I am writing this post in order to share with you some important news.

For some time I have been wrestling with the need to operate in both analogue and digital modes, and have – after much soul-searching – come to the decision that I must fully digitise myself.

In fact, I have already done so, having made a clandestine visit to a Swiss clinic over the weekend in which all remaining analogue parts and wiring were removed and a new, fully-digital operating system implanted.

While I am still experiencing mild pixelation in high winds, and occasionally have to reboot in public using a button located in a position I have been warned never to reveal just behind my right ear, things have been running smoothly so far.

NO ILL-EFFECTS: Up and running (coverage allowing)

I am perhaps regretting the decision to save money by going for the ‘wifi only’ option, as I have been disappearing rather a lot, but I can always upgrade to 3G when my present contract runs out in 2022.

Perhaps more controversially, I have decided to run with Apple’s iOS operating system. The beauty of this is that I am readily accessible to any friend or colleague with an Apple device, once they have downloaded the modestly priced app that contains the relevant code.

The drawback, if there is one, is that I will be invisible and inaudible to anyone who does not have an Apple device. While some older family members have expressed concern over this, I have pointed out that they will save money on Christmas presents.

I look forward to sharing more news as this interesting experiment progresses, and would like to stress that rumours suggesting I am being paid a modest retainer to ‘place’ Apple products in everyday conversation are completely unfounded.

And as I pad round my apartment this morning listening to the rain, as I phone friends asking what essentials I may need for the day – umbrella, mac, book, sandwiches -  I realise that I have made the right decision.

 

In May 2011 I ran an unplugged teacher training course with Nick Bilbrough at Horizon Language Training in Totnes, Devon. This week-long residential course was the first of its kind and it was a real privilege to work with Nick, who combines a deep knowledge and understanding of humanistic language teaching with a passion for dialogue, role-play and drama.

You can see an outline of the course here - we’re running the course again in May, and this post is partly a reflection on what happened last year, and partly – well, a plug for what’s going to happen next time round!

Space to discuss: we used this lovely Elizabethan building

One of the joys of the course from my point of view, and one that has influenced my thoughts on teacher training since, was the team-teaching (or team-training). We decided in advance that I would lead most of the morning sessions and Nick most of the afternoon, with the proviso that either of us could sit the odd session out. But we ended up sitting in on each others’ sessions all week. I think this contributed positively to the atmosphere in the room. It kept the energy levels consistently high and allowed us to participate and reflect with the trainees on the unfolding story of the week.

So much of what happened on our training course reflected what I love about teaching unplugged:

- The organic relationship between the task-light activities and our own lives, including our experience of the immediate environment

- The sense of making an argument by doing – we are sometimes asked how learners respond to unplugged teaching, and I often reply that working with learner lives and learner language makes its own argument for relevancy; this was borne out across the week

- The rich vein of shared reference points that ran through our sessions as laughter: our experience of the town, with its ghosts and green living, summed up as ‘That’s so Totnes!’

- The happy adoption of new and accidental language: do you really need to define a coinage as lovely as ‘she’s very highly-sprung?’

‘Task-light’, incidentally, is a term I picked up from Nick during the course. I think it’s a perfect way to describe the kind of frameworks we adopt for managing interaction – whether spoken or written – in the unplugged classroom. It’s a case of applying ‘just enough’ structure to give a conversation direction.

There is a lot to be said for learning by doing. Trainees relish activity not only because it gives them a new idea to try out, but because it gives them a way to try out a new idea – and a week gives everyone plenty of opportunities to do this.

We’ll be back: unplugged takes to the streets

If you’re intrigued by what you’ve read so far, do check out the course information on the Socrates Comenius website – full funding is available for EU nationals. Totnes is a lovely town and a great place to find some space – mental, physical and emotional – away from the classroom. And hopefully to return to it recharged and inspired, with new ideas to adopt and adapt!

Just one thing – you’ll need to be quick if you want to get EU funding. The deadline for applications is 15^th January. See what you think – if you have any questions, you can email me at lukemeddings@gmail.com or contact Nick direct at info@horizonlanguagetraining.co.uk 

This is a response to Richard Gresswell aka @inglishteacher 's #ELTBITES challenge  

So, Tuesday's class in 200 words. 13 learners (10 students, 3 teachers)*. I did use an IWB but a whiteboard would have been just as good

. . . . . .

Note I asked everyone to note down the different ways they'd had a conversation over the past 24 hours: not who they'd spoken to, or what they'd spoken about, but how they'd done it. I gave them my own examples (Skype, mobile, face to face, etc) and provided help as needed.

Compare The class compared notes in groups of three, with one person compiling everyone's answers on another piece of paper.

Share I asked the first group to share their answers and boarded these as they spoke; the other groups then added any platforms that hadn't been mentioned. The first pick was 'gesture', which I just loved. People naturally asked each other about apps and websites they hadn't heard of.

Discuss I asked if it was good to have so many ways to talk. Their responses were interesting and focused on a need to balance face to face with screen time.

Choose Everyone picked two platforms they couldn't do without (beyond gesture and face to face) - this represented a survey of preferences and was a wrap for the lesson.

Develop Possible springboards for further discussion emerged during the 'share' phase:

- censorship, eg social networking sites in China

- 2.0 trends, eg platforms people used to use

. . . . .

*This is a weekly teaching-training class at Stafford House school in London which developed out of conversations with Director of Studies Carl Roberton, who invited me to give a workshop there in September. The school is a learning environment and inviting teachers to sit on unplugged classes felt like a good fit - we're having some great conversations.

NYC COP TO THORNBURY: ‘Say buddy, what’s the little idea?'

Some people don’t like change. They’ve seen a couple of recent workshop titles, and it’s made them nostalgic for the early days of dogme. Apparently I’ve been diluting dogme principles to line my pockets.

Except they haven’t been to the workshops. They haven’t looked closely enough at the early days of dogme. And they definitely haven’t seen my pockets.

The thing is, I look back on the early days of dogme too. I’ve been arguing that dogme has evolved from a critique of materials overuse into a framework approach for some time now, not in dark alleys but in public – for example in conversation with Andi White and Rob Lewis at Iatefl Brighton (from 08:52-10:00) 

Saying that dogme has evolved doesn’t mean the principles have changed. I haven’t ‘embraced’ IWB’s or coursebooks in recent workshops, merely done what I was invited to do: examine their classroom use and potential from a dogme perspective.

We’ve been doing this since the start. Here’s Scott Thornbury in message 8 on the dogme discussion group, March 2000: ‘I see the need for coursebooks, but not the way they happen to be at the moment.’

In an MET article published in January 2002, Scott and myself acknowledge the coursebook as ‘a naturally-occurring item of classroom furniture’, and conclude: ‘The idea is to use the coursebook, but sparingly, taking its grammar syllabus with a pinch of salt’. 

I believe that dogme – despite what Scott maintains – is a big idea for educators in ELT. We’ve never claimed it was wholly new, rather that it links current practice to a rich tradition of critical and informal education that offers a genuine alternative to the CELTA ‘method’. (Unless, of course, that CELTA course has been unplugged.)

But there isn’t a central committee for dogme. No one has to run anything past anyone else before they blog, speak or – thank goodness – teach. This means that I don’t always agree with everything that gets written in support of dogme (and that people don’t always agree with me). But it does mean that we can surprise each other – and this in turn can change the way we see things.

My experience is growing: I used to teach in one context, now I train in many. This also has an impact on what I think and say about dogme.

Nick Bilbrough describes this process beautifully in a post to the dogme discussion group¹. Defining dogme as being about ‘helping language learners express what they want to say, rather than working to a predefined agenda’, he argues that – in principle – technology is unnecessary.

But principles must be measured against experience, and a stint observing and teaching in a state school in Brazil prompts Nick to consider that ‘perhaps the majority of the world’s language learners do not start with a desire to express things in English. Their emerging language skills lie dormant and English is a school subject like everything else.’ He senses a desire to communicate in their questions to him – ‘Which team do you support?’, ‘What do you eat in England?’ – that is not apparent in their interaction with their Brazilian teacher. ‘In these circumstances’, he concludes, ‘technology may surely play a part in helping to build that desire.’

I saw technology playing precisely this role in an excellent talk by Beyza Nur Yılmaz and Işıl Boy at Iatefl Brighton². It wasn’t a ‘dogme’ presentation, but it got me thinking. Their students don’t encounter much English outside school, and Beyza and Işıl spoke about the need to break down the classroom walls: using Web 2.0 to connect with learners in other countries, they argued, creates a context for meaningful interaction.

This last notion is absolutely key. In some teaching contexts, meaningful interaction is best achieved through conversation between the people in the room. In others, something more is needed – and the ability to link to other classrooms can certainly be consistent with a conversation-rich, materials-light approach to teaching (I also talked about this with Andi and Rob at Iatefl, from 07:40-08:52).

Yes, I’ve had to take some new ideas on board since – erm – 2000. But as educators we have to be learning people, surely? Exploring our passions. Developing our positions. And accepting that even big ideas can evolve.

¹http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme/message/14700     

²Integrating Web 2.0 to the curricula of university preparatory schools, prezi.com/zqhptqr1i-qr/iatefl/

OUT IN THE OPEN: I said this at the Brighton conference 

 

 

THIS MUCH I DON’T KNOW: April 2011, LTSIG PCE, Brighton. (Thanks to Matt Ledding for the video)

I was invited to lead a discussion on dogme and IWBs at the LearningTechnologies Special Interest Group pre-conference event at IATEFL in April. These are the notes I wrote as an introduction.

Have I come to the right PCE today?

Exactly a year ago I had a nice chat with Graham Stanley at Iatefl Harrogate, an evening I remember well – at least, I remember it in parts. A grand hotel, lots of black balloons and, later on, a very brightly-lit Wetherspoons pub. Your typical Friday night, in other words.

And then a couple of months ago he sent me a message via Twitter asking if I was still up for doing something on interactive whiteboards and dogme at the LTSIG PCE.

Hmm, I said – I’d love to. But did I really say that? Because although I’m interested in interactive whiteboards, my experience of them has mainly been in training contexts. And it’s often been less about using them, and more about trying to avoid covering them in drywipe marker. In short, I said, I’d be coming with more questions than answers.

Perfect, he replied. You’re booked.

So here I am – still with more questions than answers, but very happy to be here. I like days when I know I’m going to learn loads.

You all know more than me about using technology with learners. But I think we all know as much as one another about teaching. Our specialisations and interests are developing passions, not fixed positions.

Why am I interested in interactive whiteboards and dogme? Well, I almost became an early adopter of IWBs about 12 years ago. I was co-running an experimental school in London and got as far as attending a product presentation. I was experimenting with a kind of proto-dogme approach, and I thought the IWB could help answer one of my key questions: how to capture the language that emerges in class. Because if you capture the language as it emerges, you capture the ‘content’ too – what people are talking about. And that gives you material not just for an immediate focus on form, but also for the next lesson.

In practice, it meant a lot of board work. And I thought to myself, how great would it be if you could use the IWB to play that board work back in real time? ‘Remember we were speaking about the football? Well, Jose said this... Can anyone remember the words that came up? Here they are.. What did we start talking about next? Let’s take a look.’ So it becomes a revision tool for language, but also a route back into the deep context of dogme teaching – our lives.

A year ago, at Iatefl Harrogate, I made a conscious decision to go to as many tech-based talks and workshops as possible. I couldn’t get into all of them, but my reflections on leaving were that rapprochement was in the air. Dogme and tech could get along after all, as many educators – Sue Lyon-Jones for one, who is here today and whose PLN staff lounge is tagged ‘dogme ICT’ – have known all along.

But on what terms? I’m looking forward to hearing what Howard Vickers has to say about mobile learning in our symposium on dogme on Monday afternoon.

I always mention a favourite activity from Teaching Unplugged in workshops, one in which learners take notes at the weekend of places they’ve been and share them in class. And they take these notes using whatever’s available to them – from camera phones to pen and paper. It’s simple, it’s motivating, it’s learner-driven. And it’s bottom-up.

Taking notes is central to dogme or unplugged lessons. Talk, note, talk again. Report after the class has happened, reflect on it in the next lesson. Record, replay. So this is my fundamental thought about IWBs and dogme: you can use a pen to write a love letter or you can use it to write hate mail. You can do the same with a smart phone. It isn’t the technology, it’s what we do with it. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is nothing good or bad but using makes it so.    

Mainstream publishers will try and maintain the status quo. But the IWB plug-in, offering seamless integration between new delivery method and coursebook content, is an old-fashioned idea in tight trousers. It isn’t in the spirit of web 2.0 or any of the really exciting ideas I see for using tech in the classroom.

Finally, I don’t think it’s true to say that technology needn’t change the way we teach. I think that today’s bottom-up, user-driven technology demands new ways of teaching. If we don’t match our pedagogy to our technology we’re going to be going in two different directions at once. We won’t know if we’re Arthur or Martha, David or Nick.¹

Dogme and edtech have both excited classroom practitioners over the last ten years. There’s life in both of them yet because they respond to inter-connected challenges such as relevance, motivation and learner-directedness. There’s a lot to explore, and in the words of Curtis Mayfield – ok, in the words of The Carpenters, but it sounds a lot cooler when he sings them – we’ve only just begun.

So have I in fact come to the right PCE today? What ideas can we share for bottom-up teaching and learning using IWBs?

Well, that’s how we got started in April. What do people think? Is being an educator about exploring our passions, or maintaining a fixed position? (Please don’t make a joke about the position depending on the passion. No, don’t. I might have known someone would... )

Many thanks to Graham Stanley for inviting me to participate and for his generous account of proceedings here. Graham is also project manager for the British Council on the Itilt IWB project, which as he explains in this podcast ‘aims to help language teachers to use this tool in a more communicative and learner-centred way’.

¹As close as I get to satire. I meant UK coalition government leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

YOU PRESS THIS ONE: Graham Stanley shows how it's done. (Thanks to Matt Ledding for the video)

DOGHOUSE: Brighton Centre

 April, as T.S. Eliot almost put it, is the coolest month. This year at any rate. First Istek and Istanbul, then a workshop at the British Council in London, then Iatefl in sunny Brighton. Spring gardens, spring seas.

As it draws to a close, I thought I’d reprise my contribution to the dogme symposium in Brighton – an event which buzzed with energy, despite being assigned the Monday afternoon slot when sleep beckons like the sirens (or the smell of doughnuts on the parade) to weary sailors.

It was great to see so many dogme practitioners there, many of whom had also attended Dale Coulter’s wonderful talk on unplugging post-Celta a couple of days before¹. More big steps for dogme this year - or as Willy Cardoso put it: ‘The dogmest conference ever, hope next year is even dogmer.’

My introduction summarised some of the themes I’ve been exploring in talks and workshops this year. I’ve done a few overdubs, but hopefully it’ll still feel – sort of – live.

DOGBUZZ: No dozing here

 . . . . .

Less is More, Take 1

My guest house in Brighton was green. It featured recycled toilet paper and organic eggs were served at breakfast. But there was one problem – every morning at 5.30am I was woken by creaking floorboards overhead, followed by the machine gun sound of a dodgy bathroom shower.

And I asked myself – what’s the point of a guest house? And I thought: sleep (or at least a decent mattress). And I found myself wondering: how would you start to build a guest house around sleep? With deep carpeting and good plumbing, for starters. Recycled paper and organic eggs are good, but they’re extras. Without the sleep, they don’t count for much.

That got me thinking, what do we build a class around? And I thought: interaction between people. You need real conversation and good listening for starters. Other things might be nice to have, but they’re extras. If the experience isn’t built around the people, the add-ons don’t count for much.

Dogme lessons are based on learner lives and learner language. The lives supply the content, and the language supplies the form.

Dogme isn’t about what we must do in class, or what we mustn’t do. It’s about what we can do using our primary resource: the learners.  

 Teachers are learners too. As Chia Suan Chong said after Dale’s talk, being a dogme practitioner means rethinking the way we see our role. We become facilitators – participants in the process.

Now there are different ways to build a class around people. For example, one can teach dogme without using technology. And one can teach dogme with technology, provided the tech is used in harmony with the core approach, to enhance and to connect. How one navigates these options depends on the teaching context – dogme isn’t a fixed method.

So if it isn’t a method – what is it? And how do we know it’s dogme?

Dogme has evolved from a critique of materials overuse into a framework approach that proposes three core characteristics for unplugged practice: conversation-driven, materials-light and focused on emergent language. 

So far so good, some might say: ‘Isn’t this just what good teachers do?’ Well, not entirely. It might be what some of us already do, but the implications of teaching unplugged represent a serious challenge to the view of education enshrined in most pre- and in-service training.

Because the more we unplug, the more we find ourselves doing the following:

1 Keeping timings open to allow for cycles of interaction and reflection (rather than sticking to the timings in the lesson plan – though see point 3!)

2 Thinking in terms of bottom-up learning, not top-down teaching (we’re learners too: this relates to Freire’s notion of a reciprocal relationship between the teacher, who also learns, and the student, who also teaches²)

3 Recording the lesson after it’s happened (instead of planning it in detail beforehand)

Maybe this is my version of Lindsay Clandfield’s ‘power of three’ – and combined with the big three characteristics of unplugged teaching it makes three to the power of three, which is, umm, six? Nine? Ninety-nine? I flunked math – or math flunked me. So I’m going to go three-crazy and introduce a trio of ideas from my colleagues’ presentations that made a big impact on me.

The first was Candy van Olst’s impassioned argument for opening the classroom space to the learners’ own stories of life and work:

Instead of doing it ‘my’ way, they develop the confidence to do it ‘their’ way.

(Candy actually went a lot further and said: ‘Learning cannot be self-directed unless it’s in a dogme classroom.’)

The second is an idea expressed with great clarity by Anthony Gaughan:

A teacher only needs to be one step ahead to help.

(This is of critical importance to the ongoing debate about teacher experience and language competence in the dogme classroom.)

The third is Howard Vickers’s positioning of technology as a bridge between lo-tech classes and the hi-tech world we increasingly inhabit:

Using mobile technology to capture learning opportunities slows down the noticing process.

(So the camera on a mobile phone can be used to capture text outside class, allowing for reflection, analysis and problem-solving in class).

Finally, I noted the following phrase, but I didn’t note the context – an object lesson on the importance of good note-taking in dogme. I wonder if anyone can place this: ‘The socks are history!’

So dogme is more than ‘what good teachers do already’. But it isn’t new. We didn’t invent it. The experimental practice existed, and the theories of learning that support it (including socio-cultural theory and dialogic teaching) existed too.

Why, then, does it matter? Because without a shared vocabulary that situates unplugged teaching within ELT, without a framework against which to measure one’s own practice, teachers can feel isolated. 

When people share their thoughts after talks and workshops, it’s not to say: ‘This is a revolution!’ It’s usually to say, often with considerable feeling: ‘This is how I teach!’ Or, quite often: ‘This is how I used to teach!’ Or, excitedly: ‘Have you heard of Paulo Freire?’ And people are so relieved to learn that they aren’t on their own.

Dogme isn’t rocket science. It isn’t a mystery. It doesn’t require us to be cod-psychologists or part-time neurologists. It’s fundamentally pragmatic, and it poses a simple, human question: how can we learn together, using what we have to hand?

 . . . . .

DOGCREW: Willy, Howard, Scott, Candy, Anthony, Chia, Luke

 

Notes, links and training events

 

Notes

¹ Transcending limitations on newly qualified teachers; unplugging in week one

² A useful summary here – any one of Freire’s ideas will provide inspiration

 

Links

Scott Thornbury addresses five responses to dogme in this excellent video post 

I also discussed dogme in an interview with Andi White and Rob Lewis in Brighton – the jerky movement in the film is the streaming, not me trying to do robotics (thanks Andi and Rob for helping me relax!). 

http://authenticteaching.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/dogme-symposium-iatefl/ (Willy Cardoso)

http://teachertrainingunplugged.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/every-dogme-has-its-day/ (Anthony Gaughan)

http://ydnacblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/conference-itis/ (Candy van Olst – who pursues her theme in subsequent posts)

http://managementspique.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/questions-which-dog-me/ (Diarmuid Fogarty – who also pursues the theme in his latest post)

http://languagemoments.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/a-spot-of-surfing/ (Dale Coulter)

Finally, it’s well worth catching up with the summary of last week’s lively #eltchat about dogme, here:

http://theteacherjames.blogspot.com/2011/04/eltchat-summary-revisiting-dogme.html (James Taylor)

All of these educators are on Twitter, so if you’ve found your way to this blog and you’re still not sure about Twitter, give it a go. You’ll make friends, and they’ll influence you!

 

Training events

The conversation will soon continue at the TDSIG Unplugged Conference

And (even sooner) on the in-service training course I'm running with Nick Bilbrough at Horizon Language Training in Devon: a few places are available at a special PLN price now the EU funding deadline has passed – apply to me personally via Twitter for details if you’re interested.

. . . . .

 

This is in part a cautionary tale on the perils of frivolity. I had drafted a post on PPP last week before being distracted by writing a jokey piece on the ownership of authors – and was pipped at the post by none other than Scott Thornbury. After enjoying Scott’s video on PPP and the comment it generated, I’ve decided to post my original piece anyway – followed by a brief update. You can’t have too much PPP! Can you?

Two weeks ago I shared an enjoyable chat with Fiona Mauchline, Mike Harrison and Jeremy Harmer as the latter tweeted from the iH DoS conference in London and we mused on the enduring appeal of grammar to teachers and learners.

‘People have predicted the death of/lamented the predominance of [the] grammar syllabus for decades,’ Jeremy tweeted, ‘but it is DEEPLY ingrained.’ The same is true, I suggested, of PPP – we act as if it it’s gone away but, like Take That, it hasn’t.

In case like me you sometimes have to do a double take on PPP, it stands for Present, Practice, Produce: in conventional lesson planning these function as distinct phases within a lesson. However loosely it is applied, PPP encodes not only three archetypal classroom behaviours, but also the belief that language needs to be identified and explained before it is used and experienced in context.

Dogme classes are different. For a start, we change the Ps around. Language is seen as being best explored as it emerges from conversation, or when encountered in real texts – spoken and written. We then pause to examine this language together, offering explanation where it is likely to be useful, and highlighting patterns that can help with recognition and production. And then we typically resume the conversation, perhaps suggesting an activity or reference point for further practice after the lesson.

In addition to being in the wrong order, the P-words aren’t quite right. ‘Produce’ sounds as it all too often is in the PPP context – a somewhat mechanical phase at the end of a process. ‘Present’ is a little too top-down to fit what happens when we look at language through the learners’ eyes and refresh the way we approach and explain it. ‘Practice’ on the other hand is about right, whatever processes are adopted.

So the fit isn’t exact, and the process can be repeated many times within a lesson, but this is what I tweeted: ‘I see it as cyclical – speak (produce?), select and reflect (present?), speak more (practice?). Ghost PPP …’

If it is the ghost of PPP, it may be a benevolent one: PPP is less harmful than it is wasteful of classroom opportunity. But it’s also increasingly ill-suited to the learners of today and tomorrow who come to class needing less to be told and more to be heard. And one can’t help feeling that – like coursebooks – PPP retains a role in training courses and school classrooms because it benefits the inexperienced teacher as much as it does the learner.

What do other people think?

. . . . .

(After viewing Scott’s video and reading the comment!)

I like the idea of dealing economically with the first two Ps, and I can see that one function or by-product of its use in class may be priming. I think we all agree that personalisation is desirable. But even if PPP is tempered by personalisation, or reframed as priming, I’m not sure it will do. In fact the more I think about it, the more it bothers me, for three (yes! there must be three) reasons:

- It narrows the scope of the lesson

- It reifies the language unit at the expense of the language system: learners are often challenged less by the ‘units’ and more by the ‘complex’ of language as encountered outside the classroom

- A production phase in which people attempt to fit presented language into a more or less communicative context is profoundly counter-intuitive, and is therefore frustrating for all concerned

Finally, I also liked on Scott’s blog Anthony Gaughan’s recast of PPP as something the learners can manage and do – a theme pursued in comment by Stephen Herder. Amazing things happen (in theory and practice) when we think less about the teacher, and more about the learner. How does Willy Cardoso put it? Oh, like this.

INDEXER’S NOTE: The phrase ‘PPP’ doesn’t appear in Teaching Unplugged, but that doesn’t mean there’s no indexing work for me to do. In fact there’s so much, and it’s so interesting, that it’s going to be the subject of my next blog.

Publisher set to purchase author in industry first

A leading ELT author is to sell his life to a major publishing house, according to industry sources. In what is believed to be the first deal of its kind, the so far unnamed scribe will sign over full rights not only to past and future work, but also to what legal experts have called ‘the physical side of his existence – the old world, analogue stuff – his body.’

No longer will educators have to wait for a conference appearance, live or filmed. In-home webcams, dedicated CCTV and P2P mouse-tracking software will allow people to follow authors’ physical and online movements 24 hours a day.

‘We don’t see it as an invasion of privacy,’ said a spokesperson for the publishers. ‘The boundaries between what is private and what is public have already been blurred by social networking, and the logical extension is full access to the author. It’s a bit like the Teacher’s Book, but with added value.’

Consumers will be offered a range of access packages across the day, with budget deals for afternoons - when authors are understood to be less productive.

‘I thought it was odd when this latest meeting was held at a crossroads,’ the author revealed to the Unplugged Index. ‘And I miss being able to see my shadow. But one has to move with the times.’

Industry sources have declined to comment on reports that a recent project ended in disaster when an author was turned into an app, downloaded for beta testing and subsequently lost when a hard drive failed.

Click here for a serious discussion of this issue!

Because voice and identity are closely linked, Karenne’s Dogme Challenge #6 on exploding the NNEST myth is closely related to the previous one on the learner’s voice. If we want our learners to be present in the classroom not just as students but as people, we must also be present not just as teachers, but as ourselves.

Of course, our behaviour as a teacher won’t represent every aspect of ourselves, any more than our behaviour as a lover, friend or parent can. Each role is an expression of the whole: we reveal and explore different facets of ourselves in each, but the more authentically related to the whole these facets are, the happier (and the more convincing!) we tend to be.

The way we express ourselves in a second language is an important aspect of that whole identity and should be cherished, whether we are learning or teaching. If Dogme foregrounds the authentic voice of the learner, it must also foreground the authentic voice of the teacher.

Of course, teaching is a complex activity and our relationship with teaching – and thus with our own identity as teachers – shifts according to time, experience and circumstance. A NNEST may have a complex relationship with their own English (which, as Cecilia points out, can be used to help learners), but this is not the whole story: all teachers have complex and shifting relationships with their knowledge of the subject; with their teaching experience and how it relates to new challenges; with their confidence in class. And, as Richard indicates, variations in UK dialect alone are considerable: NESTs may even find themselves tempering their own dialect when they teach!

Ultimately, Dogme offers a positive lens through which to view Challenge #6. If as suggested in Teaching Unplugged we see each lesson not as a performance, but as an experience, it is our role as teachers and facilitators – and not as exemplars of a language ‘ideal’ – that really counts.

In fact, understood in the context of the sociocultural cognitive model that underpins it, Dogme – far from representing an unattainable ideal for NNESTs – has the potential to make teaching a less tense and more whole-hearted experience.

To scaffold learning we need to know more than the person we're teaching (Bruner's notion of the 'better other'). Instead of constantly straining for the syllabus ideal, unplugged learning unfolds closer to the ground in the zone of proximal development (ZPD).

I like to imagine the ZPD as a shared space somewhere above the learners' current ability (but overlapping with it, because emerging from it), and somewhere below the teacher's technical mastery and knowledge of the target language (but overlapping with it, because drawing on that expertise).

Exploring the ZPD with learners involves two key qualities that I’ve always believed are required in the Dogme classroom: an interest in language, and an interest in people. Provided you’re interested, your expertise at the interface between the two will grow. As Sabrina says: ‘It all comes down to passion.’ Or, as Rick argues: ‘The big difference isn’t whether or not one is a NEST or a NNEST, but whether or not one is or isn’t a teacher.’

It’s interesting that three out of the four responses to Karenne’s sixth challenge to date (at time of writing - see more links, below) have come from NNEST teachers. I’ve met Rick, Cecilia and Sabrina (and Richard) via Twitter, and I feel we’re getting to know each other – or at least the facets of ourselves that we share on Twitter! – quite well. Do I think of Rick, Cecilia and Sabrina as ‘non-native English-speaking teachers’? No, I think of them as people. As people who teach. As teachers.

 

Words in grey appear in The Index.

Read on... other responses to Dogme Challenge #6: 

NESTs vs NNESTs – What is the Big Difference? by Henrick Oprea

Nothing More... Nothing Less... by Cecilia Coelho 

It all comes down to PASSION by Sabrina de Vita

Are Native Speaker Models So Important? by Richard Whiteside

Do you need to be Italian to be able to make pasta? by Mike Harrison

A staffroom conversation by David Dodgson

 

And the Challenge:

Dogme Blog Challenge #6 Exploding the Myths 1 "NNESTS can't do dogme" by Karenne Sylvester

As always, the best place for background:

Z is for ZPD on Scott Thornbury's A-Z of ELT

And an earlier look at this from my online Guardian column:

Free the world from coursebook English