Paulo Freire

Born: Recife, Brazil - 19 September, 1921
Died: São Paulo, Brazil - 2 May 1997

One of the most significant educators in the world during the last part of the 20th century.  His work, however, is not central to the curricula of many schools of education whose responsibility is to prepare the next generation of teachers. 

Friere believed the true nature of dialogue to be a process of learning and knowing.  To participate rigorously in a dialogue as a process of learning and knowing, students must be able to transform their lived experiences into knowledge and to use the already acquired knowledge as a process to unveil new knowledge.

"We need to say no to the neoliberal fatalism that we are witnessing at the end of this century, informed by the ethics of the market, an ethics in which a minority makes most profits against the lives of the majority.  In other words, those who cannot compete, die.  This is a perverse ethics that, in fact, lacks ethics.  I insist on saying that I continue to be human... I would then remain the last educator in the world to say no:  I do not accept... history as determinism.  I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century."

Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Ideology Matters.

The term "pedagogy" has Greek roots, meaning "to lead a child" (from pais: child and ago: lead).  Thus the term "pedagogy" illustrates, education is inherently directive and must always be transformative.

Donaldo Macedo, Introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed deals with significant questions of cultural identity.  It provides language to critically understand the tensions, contradictions, fears, doubts, hopes, and "deferred" dream that are part and parcel of living a borrowed and colonized cultural existence.  Donald Macedo says in the introduction that it "gave me the inner strength to begin the arduous process of transcending a colonial existence that is almost culturally schizophrenic: being present and yet not visible, being visible and yet not present".

 

The Banking Concept of Education

Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty vessel to be filled by the teacher. He notes that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (Freire, 1970, p. 77).  This led to Freire's democratic proposals of problem-posing education where "men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation."

Subordination through an imposed assimilation policy. 

In our so-called open societies his work suffers from a more sophisticated form of censorship: omission.

Until his death, Freire courageously denounced the neoliberal position that promotes the false notion of the end of history and the end of class.  He argued that although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression.  Freire recounted how a family in Northeast Brazil scavenged a landfill and take "pieces of an amputated human breast with which they prepared their Sunday lunch."

Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Ideology Matters.

Paulo Freire - A Curious Being

Seeing Through Paulo's Glasses: Political Clarity, Courage and Humility

Noam Chomsky (2013) Pedagogy of the Oppressed

 

 

Structuralism

From Wikipedia

In Course in General Linguistics, a book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes on lectures given by Ferdinand de Saussure at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911, the analysis focuses not on the use of language (called "parole", or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language (called "langue"). This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically. Saussure argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts:

1. a "signifier" (the "sound pattern" of a word, either in mental projection—as when one silently recites lines from signage, a poem to one's self—or in actual, any kind of text, physical realization as part of a speech act)
2. a "signified" (the concept or meaning of the word)

This was quite different from previous approaches that focused on the relationship between words and the things in the world that they designate. Other key notions in structural linguistics include paradigm, syntagm, and value (though these notions were not fully developed in Saussure's thought). 

A structural "idealism" is a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes or even constructions) that are possible in a certain position in a given linguistic environment (such as a given sentence), which is called the "syntagm". The different functional role of each of these members of the paradigm is called "value" (valeur in French).

Saussure's Course influenced many linguists between World War I and World War II. In the United States, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark and Alf Sommerfelt in Norway. In France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste continued Saussure's project, and members of the Prague school of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential. However, by the 1950s Saussure's linguistic concepts were under heavy criticism and were soon largely abandoned by practising linguists:

Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale. One can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky.

The clearest and most important example of Prague school structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague school sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analysed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analysing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope—it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English is because these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different fields.

Edward Said

Edward Said (1978) identified the tendency to stereotype citizens from the Arab world.  The Middle East is often seen as the eternal and unchanging East with the sexually insatiable Arab, the Feminine exotic, the teeming marketplace, mystical religiosity, corrupt despotism, and so on.  China is also similarly stereotyped as being exotic and eternal, underdeveloped and backward, the paradoxically juxtaposed old and new, the crowded, dirty and poverty-stricken life, the smiling or inscrutiable exterior hiding either bad intentions or misery, the passive Oriental and the despotic leader, the dullness of life under socialism, the uncaring nature of the Communist government, and so on.

Intercultural Communication (Holliday, Hyde & Kullman) Routledge, 2010.

Islam Through Western Eyes - The Nation, 1980.

Jacques Bellot - Refugee teacher

The sixteenth-century Huguenot émigré Jacques Bellot played a seminal role in the history of English and French language tuition, and is remembered for composing some of the first descriptive grammars for learners of both languages. His methods remained in use throughout the seventeenth century after being incorporated into the often-reprinted Grammaire angloise (1625).

Peter Auger - Research article- Fashioned through Use: Jacques Bellot's Rules and its Successors.

He devoted himself to the teaching of English to the immigrant French community in London as well as teaching French to the native population.  
A.P.R Howatt - A History of English Language Teaching (1984:13)

Alastair Pennycook

Alastair Pennycook is Professor of Language Studies at University Technology Sydney.  He coordinates and teaches the subject Global Englishes.

I have begun reading English and the Discourses of Colonialism (1998) Routledge, London.  Stumbling upon the writings of Prof. Alastair Pennycook has been a revelation as I am interested in the political dimensions and power relations involved in the teaching of English.
 

Summary
"English and the Discourses of Colonialism opens with the British departure from Hong Kong marking the end of British colonialism. Yet Alastair Pennycook argues that this dramatic exit masks the crucial issue that the traces left by colonialism run deep. This challenging and provocative book looks particularly at English, English language teaching, and colonialism. It reveals how the practice of colonialism permeated the cultures and discourses of both the colonial and colonized nations, the effects of which are still evident today. Pennycook explores the extent to which English is, as commonly assumed, a language of neutrality and global communication, and to what extent it is, by contrast, a language laden with meanings and still weighed down with colonial discourses that have come to adhere to it.  Travel writing, newspaper articles and popular books on English, are all referred to, as well as personal experiences and interviews with learners of English in India, Malaysia, China and Australia. Pennycook concludes by appealing to postcolonial writing, to create a politics of opposition and dislodge the discourses of colonialism from English."

Chapter 5: Opium Riots, English and Chinese

'The curriculum of the girls' school is no longer dead and uninspiring.  Cookery, clay-modelling, paper-cutting, drawn-thread work, hygiene taught by Lady Medical Officers, are romantic subjects for the little Malay girl compared with what her elder sisters learnt a few years ago.' 

Straits Settlements, 1934.

Pennycook views the education provided by the colonial powers as 'fostering a more receptive, obedient and hard-working population' which far from altering the status of women it rather maintained the same status (1998:97).

One aspect of the vernacular education was to promote loyalty, obedience, and acceptance of colonial rule (1998:100).

Language policy involved guarding against the teaching of English 'indiscriminately' with Frank Swettenham (later Sir Frank Swettenham, High Commissioner of the Federated Malay States and Governor of the Straits Settlments) believing that teaching English would 'unfit them for the duties of life and make them discontented with anything like manual labour' (1998:99).

Loh Fook Seng (1975:85): English education 'had emerged as a new basis for the achievement of elitist status'.

The effects of colonial language policies thus laid the roots for ethnic and class divisions that the British could then manipulate to widen colonial governance (1998:101).

Hong Kong: opium riots and myths

"It is important to provide a clearer account of the historical background to colonial education."

"The views of colonialism that many of these histories put into place downplay the background of colonial exploitation, disdain and racism and stress instead a history of colonial benevolence, stability, and docility" (1998:103).

The Opium Holocaust - 'Compared to the infamies of World War II, which still prey upon the Germans and Japanese, the supply of opium to China which led to the addiction and death of countless hundreds of millions has been neglected' Yee 1992 (1998:104).

First Opium War (1840-42)
Second Opium War (1857-58)

The trade in opium was to remain dominant in Hong Kong's development until the Japanese invasion in 1942.

Thornbury's - Dimensions of methodology

 

This was taken form a plenary given in South Korea, 2012, by Scott Thornbury entitled The Secret History of Methods.  Much like all of Scott Thornbury's presentations it is very interesting, amusing and well worth watching.

The Secret History of Methods

 

Constructivism

Many educational psychologists were more concerned with what was going on inside the human brain than how to get in.  Dewey (1916), Piaget (1973), Vygotsky (1978) and Bruner (1996) each proposed that learners could learn actively and construct new knowledge based on their prior knowledge.  In these perspectives, the role of the instructor is a facilitator (Ornstein and Hunkins, 1998).  For Dewey (1916), a situation represents the experiences of the environment affecting the learner, and interaction takes place between the learner and his or her environment.  So, knowledge is based on active experience.  However, Piaget and Dewey each believed that the educator's role involves the shaping of learners' real experience from the environment, and knowing what surroundings tend to promote experiences that lead to growth (Ornstein and Hunkins, 1998).

Dewey (1916) considered that the main function of education was to improve the reasoning process.  He also recommended adapting his problem-solving method to many subjects.  A student who is not motivated will not really perceive a problem, so problems selected for study should be derived from learner interests (Ornstein and Hunkins, 1998).  Therefore, the methods of constructivism emphasize development of learner's ability in solving real life problems.  As a result, problem solving and free discovery come together.  In other words, knowledge is dynamic and is built around the process of discovery (Dewwy, 1916).  Dewey considered the teacher as a guide rather than a director since learning allowed for creative interaction with the teacher rather than outcome-based teaching.

Vygotsky placed more emphasis on the social context of learning.  Vygotskian theory, emphasizes the importance of the socio-cultural context in which learning takes place and how the context has an impact on what is learned (Vygotsky, 1978).   Since Vygotsky emphasized the critical importance of interaction with people, including other learners and teachers, in cognitive development, his theory is called "social constructivism" (Maddux, Johnson and Willis, 1997).  Much of collaborative problem solving strategy is built on the best known of Vygotsky ideas, the zones of proximal development (ZPD).

Source: TYLEC handout - 'Toward constructivism for adult learners in online learning environments' Huang, H-M., British Journal of Educational Technology Volume 33 No 1, 2002 pp 27-37

Jean Piaget

Born: 9 August, 1896
Died: 16 September, 1980

The most important contribution of Piaget's work was to alert educators to the child's active role in their learning and the importance of mental activity.  He showed how children actively attempt to make sense of their world and construct their own understandings.  His work had a great emphasis on primary education and is the basis for many of the principles of discovery learning. 

Formal Operational Stage 

The development of metacognitive skills is key  to the success of the formal operational stage.

 

McLeod, S. A. (2010). Formal Operational Stage. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/formal-operational.html 14-10-16

Jerome Bruner

Born: 1 October, 1915
Died: 5 June, 2016

For Bruner, the process of education is as important as its product.  The development of conceptual understanding and of cognitive skills and strategies is a central aim of education, rather than the acquisition of factual information.  He saw that learning must have a purpose that learners must experience success and that learning should take place in contexts that have familiar formats and routines, such as, e.g. bedtime story telling.  His research emphasised the role of the teacher: children need someone to lead them on to higher levels (scaffolding learning). In principle, anything can be taught to children of any age, provided it is presented in a 

Here is a summary of constructivist principles from Brooks and Brooks (1993):

Student autonomy and initiative are accepted and encouraged.
Students who frame questions and issues and then go about analysing and answering them take responsibility for their own learning and become problem solvers.

The teacher asks open-ended questions and allows wait time for responses.
Reflective thought built on others' ideas and comments.

Higher-level thinking is encouraged.
The teacher encourages students to connect and summarize concepts by analysing, predicting, justifying, and defending their ideas.

Students are engaged in dialogue with the teacher and with each other.
Social discourse helps students change or reinforce their ideas.  If they have the chance to present what they think and hear others' ideas, students can build a personal knowledge base that they understand.

Students are engaged in experiences that challenge hypotheses and encourage discussion.
The constructivist teacher provides opportunities for students to test their hypotheses, especially through group discussion of concrete experiences.

The class uses raw data, primary sources, physical, ans interactive materials.
The constructivist approach involves students in real-world possibilities.

 

Lev Vygotsky

Born: Belarus, 19 November, 1896
Died: Moscow, 11 June, 1934

Vygotsky argued that children learn most effectively through social interaction with people more knowledgeable than themselves when they are involved in jointly solving problems and constructing new understandings within their Zone of Proximal Development.  He put great importance on the place of social interaction in the cognitive and language development of children, since he argued that it is through everyday problem-solving and tasks that socially mediated dialogue is gradually internalised and becomes an inner, personalised resource for the child's own thinking and ability to perform competently on their own.

Source: TYLEC handout.


Microgenesis = the moment-to-moment co-construction of language and language-learning.
Development of competency for a task or activity.

To Vygotsky, all fundamental cognitive activities take shape in a matrix of social history and form the products of sociohistorical development.  That is "cognitive skills and patterns of thinking are not primarily determined by innate factors, but are the products of the activities practiced in the social institutions of the culture in which the individuals grows up.  Consequently, the history of the society in which a child is reared and the child's personal history are crucial developments of the way in which that individual will think.  In this process of cognitive development, language is a crucial tool for determining how the child will learn to think because advanced modes of thought are transmitted to the child by means of words" (Schutz, 2002). 

This is the underpinning of Vygotsky's "social constructivist" or "sociocultural" approach to language acquisition.  This squarely places him outside of Chomsky's innatist position and firmly in the "interactionist" framework of language acquisition.

Regulation, the ZPD and Scaffolding

Children's cognitive development is regulated, facilitated and enhanced through their interaction with more advanced and capable individuals, such as a parent, a teacher, or an older sibling.

Successful learning takes place when the child takes over, or appropriates, new knowledge or skills by shifting from inter-mental activity to intra-mental activity.

ZPD = the range of tasks that children cannot yet perform on their own, but may learn with the help of others or "the difference between the child's developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the higher level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."

This process of supportive dialogue, or assisted learning, which directs the attention of the learner to the key features of the environment, and which prompts them through successive steps of a problem was labeled by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) as "scaffolding".


The teacher's role is to elevate a learner's level to the ZPD.  Once appropriated, the new skills or knowledge can be self-regulated by the learner.

Scaffolding involves the following functions (Ellis, 1998):
1.  recruiting interest in the task;
2.  simplifying the task;
3.  maintaining pursuit of the goal;
4.  marking critical features and discrepancies between what has been produced and the ideal solution;
5.  controlling frustration during problem solving;
6.  demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed

Donato (1994) "scafolded performance is a dialogically constituted interpsycholigical mechanism that promotes the novice's internalisation of knowledge co-constructed in shared activity."

Sociocultural theory explains language as a tool for learning and thought creation; it is a functional description of the use of language and the thought process by which knowledge is constructed. 

John Dewey

Born: 18 October, 1859
Died: 1 June, 1952

Most significantly, Dewey constantly emphasised that learning is a social and interactive process. He argued that content should be presented in a way that allows children to relate learning to prior experiences: inactivity is flawed methodology.  Furthermore, he argued for balance between the delivery of knowledge and the interests of the learner: many believe this idea is one of the derivations of project based learning and research .  The teacher's role is that of facilitator, and as a 'member of the community', a 'partner in the learning process'.

Source: TYLEC handout.

Teaching

I really liked David Hansen's analysis of why teaching should be considered a vocation and it has been for me.

Teaching as a vocation compromises a form of public service to others that at the same time provides the individual a sense of identity and personal fulfillment.
David Hansen, The Call to Teach

• A job is an activity that provides sustenance or survival.  It comprises highly repetitive tasks that are not defined and developed by those performing them.
• Vocation goes well beyond sustenance and survival; it guarantees personal autonomy and personal significance.
• Work may ensure personal autonomy and can therefore yield genuine meaning but, unlike vocation, it need not imply being of service to others.
• A career describes a long-term involvement in a particular activity but differs from vocation in similar ways that job and work do, that is, it need not provide personal fulfillment, a sense of identity, nor a public service.
• An occupation is an endeavor harboured within a society;s economic, social, and political system, but persons can have occupations that do not entail a sense of calling in the same way vocations do.
• A profession broadens the idea of an occupation by emphasizing the expertise and the social contribution that persons in an occupation render to society.  However, profession differs from vocation in two important ways.  First, persons can conduct themselves professionally but not regard the work as a calling, and can derive their sense of identity and personal fulfillment elsewhere.  Second, perks such as public recognition and rewards normally associated with professions run counter to personal and moral dimensions of vocations.

The teacher - a manager, mentor, controller, counselor, artist, architect, scientist, psychologist, sage on the stage and guide on the side.

From passive technicians to reflective practitioners and transformative intellectuals.

Otherization

Otherization is a major inhibition to communication - we can construct and reduce people to be less than what they are.  Communication is about not presuming, not falling into culturist traps.

Othering involves reducing people according to prescribed stereotypes.  Stereotypes are often infected by prejudice, which in turn leads to otherization.

Henry Sweet - Inventor of the first phonetic alphabet.

Born: London, 15 September 1845

Died: Oxford, 30 April 1912

In 1877, Sweet published A Handbook of Phonetics, which attracted international attention among scholars and teachers of English in Europe.  He followed up with the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885), which was subsequently adapted as A Primer of Spoken English (1890). This included the first scientific description of educated London speech, later known as Received Pronunciation, with specimens of connected speech represented in phonetic script.  In addition, he developed a version of shorthand called Current Shorthand, which had both orthographic and phonetic modes. His emphasis on spoken language and phonetics made him a pioneer in language teaching, a subject which he covered in detail in The Practical Study of Languages (1899). In 1901, Sweet was made reader in phonetics at Oxford. The Sounds of English (1908) was his last book on English pronunciation.

Ferdinand de Saussure - One of the founders of 20th century linguistics

Born: Switzerland, 26 November 1857

Died: 22 December 1933

Ferdinand de Saussure developed the study of linguistics as a form of social behaviour.  He has had a great impact on the study of language, literature and the philosophies of communication and expression in the 20th century.  I first came across his work while studying for an MSc in Information Technology in 2005.

He was interested in the relationship of utterances to the whole system of language.

He was interested in the study of signs and what has become know as semiotics or semiology.

His argument was that signs in language are arbitrary and conventional.  This means that speakers of a language agree conventionally that, for example, the word cat refers to the cat animal and the chosen word 'cat' is arbitrary i.e. it has no relation whatsoever to the actual cat other than being agreed upon by a group of speakers. There is so essential relationship between words and things.  They adhere to arbitrary and conventional forms of agreement.

Langue involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful utterance, "parole", would be possible. Parole refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue. This is the individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject.  Saussure did not concern himself overly with parole; however, the structure of langue is revealed through the study of parole. Very good video explaining Saussure's work from Bella Ross: