is always something that needs doing with considerable circumspection as the danger of ‘unuseful’ and inappropriate transfer is very great. Let me give you an example of such “export” activity. Over the years Pilgrims has offered EFL colleagues working in Turkish Universities workshops on many different aspects of humanistic language teaching. These people teach in what Adorno would define as “vertical” institutions, i.e. authoritarian ones, where the boss’ word is law. I have been acutely aware, as a trainer in the Turkish University context, that my underlying humanistic message which aims to empower students and puts them in the centre of the whole process, is at cultural loggerheads with the ways in which Turkish University departments actually run. This does not mean that individual teachers in Turkish Universities may not have benefited from such workshops given by many Pilgrims trainers who have worked in Turkey over the past ten years, but it does mean that there is an inevitable cultural misfit between the values inherent in the training offered and the values of the host institution.
It needs to be said that when many of the current EFL teaching techniques were being evolved in UK and US by people like Earl Stevick, Bernard Dufeu, John Morgan, Alan Maley, Alan Duff and many others, the US was in the grip of Reaganism and the UK was writhing under Thatcher. The “Iron Lady” once famously declared that there was no such thing as society or societal values. For her only the individual existed. This was not a propitious climate in which to talk about student-centred teaching and Carl Roger’s unconditional positive regard for others! So perhaps humanistic language teaching will often be out-of-step with dominant ideologies within its society of origin just as much as in societies it migrates to.
My worry about the training work I did in Lucknow ( Uttar Pradesh) and Delhi is the acceptability of the values behind the teaching techniques I demonstrated and involved people in, the acceptability in terms of their own very diverse cultures and backgrounds ( anybody who generalizes about the Indian sub-continent has to be a genius or a knave.)
So my question to my three co-authors, who each know much more about India than I do, is this:
To what degree do the values that have given rise to humanistic language teaching meld with or clash with the various sets of values held by the ethnically and religiously different populations of India?
Without going outside what is already done, believed in, accepted, where do we go?
While Mario was working with groups in Lucknow and Delhi, and Rick was in Bangalore and Mumbai, I was working with large groups of senior teachers and principals in Chennai (Madras) and Kolkata (Calcutta).
What are the values and beliefs that have given rise to ‘humanistic’ language teaching?
Humanistic values and beliefs are grounded in an ongoing questioning of thinking and ideas combined with an emphasis on creativity and originality. They include:
- Putting learners, not content, at the heart of the learning/teaching process
- Learning and teaching are not just to do with cognition. Affect and cognition are integrated in the teaching-learning process.
- Each person has not only the potential to learn, but also an innate drive for development and actualisation, given favourable circumstances
- Each person constructs his/her own personal reality and is therefore, unique.
- By using their ability to reason and solve problems everyone is eventually capable of directing themselves and evaluating their own thoughts and actions and learning. Each person can make choices for him/herself.
- Personal growth should be nurtured within a larger context of group growth, being achieved through mutual respect and regard among group members and an awareness of environment and culture.
In this article I want, firstly, to draw attention to the difference between ELT techniques that have emerged from humanistic thinking and the thinking itself. The techniques/activities we presented in our Indian workshops were perhaps new, but humanistic thinking itself has long been alive and well in India . Rabindranath Tagore, for example, the Bengali writer, artist, thinker and educator lived his dream of a system of education based on tolerance, exploration, curiosity and self expression. He ‘envisaged an education that was deeply rooted in one’s immediate surroundings but connected to the cultures of the wider world, predicated upon pleasurable learning and the individualized to the personality of the child.’ (O’Connell, K.M.)
In a country like India, where there is a multiplicity of religions, languages and cultures, people habitually tolerate and accommodate differences. During my workshops, many of the educators and teachers voiced their familiarity with humanistic thinking. They were well able to understand and accommodate the ideas. That was not the problem.
What participants talked about was the difficulty of applying ‘humanistic’ based ELT teaching techniques in their current working circumstances. Greatest among these was number of students in each class and size of classrooms.
One way through this is to present the ideas in their original form and then allow space and time for teachers to explore how to ‘translate’ the ideas into action, and how to appropriate the techniques in ways, and at times, they deem suitable and possible in their teaching contexts. To give a simple example: one teacher was looking for a way to allow students to read, ask questions about and comment on each other’s work in creative writing classes. In a small classroom with sixty students, displaying everyone’s work was next to impossible. Knowing that she knew what she wanted, she only needed to find how to do it. We talked about some possibilities and she has chosen the one that is most possible in her teaching situation. She has arranged to take the class to a larger space once a fortnight for writing lessons.
Recently, someone asked me if I thought India was ready for humanistic thinking in education yet. The fact that I was asked such a question, reminded me of the presuppositions we can so easily make about our own ideas and ways of doing –(in this case, humanistic thinking was somehow a Western concept and also that ‘we’ are in some way ahead in our thinking.)
This is true for trainers and for teachers. As trainers, it is a mistake for us to think that we are presenting ideas to participants for the first time, in this case, the mistaken notion that humanism is uniquely Western construct. It is a mistake to present any ideas as if they were superior to all others, or with the implication that there is an only or best way of teaching.
I believe that as trainers and teachers, we need to be clear about what our ideas and values are and that they are not more than this. An even greater mistake, though, is for trainers to decide not to present ideas at all, because in their view participants may not be ready for them, may not be able to understand or be able to implement them.
If we believe in humanistic principles, such as our ability to think rationally and make their own decisions, and that we grow, not by losing ourselves in our own beliefs and values, but by communicating openly and freely, then our training programmes should provide opportunities for participants to do that. Who are we to decide not to?
There is nothing intrinsically Indian to Mario’s question. It naturally applies to any teacher training context and to the investigation of fit. The question is not whether humanism is appropriate in India. It is, consider Amartya Sen’s recent The Argumentative Indian, for ample proofs of sub-continental debate, reflection and centuries of humanism. Rather, the question is how does the Western trainer working in an infrastructurally challenged country such as India lead trainer-trainee dialogue toward building appropriacy in the training. As in the case of a development worker, the language teacher trainer should look to build a participatory dialogue with the trainees as an essential part of the process of delivering meaningful input. How else can appropriacy be achieved unless there is interaction as to how the ideas can be adapted to the trainees’ circumstances? Otherwise, the “import” ideas risk hitting the ground like an airlift of good intentions with little relevance or sustainability to the community of recipients.
Another clear benefit of participatory dialogue in training is that it facilitates a two-way flow of ideas. Not only does the trainer avoid coming across as a blind absolute authority, but he is more likely to learn about the variants, 'cubby holes' and 'blind spots' of his own approaches. Participatory dialogue increases the likelihood of a decent fit as well as generates collaborative two-way innovation. Robert Chambers of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, has vividly described this dilemma in development workers’ best intentions versus under listened-to local beneficiaries in his book Whose Reality Counts. Consider the innovative case of modern pharmacology, where great “new” sources of treatment are not exclusively in modern Western or Eastern laboratories but in the lore of local knowledge. The worry of a “clash of methodologies” is felt most by those who presume clash. Dialogue first, ask questions and listen till the cows come home.
Judy is absolutely right that there is a long tradition of humanistic teaching in India. For example, the schools inspired by Jiddu Krishmamurthy, such as Rishi Valley, all aim to put learners, not content, at the heart of education. Child-centred education is now at the core of the government’s National Curriculum Framework and teachers are expected to "plan lessons so that children are challenged to think and not simply repeat what is told to them." (Deepa A, 2005). With globalisation, the educated elite of India often share the western concern with the rights of individuals to choose how they will grow, not to accept how their elders want them to grow. However, I’d like to point to four key factors in the predominance of the vertical institutions Mario describes: their physical conditions, the place of the exam, the fluency of teachers and social class.
As Judy says, class size is an important factor. It is difficult to enable 70 students to construct their own personal reality in three forty-minute periods a week. In state institutions, access to photocopiers, CD and DVD players is minimal so there is little opportunity for teachers to produce materials fitting the interests of the class, even if the packed syllabus allowed them to. Group work can be noisy in a crowded classroom – and it can upset other teachers if the space is shared with 70 other students engaging with simultaneous equations. It is impossible to have a personal life and to mark the writing of several classes of 70 students in any way that addresses their individual needs. However, that’s no reason to give up. Talk is free, after all. Pair work need not be too noisy if everyone whispers. Students can be encouraged to read what other students have written, even if the teacher doesn’t have time to read all they write.
Another obstacle to humanistic language teaching is the backwash effect of constant assessment (which the British school system seems increasingly anxious to emulate). At the end of every school and university year, there are exams which have to be passed before the student can be promoted. Almost all of these exams depend on the rote learning of huge quantities of knowledge about set texts and grammar – such a time-consuming process that there is little of the day left for open-ended discussion. It is easier and cheaper to test writing than speaking, so the written word takes precedence over the spoken word in the classroom. It is easier and cheaper to mark multiple choice answers than free writing, so closed, “right or wrong” answers are tested – and therefore taught. Until the hands of the exam are prized off the necks of Indian learners, humanistic language teaching will have a hard time.
While the elite (who ordain government policy, train teachers and run schools like Rishi Valley) are fluent in English, the majority of teachers who teach it, especially those in the state sector, are not. It is, as I suggest in more depth elsewhere, difficult to teach English if you can’t speak it (2006). Most teachers have been raised in the exam-driven system described above and while they know the rules of grammar, they are handicapped when discussing their own feelings in a foreign language, let alone expecting their students to do so. A limited solution to this problem, I suggest, is to offer such teachers a toolkit of lessons that can be taught by teachers without much English – games such as Simon Says where the teacher only needs to produce the language in her word-store, but can still enable 70 students to be creative. Simon says, Wash an elephant! This command is linguistically simple but can stimulate an amazing variety of responses.
Finally, I’d suggest that class differences are more significant than ethnic and religious differences. The English-educated elite in India are self-confident, ready to experiment and often keen to express and implement humanistic ideas. Such ideas can be rejected by the middle class school teachers who have to put them into practice. These teachers have been taught to respect authority without question and pass on verbatim what they have been taught. So they often don’t feel comfortable encouraging their students to ask questions and express their feelings. In Sri Lanka, a similar context, Canagarajah found that “since the teachers did not feel committed to the new pedagogy, the students soon picked up their lack of enthusiasm and began to share the same resentment.” (1999, 115) If humanistic language teaching is to flourish in India, as Rick says, trainers need to respect the reservations of teachers. They will take what they want in their own time.
Canagarajah, A.S. (1999) Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. OUP
Deepa A. (2005) India Together www.indiatogether.org/2005/dec/edu-ncf2005.htm
O’Connell, K.M. (2003) ‘Rabindranath Tagore on education’, the encyclopaedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/tagore.htm
Watts E. (2006) ‘How do you teach English if you can’t speak it?’ www.developingteachers.com
Please check the Skills of Teacher Training course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Expert Teacher course at Pilgrims website.
|
