Off the Beaten Path: Oblique Strategies

Hall Houston, Hong Kong

Hall Houston has many years of teaching experience at universities in Taiwan and Hong Kong. His first book, The Creative Classroom, was published in 2007 by Lynx Publishing (www.lynxpublishing.com). He is currently working on his second book. His professional interests include cross-cultural communication, discourse analysis, creativity and critical thinking. E-mail: hallhouston@yahoo.com

Read the following sentence:

Discard an axiom.

How would you apply it to your current teaching situation? Try another one:

Listen to the quiet voice.

What could this mean in the context of your school? And one more:

Disconnect from desire.

These are all from ‘Oblique Strategies’, an unusual deck of cards created by musicians Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975.There is now a fifth edition of the deck. Each card contains a mysterious phrase that can be used to provoke thought or deal with a problem. In some cases, it might take a few minutes to guess the intention of the phrase, then apply it to your situation. These cards have developed a cult following, and were even featured in Richard Linklater's 1991 film, Slacker.

According to Eno, "These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack, or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear...”

Oblique strategies could have a number of uses in language teaching. They could be used in lesson planning to suggest new directions. Also, they could be used to stimulate discussion in class. Alternatively, you can ask students to produce several meanings to a phrase. Or you could ask students to create their own deck of cards using words and drawings. They could even be used to energize a teacher training session.

These two pages will give you a random selection from the deck:

Random Strategies – Oblique Strategies: http://tools.blackhat-seo.com/strategies/

Oblique Strategies: http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html

Please check the From Teaching to Training course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.