Some people dislike humanistic teaching
Or the real world of the classroom

John Morgan (died Nov 2004), Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims, UK

Mario writes:

I vividly remember the impact of a workshop led by Philip Prowse one summer evening in Cambridge in the mid-eighties. He asked two people to come out in front of the group and to sit opposite each other.
First they had to gaze into each other's eyes.
He gave each of them two bits of paper and asked each to write down three things she did not know about the other.
They swapped papers.
Each person wrote down the information the other person did not have about them.
Again they swapped papers.
Philip now asked each person to put the paper into his/her mouth.
Next instruction: "Chew the paper thoughtfully and guess the information you have not read."
Next instruction: " Please take a deep breath and both swallow your papers. This will help you digest the information!"
At this point one of the two volunteers asked why she should follow Philip's absurd instructions any further. Enough was enough.

I think Prowse, in this send-up of humanistic teaching, accurately captured the unease a great number of people feel about some aspects of the humanistic movement. How dare a teacher ask learners to jump through senseless hoops that they do not understand and for which they have been given no rationale? I wonder how often exercises I have proposed to my students have felt to them as looney and unjustified as Philip's exercise felt that evening in Cambridge?

Another person to be moved to parody harmonistically intended exercises is Ann Malamah Thomas in Classroom Interaction, OUP 1987. She presents this scenario:

Here is a lesson plan aimed at bringing about a co-operative atmosphere in a classroom. The teacher is a young man, with several years' experience of teaching in his own country, who has just secured a job overseas. He is taking his first class, an evening class of about sixteen adults, who all did some English at school, but who now want to improve their reading skills in English for both career and leisure purposes. The new teacher is keen to establish a strong feeling of group solidarity in the class and good student-teacher relationships.

Lesson plan

1. Relaxation: eyes closed for three minutes.

2 How much do we know about each other? The label game: each student has six sticky labels and writes a different adjective on each, for Example clever, clumsy, witty, nice, ambitious, etc. students then circulate, sticking their adjectives on to the jackets of classmates they most appropriately fit.

3 Discussion: how each student felt when different adjectives were attached to him, which adjectives each student would have liked to have attached to him, which adjectives each Student would not have liked attached to him, and so on.

Given that the class members are all middle-aged, reserved, and very conscientious about improving their English; that their previous experience of language learning has been of doing grammar and comprehension exercises and of memorizing vocabulary lists, what reaction to this lesson plan can you predict?

Now look at the interaction which might arise from the execution of this lesson plan:

The interaction has developed into conflict. The classroom atmosphere by this stage is fraught with tension, and it is difficult to see how the lesson can progress from here. Could this conflict have been avoided?

The imaginary lesson she is here pillorying is based on a suggestion from Gertrude Moskowitz's anthology of therapy and creativity techniques transposed to the language classroom: Caring and Sharing in the Foreign language Classroom. (Our affectionate nickname for the book in the 1980's was Scaring and Daring in the Foreign Language Classroom!)

A form as lively and trenchant as parody is rarely used in academic discourse. Why then are Prowse and Malamah Thomas moved to use it? What is it makes them angry enough to have to resort to straw men and send-ups?

That they are onto something serious is clear from the calmer, deeper and more measured thinking of Kata Ittzes, a colleague who has pioneered the use of carefully selected Moskowitz ideas in the Hungarian secondary school. Given that Kata feels she owes Caring and Sharing a considerable debt of gratitude, it is striking to read this from her pen:

" I feel making use of humanistic techniques is a very delicate matter indeed- to follow somebody, to look up to somebody, to find an ideal. Teachers are transmitting not only their knowledge of a subject but also their moral, emotional, social even political views as well as their values. and children or adolescents are easy to manipulate. Do we want to manipulate them? We may manipulate them for the wrong reasons and with the wrong methods.
Wouldn't we rather prefer to subtlety guide them to think and choose for themselves? There is a very thin line, a none too definite border here between manipulation and individual choice. Clark, speaking of the "tyranny of humanism"/ manuscript quoted by T. Scovel, TESOL '82 voices his "uneasy feeling that something is not right." C. Brumfit,in a review written about G.M.'s book says: "your sympathy is not requested but kidnapped and held hostage."/ ELTJ October 81./ I am afraid the same can apply not only to the reader of the book but to the learner as well."

The power of the above passage derives from the fact that Ittzes is firmly committed to student-centred teaching. When she gave her seminal paper ( see Appendix 3 ) at the IATEFL conference in Brighton in 1986 she showed us slides of the students whose humanistic work she presented and asked each of us present at the talk to write a letter to her students thanking them for having allowed her to present their work. This was not a rhetorical device - she meant us to do just that.

Here's what John Morgan had to say in reply to the parodies and to Ittzes's more serious points:

I recently read in a newspaper of how an offender appeared before the magistrates charged with breaking a probation order. A condition of the order had been attendance at group sessions and the young man had not been attending. His solicitor explained to the magistrate that during one session his client had been asked to role play an apple, and this he had been unable and unwilling to do. Doubtless there had been good reasons for asking the group to take part in this role play, but his client had not understood them, and had walked out. The magistrate gently explained that probation order was to be observed, and the offender paid for his failure to under-stand with 200 hours of Community Service.

This account touched me deeply, as not long before I had asked a group of teachers on an in-service course to do something very similar. I placed a chair in the middle of the group and asked one of the teachers to take off her shoe and put it on the chair. I asked the other members of the group to put questions to the shoe, which the shoe's owner then answered on its behalf. A description of that activity might well be "she was asked to role play a shoe."

Now I had my reasons for asking the group to do this exercise, and I shall return to them later, but for the moment let us take the stark absurdity of that description as an expression of the gulf between the Real World (where people do not pretend to be shoes or apples) and the world of the classroom (where, apparently, they do ).

The idea that these two worlds are different is part and parcel of our professional experience and practice. In the 1960s we taught English by the Direct Method. I would, for example, come into the classroom with a box of fruit and lay them out on my desk. I would pick up an apple and say slowly and clearly "This is an apple", then hand it to a student and ask "what is that?", pointing at the apple. If the student had understood, and had remembered the sounds a-pp-le, she would say "This is an apple". If she showed that she had not understood, by remaining silent or by producing some other response, I would repeat the process with another student. If things went well, by the end of the class the students would be taking and giving one another pieces of fruit and producing exchanges of increasing complexity: "Is that an apple or a banana?", "It's a banana", "give me the banana, please".
In this way they practised and gained facility with the 'forms' of English structures, and with a subset of English 'vocabulary', and with the 'sounds' of the language. Viewed as a social event, what we were doing was hardly satisfying, but as a means to an end it worked well enough. None of us was under the slightest misapprehension that our world of question and answer, apples and bananas, was the Real World, though elements of that world were necessarily present. We were practising 'for' the Real World - our class was a rehearsal.

It was, however, inevitable that the learner's willing "suspension of reality" should at some point break down. There is, after all, a limit to how long one is prepared to function in a world of rehearsal. After one or two hundred hours of it one begins to hanker after performance, and as the novelty of the language itself wore off all but the most dedicated students would start to lose motivation. We needed a different classroom reality, which would capture something of the performance element in the Real World, the satisfaction of conveying needed information, of accomplishing tasks, of influencing the behaviour of others through language.

So we put the banana in a bag and our drills became guessing games; exercises became activities; and lessons became sequences of tasks. To stress that a foreign language could be used to 'do' things, we introduced group and project work. The language we taught was itself different- we were no longer content with the mere manipulation of structures and vocabulary but demanded "authenticity" and "meaningful expression". In short, we found ourselves constructing , with the collusion of our students, an increasingly complex model or analogue of the Real World. In 1969 one of my intermediate classes wrote and produced a 10-minute "classroom documentary" on the Moon Walk of the US astronauts, based on three weeks' research in magazines, newspaper accounts, and a transcript of the actual conversations between Mission Control and Apollo. In 1972 a colleague in Cambridge got his beginners' class, armed with notebooks and portable cassette recorders, to interview local residents on their attitudes to foreigners. From the data collected, and the insights they had gained, they then improvised role plays in the classroom. About the same time my own class was taking over the kitchen to test out practically their comprehension of recipes. The General Election of October 1974 inspired parallel, simulated elections in many schools, complete with manifestos, canvassing, and public meetings.

Through these and other structured events (inside and outside the classroom) we attempted to create realistic opportunities for achievement in our little world of learning, whilst maintaining the safe, comprehensible frame of classroom and syllabus. And, to a large extent, it worked. Our students maintained their motivation, classes became more lively and at the same time more challenging. We took pleasure in planning our lessons, in preparing materials that would engage our students' attention. Our students found satisfaction in completing the tasks we set, in solving puzzles, and in discovering something of the power that even a partial competence in a second language can bestow.

But 'realistic' is not 'real', and the Real World is neither safe nor tidily structured. Insofar as we succeeded in our aims, it was because we all, learners and teachers, tacitly agreed to 'exclude' from our world of language learning sizeable chunks of dangerous, untidy experience. We set limits, for example, to the modes and content of our interaction with one another, avoiding contacts that might complicate our relationship and "interfere with learning". (such contacts took place, of course, continually, but not within the frame that we recognised as The Classroom.) like many groups brought together by a single common purpose (committees, work teams, congregations) we allowed the immediate task-in-hand to define our interaction and tried not to step outside the roles it imposed. Pair and group work was tightly goal-oriented, with jigsaw reading and listening and carefully prepared situational role play: group members faced one another in clear, even stereotypical, roles, not as the complex changing individuals they "really" were. If a discussion took place, it would be to decide a scheme of work or to explore an agreed theme (usually related to reading and composition work), conducted along formal lines with a Chairman (usually the teacher) to ensure order and equality.

In these activities over-personal contributions would be internally pre-censored out. I shall never forget the catastrophe that occurred when, in an advanced discussion class on the then topical theme of abortion, one member talked of an abortion she herself had had. Not only were we unable to cope with such a gross breach of our tacitly-agreed rules. We also lacked any procedure to handle our own feelings of shock and embarrassment. The remainder of that class was largely silence.

Such lapses apart, though, my classroom of the 1970s was a workable model, and admirably suited to the new functional-notional schemata that had begun to filter through to us.* The idea that a language-learning syllabus could be constructed from the nuts and bolts of practical communicative acts, rather than the abstract concepts of grammar, was exciting, and gave philosophical justification to the work we wanted to do.

It was, however, precisely in our emphasis on "language as communication" that we began to open up the cracks in our carefully-constructed classroom reality. The simulated "information-gap" activities (in which, for example, two students would be given different partial accounts of the same fictional event, and would then through dialogue produce a full account) began to seem hollow in comparison with the "real" information gap that would be present when, say, two people exchanged information about their own lives, or expressed their different reactions to the same event. We pushed increasingly in the direction of "realism" and "personal reality" and in so doing, broke many of the tacit rules of "normal" classroom reality.*

It was on a summer course that I first realised that the world I and my students were constructing in the classroom was radically different from the simple analogue I had assumed. I had a class of ten middle-aged ladies, mainly teachers from Italy and Spain. Their English was basically good but lacking in fluency, and I was unwilling to make them work through exercises that they might see as mere repetition of previous learning. I decided to structure each session as a conversation class, but within a "game frame" that would give linguistic shape and at the same time ensure equal turn-taking. For the fourth of these sessions, which was to focus on the language of evaluation and belief, I asked them each to choose an imaginary crime and, in role as the criminal, recount it to the others. Then, when everyone had done this, the group became a jury that was to reach agreement on appropriate sentences for each "criminal". I believed that in the course of this they would be nudged into using appropriate language, and would also have a task that was in itself challenging and involving- two paramount criteria for me. The added role play element - in which each member was directly associated with a specific crime - would help concentration and heighten participation. The "realism" of the jury frame, and the distancing effect of the role play elements, accorded with my view of the classroom as an analogue of the Real World.

Towards the end of the activity, one of the group broke down in tears. Half in, half out of role (it was at first not clear whether she was "really affected or simply a good actress) the group closed to comfort her. After a while, we discovered the reason for her distress- while everyone else had, as asked, chosen an imaginary crime, she had presented an actual crime she believed she had committed, a road accident in which a pedestrian had been killed.

This time, we were able to cope with both our and her disturbed feelings: we simply allowed her to talk. The road accident was only one of many things that she had a need to express. She told us about her son, her doubts about her work (she was a teacher), her lack of confidence in speaking English. I had the impression she was talking directly about these things for the very first time. On our part, we were glad that our group was able to provide her with something she evidently needed, and in a way grateful for her trust.

This was communication of an altogether different order from what I had come to expect in the classroom, taking place in a reality that was nether simulated nor that of the Real World. From the elements of our own lives, of a foreign language, of game and fantasy, we had created something that was real in its own terms, which did not need external justification.

After that, I stopped thinking in terms of realism and simulation but concentrated instead on treating the classroom as a world to be built from the subjective realities of the group members ( not excluding myself), a local and temporary reality in which skills (e.g. language),awareness (of self and others), and creativity could grow. Sometimes the elements of this reality are clear and readily expressed - a simple exchange of ideas will serve to give them substance. At other times they lie frustratingly beneath the surface until triggered by a thought or an event, or until the mood, or the tolerance, or the mutual trust within the group permits their expression. Sometimes the really important things - the internal doubts and fears and fantasies, for example, that inhibit learning or speaking the foreign language - are buried so deep that quite elaborate or extreme measures are needed to bring them to light, to "lay the ghost" and permit learning to take place.

The techniques or "frames" available to the teacher in helping to develop classroom reality are many and various. Some are familiar and correspond to activities and procedures of the Real World, or to activities carried over from more traditional language-teaching: a dialogue, a "free conversation", an exchange of letters, a role-played encounter. Others are more remote, less overtly "realistic" - a mime, a symbolic enactment, a guided fantasy , word association games and so on. Sometimes the immediate aim is language production, sometimes the creation of a mood within which production can take place, sometimes neither. Thus, at the beginning of a language course I regularly ask the group to join me at the blackboard, then stand back and invite the group to play a game with the following rules:

-anyone may go to the blackboard and write ONE word

OR they may take the board pointer and SILENTLY tap out a sentence from the words on the board.

- they may do this as often as they like but must allow at least one other person to take a turn before they return to the board.

As the exercise develops, the blackboard is filled with words and the students formulate and read sentences formed from them. Sometimes the sentences they form chain together in dialogue, sometimes they offer comments on some matter of individual or group concern, sometimes (not only with beginners and elementary learners) they are conscious experimentation with the structures of the language. Because the exercise is carried out in silence, there is no pressure to speak, to reveal oral weakness; the pace of the exercise is typically slow, permitting time for reflection and response; and because the teacher has retreated (correction is either absent or self-administered), the group is given a clear space within which to direct the flow of interaction.

Such an exercise is patently un-"realistic", it bears little correspondence to the "normal interactions" of daily life. But within its arbitrary frame, a true, local reality is created, which sets a mood for the class (relaxed, open, person- rather than task-centred) and opens the way to further development.

Which brings me back to shoes and apples.

I do not know the purpose, in the example quoted, of "role playing an apple", but I do know that it is an absurd action only in the context of the abstraction I have here called the Real World, i.e. the mental picture we might have of "normal, social behaviour". In the context of an agreed "local reality", such as a probation group, or a language classroom, or an office Christmas party, it might well not appear absurd. What is important (and what clearly failed to take place in this instance) is that those taking part in the role play should perceive it as an appropriate event for them at that time.

In the case of my training group and the shoe, I was demonstrating a technique for promoting question -and-answer in situations where participants are inhibited by lack of linguistic, or imaginative, or social confidence. As with the use of glove puppets in talking with children, it starts within a game frame (Christmas party), but may develop in quite other directions as the activity continues. In this case, it enabled a very shy teacher, who was terrified of revealing what she saw as her poor English to fellow-professionals, both to express herself and to become part of the group.

Mario concludes:

What John Morgan has outlined of his own development as a teacher contrasts sharply with the parodies with which this chapter opened.
Prowse and Malamah Thomas have picked either bad exercises or exercises ill- chosen and applied. You could do this with exercises from any tradition and make them look wrong and inept. The importance we attach to the Prowse and Malamah Thomas caricatures comes from realising that people from the humanistic tradition often fail to convey to others what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Perhaps we need to verbalise our rationales more and abandon the arrogance if thinking that the value and use of our way of working is self-evident and beyond question. This has long been a secret stance of mine.
In Short Article 1 Simon Marshall sets out a pretty robust set of humanistic PRINCIPLES that you might find interesting to read if you have got this far in this long ramble!