Six education podcasts

I’ve enjoyed podcasts for a while now, listening to them as I walk the dog, drive to work or do housework. Over the past year, they’ve been a very welcome opportunity to listen in to interesting conversations taking place around the world. I thought I’d share six favourites.

1. FreshEd with Will Brehm

FreshEd with Will Brehm is excellent. Weekly episodes from a wide range of people around the globe give a broad understanding of current debates and research in the field of education. Some episodes, such as the one with Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye on challenging the commonplace relationship between test scores and GDP, have been particularly useful in highlighting aspects to investigate further. Of the over 200 episodes currently available, another three I’d recommend would be What works may hurt: side effects in education with Yong Zhao, Less is more: how degrowth will save the world with Jason Hickel, and Numbers! with Nelli Piattoeva and Rebecca Boden.

2. The Action Research Podcast

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the episodes in The Action Research Podcast. The one with Dr Alfredo Ortiz Aragon, Acting to Learn and Learning to Act, was particularly good for the focus on ‘people-who-know learning for and through action’. And, I really appreciated the most recent one I listened to – What is Community-Based Participatory Action Research – for its emphasis on the messiness and the time involved in such work. All the episodes are really worth a listen ‘for those interested in research and social change’.

3. Unsettling Knowledge Inequities

Unsettling Knowledge Inequities is a mini series of five episodes exploring issues related to the politics and global power dynamics around knowledge production, exchange and circulation. Driving home from a shift at a vaccination centre one evening, I loved hearing from Dr. Lorna Wánosts’a7 Williams about centering indigenous knowledge and Lil’wat principles of teaching and learning.

All people have their way of learning and teaching so that a society can continue. What has evolved at what we now call university is one way, but all people have developed *their* ways.

Dr Lorna Wánosts’a7 Williams

4. The SLB Podcast

The SLB Podcast from members of the SLB Co-op in Barcelona focuses on English Language Teaching, Second Language Acquisition and ‘other things that enthral and infuriate’ them. There are great conversations with well known names like Mike Long and Scott Thornbury as well as people new to me – Elina Paatsila, for example, who talked about Positive Learning. The episode SLB Origin Stories is well worth a listen as an example of how their co-op began, the challenges along the way and the advantages it offers to members. The podcast is a good listen and good company as I wander round a field or along a river.

5. Teacher Talking Time

I discovered Teacher Talking Time, another ELT podcast, when Luke Meddings was interviewed for one of their episodes. That was just a lovely episode and I’d thoroughly recommend it. Luke reflects on his role in the teaching unplugged movement and the experiences with education that had preceded his work with Scott Thornbury. Since then, I’ve dipped into the podcast, most recently this afternoon while hoovering when I listened to the episode introducing the series on Corrective Feedback in partnership with Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

6. Teaching in Higher Ed

Teaching in Higher Ed with Bonni Stachowiak is another podcast that I dip into and always enjoy the conversations. Maha Bali, Autumm Caines and Mia Zamora shared Community Building Activities, Susan Blum discussed ungrading and this week, Emma Trentman talked about Language Learning Ideologies – just three of the 361 episodes currently available.  

Thanks to Emily Bryson for the inspiration for this following her post (back in October!) about favourite podcasts 🙂

Dipping my toe back into ELT waters

I’ve had a lovely long weekend doing some of the suggested reading for the Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) course with Serveis Lingüístics de Barcelona (SLB Coop) which starts next month. Having not spent very much time thinking or reading about English Language Teaching (ELT) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) over the past six years, this feels like comfort reading, returning to familiar names, theories and debates. 

I used to do quite a bit of reading and taking part in discussions about language learning and practice. But then, a couple of experiences at an IATEFL conference in 2014 – one positive, the other, less so – took me in a slightly different direction and drew my attention away from ELT until very recently. Although I continued to practise as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) worker for a while, my reading, thinking and discussions were more focused on broader topics. I completed an EdD earlier this year, having researched the formal and informal learning of grassroots community activists in Scotland. In that research, I used the work of Jacques Rancière, along with a bit of Michel Foucault, as a theoretical framework.

As I now start to read about TBLT in preparation for the course, Rancière’s work seems relevant, particularly around the role of the learner and the way in which education can position people. As we search for the most effective and efficient way for someone to learn a language, we should also consider the effects of the different approaches on how people are perceived (and how they perceive themselves). 

In writing about TBLT, people regularly refer to the distinction identified by Wilkins (1974) between synthetic and analytic syllabuses. In a synthetic syllabus, the learner is presented with bite-sized pieces of language – whether these be grammar, lexis or functions – and they are required to synthesise this information about the language in order to be able to use the language to communicate. In an analytic syllabus, of which TBLT is an example, learners analyse the language they encounter, inducing rules for themselves and learning lexis incidentally (Long, Lee & Hillman, 2019). Dogme ELT, or Teaching Unplugged (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009), an approach I’m much more familiar with, is also an example of an analytic syllabus. 

A synthetic syllabus seems to conceive of learners as not being able to learn without a teacher and indeed keeps learners dependent on teachers as they progress through the different levels. This progression, as Rancière (2010, p.9) writes, ‘is the art of limiting the transmission of knowledge, of organizing delay, or deferring equality’. An analytic syllabus, on the other hand, recognises that people can learn without the explanations of a teacher but that a teacher, by drawing attention to things, can speed up the process. 

All their effort, all their exploration, is strained toward this: someone has addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to, not as students or as learned [individuals], but as people; in the way you respond to someone speaking to you and not to someone examining you: under the sign of equality.

Rancière, 1991, p.11

I won’t go any further into this just now because this is just intended as a short post to say “hello again!” to the one or two people who might come across it, but it does highlight the ways in which learning about task-based language teaching might connect to my thinking and my concerns about education more widely, particularly the ways in which education can create and maintain inequality under the guise of tackling it. 

To pose equality as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish.

Rancière, 2003, p.223

Neil McMillan’s conversation with Mike Long in episode 3 of the SLB Coop podcast touched on the potentially emancipatory purpose of TBLT so this is something I’m hoping I get to explore further on the course. For now, I’m enjoying thinking about and reading about language learning and teaching again. 

I have a lot of catching up to do! 

References

Long, M., Lee, J., and Hillman, K. (2019) ‘Task-Based Language Learning’ in J. Schwieter & A. Benati (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Meddings, L. and Thornbury, S. (2009) Teaching unplugged: dogme in English language teaching, Peaslake, Delta Publishing.

Rancière, J. (1991) The ignorant schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Rancière, J. (2003) The philosopher and his poor, London, Duke University Press. 

Rancière, J. (2010) ‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters’ in C. Bingham and G. Biesta, Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation, London, Bloomsbury.

Wilkins, D. (1974) Notional syllabuses and the concept of a minimum adequate grammar. In S.P. Corder, & E. Roulet (Eds.), Linguistic Insights in Applied Linguistics, Brussels, AIMAV. 

A quick update

This is really just a post for anyone who happens across this blog – either because I’ve followed a blog or liked a post and you’re curious or you’ve somehow clicked through from somewhere else. (It may appear in the feeds or emails of people who used to follow this way back when.)

I haven’t posted here for over two years and I don’t anticipate writing anything here (other than this) anytime soon. I started this blog while working as an Adult Literacies & ESOL Worker with a local authority in Scotland. I had also been involved in teaching general English and EAP to students coming to study at university in Scotland and in tutor training. I’m interested in language and learning and this blog was set up as a place to share thoughts, reflections and activities with colleagues around the world whenever I had something to say (and time to say it!). I enjoyed the discussions here, on other similar blogs and on Twitter but I haven’t managed to keep up with those discussions recently. In the past few years, I’ve had opportunities to do some new things and I’m not currently  working directly in literacies or ESOL.

One of those new things came about from wanting to understand a bit better what it was about education that hadn’t worked or still wasn’t working for a lot of the people I knew –  learners, family members, young people.  I enrolled as a part-time student on the University of Glasgow’s Doctorate in Education programme. I’ve recently completed three years of taught modules and it has been eye-opening, interesting and a lot of work and I have, I think, started to better understand the role of education in our society. Now, as I start my research project, I’m hoping to be able to explore this a bit more. The other opportunity has been a new (fixed term) role with the local authority to support the work around community empowerment and that has raised all sorts of other questions!

Collaboration and discussion in ELT

Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by Sandy Millin, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence, http://bit.ly/tzwXS

It has been very interesting to follow the recent discussion and reaction around the idea of demand high ELT following Geoff Jordan’s post. I’ve been particularly interested in understanding why it bothers or enthuses people and in examining my own reaction to it. I touched on it briefly in a recent post and, in the comments, recognised that I think the idea of demand high has a lot to offer. But, in trying to understand the reaction, it’s not just a matter of deciding whether we think the ideas of the demand high instigators, Adrian Underhill and Jim Scrivener, are good but it’s also important to wonder why they have drawn negative responses that are just starting to be aired.

There’s something very familiar about the reaction to demand high and, in particular, the idea that we do this already and that it’s just good teaching. But, as I realise, from reading comments and posts like that from Luis Otavio Barros, there is a need for what they are trying to convey. However, there’s also quite a strong feeling of “Who do they think they are to come and tell us how we should be working? What do they know about my experience, my training, my context?” as Geoff Jordan and Mike Harrison express in their posts. Other reactions seem to be along the lines of ‘Meh!’. I think I’ve personally felt a bit of each.

Chuck Sandy, when tweeting about Mike’s post, asks that we ‘start talking to each other. Don’t forget to listen’. That, I think, may be where the demand high people might be going wrong. They don’t seem to have asked or listened very extensively. If they have, I haven’t been aware of it and would be happy to find out more about that. They seem, rather, to have been making broad assumptions based on their own observations and now they’re telling us what we should be doing.

The arguments that this is just good teaching, we already do this, it’s nothing new, are ones that the Dogme in ELT (Teaching Unplugged) has drawn over the years. But, in arguing this, I doubt anyone is saying that we shouldn’t promote good teaching but perhaps that we don’t like other people assuming we’re doing it wrong without taking the time to find out more.

Thinking about it more over the last few days, one big difference between the two approaches/memes/methods (or whatever they are these days), however, seems to be in the level of collaboration involved in discussing and developing the ideas. Unplugged teaching was discussed in a dedicated forum for a good few years before Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury brought out the Teaching Unplugged book in 2009. In it, they recognised the contributions of the discussion list participants. ‘Since its inception in March 2000, the Dogme discussion list provided the forum where these ideas and beliefs were debated, challenged, adapted, and exemplified. Out of this ‘long conversation’ emerged ten key principles’ (p. 7). It’s still being discussed.

I like many of the ideas of demand high. I think there is a lot of good advice there. But I also think that there are areas which need to be approached with care. We need to be able to judge, for instance, just how high we should be demanding of individual students at any particular stage in their learning. When we’re getting a new student comfortable in the classroom, for example, high demand might be for them to say anything at all.

I think there needs to be a lot more listening and learning from the wealth of knowledge and experience that already exists in the ELT world and a lot more debating, challenging, adapting and exemplifying to develop and disseminate the ideas of demand high in ELT.

There is, as Geoff suggests a lot more strongly than I would feel comfortable with, very much a product approach to launching demand high in the ELT world. We, it seems, would much prefer to be part of the process.

It’s been a while

 

I haven’t posted here in a while. Did you notice?

While still very interested in all things learning and language, I’ve been distracted by the wider world and it’s in that wider world that I’ve been doing a lot of my reading, thinking, discussing and tweeting recently.

But I’m missing the ‘old’ days and hope to start reading, commenting and posting more relevantly… soon… ish!

🙂