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 

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)