pedagogy

Reflections on Context

I teach English as a foreign language to Brazilian upper-middle/middle class teenagers aged 14 to 17. All of them are at that stage of their educational trajectories where they are being primed for academic life in university. A vast majority of them go to renowned private high schools whose core goal rests in getting their students into the best universities and colleges in the country. That means that these kids are being prepared for competition, especially those who are aiming at prestigious careers, such as Medicine or Law, to name a few.

Pedagogically speaking, these kids’regular schools are pretty conservative. Students are grouped in large numbers (30 to 40 students) and classses are delivered lecture-style, with the teacher being the expert in charge of passing on the knowledge necessary for these kids to make it to the next big thing in their lives – college and the prospect of a promising professional life, which will provide the means for ensuring a comfortable life, much like the one they already have with their parents. Another contextual aspect particular to our city (Brasília, the capital city of Brazil) is that a career in public service is also among many of these kids professional future prospects. Being able to pass a public examination for a prestigious career in Congress, for example, means high salaries and life-long professional stability. On top of that, many of these kids parents are civil servants themselves, naturally being role models for their kids.

It’s a culture of competition the one in which our teenage students are born and raised. High-stakes tests are the gateways to a prosperous future, and the gatekeepers are the schools and teachers who make getting as many of their youth as possible inside a good university their highest priority. Schools actually use college entrance exam rankings for the purpose of advertisement. They are highly competitive and lucrative enterprises. It makes perfect sense that these schools prepare their students to do well on tests. After all, we live in an assessment-driven culture. Students’ performances are measured and primed for passing tests, and passing tests equals successful professional future. It is common for these high schoolers to spend their Saturdays taking tests at school and spending their whole week, mornings and afternoons, in school, both attending their regular classes and engaging in academic activities, such as writing workshops, where they practice writing academic essays in a product-oriented approach.

These are only some aspects of the cultural fabric of which we, EFL teachers, are also a part. It is our goal to teach these kids English, the language that will open even more doors to a prosperous future. Any job or career worth pursuing nowadays requires individuals who have very high levels of proficiency in English. These kids’ regular schools fail at teaching the language itself, since their goal is to prepare them to pass a test about the language, something which they can do without being able to speak or write fluently in English. That’s where we come in. Our goal is to teach these kids the language itself, and not only about the language. Our classes are taught in English, and we adopt a no-Portuguese policy in the classroom. We adopt communicative methodologies, aiming at developing students’proficiency in English in all four skills, understanding (reading and listening) and producing (writing and speaking) the language fluently and accurately. A majority of our students start their English studies with us as little kids, staying with us until teenagehood, when they will have reached upper-intermediate to advanced levels of English proficiency. By the time they reach these high levels of English proficiency, most of them will have been studying with us for about 6 to 7 years.

The schooling experience of most of the teenagers that I have in my upper-intermediate and advanced level English classes is a very traditional, teacher-centered, high-stakes-test driven experience on a daily basis, as I have briefly described above. It’s a grinding routine in which they wake up very early, have classes the entire morning, have lunch (many times at school) and come over to our institute for their twice-a-week English lessons. Their classroom experience with us is different from their experience in their regular schools in some aspects. Our classes are smaller, with about 18 students in each group. The classrooms themselves are smaller and we adopt a U-shaped seating arrangement of desks. As I’ve mentioned before, we adopt communicative methodologies. Our teachers are trained to facilitate classes that are student-centered and dynamic, fostering plenty of genuine communication. We adopt course books that are the core of these classes, though teachers are encouraged to make the necessary adaptations to course books in order to address their students needs. Group work and pair work dynamics are widely adopted and are an important element in the communicative dynamics implemented in our classes.

Still, my teenage students are tired, and understandably so, given their high school routines. And even though their schooling experience with us bears many differences from their regular schooling, written tests, essays and grades are also important components of our courses. They need to do homework, write paragraphs and essays, and take tests on grammar and vocabulary, as well as reading and listening comprehension. I have often felt that my classes might be coming across as more of the same for my teenagers, despite all my efforts to engage them in energizing discussions and collaborative dynamics with their peers. I mean, these kids have been our students for nearly a decade. It’s as if they have already been intensely exposed to our repertoire of communicative dynamics and activities, no matter how much we personalize and adapt and revamp what goes on in the classroom.

I’m thinking of ways to rethink their engagement. I’m thinking, and looking around, and getting acquainted with other pedagogic practices. Lately something has caught my attention – project based learning. I have been really curious about it and on a quest for learning more about what it is, and how to implement it. I want to write more about it soon, but for now, I will let these reflections on my context sit in my mind a while longer.

Eco-systemic thought: Education, Learning, and Citizenship in the 21st Century by Maria Cândida Moraes

The following is my version of a chapter in one of the books by Brazilian educational researcher Dr. Maria Cândida Moraes. The original work is in Portuguese, and apparently there are no English versions of her work available online. This is a personal work of translation which aims at sharing the extremely pertinent thought proposed by Moraes with my English-speaking community. I also felt compelled to engage in this translation, for it requires a certain density of understanding which I find extremely rich. In the words of Moraes herself:

“We know by experience that in all translation there is some betrayal, and that in all interpretation there is reconstruction by that who interprets. Pedro Demo (2000) comes to the rescue by saying that ‘hermeneutically speaking, knowledge never manages to stay the same, even if it wanted to. Transmitting is never just reproducing […] and all copy is, at least partly, also reconstructed’ (ibid.: 125)” ~ Maria Cândido Moraes

I hope you enjoy reading Moraes as much as I have.

Part 3: The Eco-systemic Paradigm for Education (pgs 241 – 246)

Today we know that, adjacent to the roots of quantum, biological, and complex thought, there are epistemological seeds capable of grounding the process of knowledge construction, the development of learning, networked knowledge, self-organizational processes, autonomy, and creativity. These are seeds which can also influence human thought to develop towards a new way of constructing and reconstructing not only education, but also, and most importantly, a better repositioning of the learner/apprentice with regards to the world and life, providing a more adequate perspective of what reality is as well as the meaning of the individual’s own humanity.

The epistemological grounds provided by these theories strongly oppose the traditional causal model present in instructionist theories, at the same time offering some important pedagogical keys embedded in these macroconcepts and that, perhaps, might be better understood and explored by educators and science in general. Today, more than ever before, we have come to the realization that our school is reproductive, authoritarian, and autocratic in that it works with knowledge in its most linear approach, materialized in the teacher that talks and the student that listens and copies. The more aligned the student is with the teacher’s own linearity, the better his grades.

In reality, the theories approached here unfold the complex nature of knowedge and learning. They also reveal certain meaningful parameters, principles, and values which may serve the reconfiguration of a new educational scenenery and which may foster pedagogical practices that are more dynamic, integrating, complex, and holistic, and which thus require a greater conceptual clarity with regards to knowledge, learning, and the complexity involved in the educational processes.

Education, culture, and society are all complex systems, whose workings entail diverse areas of human knowledge, and which require a broader, more ample view of the solutions for their issues. We have an educational reality which is systemic and which, therefore, requires a treatment compatible to its nature.

This same complexity is present in the knowledge construction and learning processes, whose non-linear nature is seen in the interpretive processes which are dialogically complex because they are intrinsically reconstructive and productive, as explained by Pedro Demo (2000). We know by experience that in all translation there is some betrayal, and that in all interpretation there is reconstruction by the one who interprets. Pedro Demo (2000) comes to our rescue by saying that “hermeneutically speaking, knowledge never manages to stay the same, even if it wanted to. Transmitting is never just reproducing […] and all copy is, at least partly, also reconstructed” (ibid.: 125).

However, we know that such comprehension is not easy, especially to those educators who are accustomed to grouding their work in specific theoretical references. In every day life, a majority of people is also used to perceiving and interpreting the world from the perspective of classical physics, which apprehends the visible reality as being structured, stable, and most events as predictable, predetermined, and rationality being the state of mind best suited and most greatly used for the construction of technical-scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, we also perceive that physicists themselves stimulate, in their heated philosophical discussions, the possibility that there is something wrong in the materialistic realism founded on the notion that real objects are independent from subjects or from the way in which we observe them, thus signaling some epistemological developments (Goswami, 2000).

Today, it is no longer possible for us educators to ignore the epistemological implications of the scientific knowledge involving the concepts of self-organization, complexity, chaos, undeterminism, and non-linear dynamics which determine living systems. We notice that these macroconcepts or new themes, when allied with cognitive science (Varela et al., 1997), set forth a more challenging vision of the morphogenesis of knowledge, a non-linear vision of the dynamics of reality, which, more than ever, unveils the intricacies between cognition and life (Maturana & Varela, 1995). For these authors, living systems are cognitive systems, and life is a process of cognition. The interactions which take place within living organisms are aways cognitive interactions that are built upon the very flow of life. It is in this flow of life that, upon actions and reactions, we shape our world and are shaped by it. From this structural imbricacy, subject and world emerge together. And what is the meaning of that for education?

We have come to realize that this theoretical reference corroborates to a better understanding of the complex bio-psycho-sociogenesis of human knowledge, as explained by Hugo Assmann (1998). In this view, one acknowledges the evolutionary trajectory or the presence of heredity in the constitution of human beings, associated with the diverse environmental contexts in the way human competences develop and evolve.

From Biology, we have learned that each learner possesses his own structural dynamic, which is unique and untransferable, and which does not admit replication. It is something constitutive of his personality, of his ways of being, of learning and of ‘feelthinking’ (Moraes & Torre, 2002). It is, after all, something inherent to the learner’s way of knowing and being in the world. By the same token, inspired by Maturana, we know it is from the congruence between his structural dynamic and his historical-cultural journey that the individual is capable of interpreting reality and of realizing his own humanity.

From Physics, we understand that reality does not exist outside of the observer, which explains why we create the world in our image and likeness. From Physicochemistry, especially with Prigogine, we learn that equilibrium states, both in mechanics and in thermodynamics, resonate in biology as it does in society. Fluctuations resulting from both external and internal causes may result in new structures and, under certain circumstances, noise, disturbance, randomness, detours, and other conditions, morph into a source of order and renewal.

Which meaningful implications do these concepts suggest? One of them is the acknowledgement of motivation as the driving force of self-organizing processes, and that it depends on what takes place inside the system. Motivation is always endogenous, happening from the inside out. And to what extent is the cognitive dimension of the individual a part of the self-organizing dimension of life? If we consider the notions that “the whole is in the part which is in the whole” (Morin, 1995: 109), it becomes easier to undersatnd that the cognitive dimension also possesses a self-organizing dynamic, not only in relation to autonomy, but also in the individual’s actions upon the world around him, since autonomy depends on the group of the individual’s relations with his environment.

From this new theoretical framework, what is it to learn and to know? If we must define this paradigm more clearly, what are the dimensions which might be involved in this theoretical construction?

MORAES, Maria Cândida. Pensamento Eco-Sistêmico: Educação, aprendizagem e cidanania no século XXI. 2 ed. -Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2008.

On finding my voice (part 2) #rhizo14 autoethnography

I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room when I read Bali Maha’s reflections on oppression. Little did I know that reading it would enable me to connect the final dots in the big picture of my life, where I came from, who I’d come to be, what choices I’d made which had boiled down to the life I had, the relationships I nurtured, my dreams and desires.

The culture within which I was born is known for its machismo, and even though women in my country have been increasingly more active in society in general, occupying positions of power which in the past would exclusively be the realm of men, it was the cultural background against which women from my generation were raised and imbued with society’s expectations towards the possible social roles we were supposed to perform. I have, however, been lucky to have been born in a family who treasures the autonomy and freedom that can only be attained by getting an education. Being the oldest daughter of an economist dad and a pedagogue mom, it has always been a family value to pursue higher education, especially in a country where good opportunities only seem to come along to the rich elite and a portion of the struggling educated middle class, the latter being our case.

My parents made a point of buying me the best education they could. I went to the best private schools in my city and was even sent in an exchange program to the U.S. in my last year of secondary school, at the age of 16. I’d been an English learner for ten years at the time, and the year I spent with an American family in Aurora, Colorado enabled me to develop a well-above-average fluency in the language. Back in Brazil, my dad pushed me forward in my education, as I was obviously expected to pass my college entrance exam and stay in touch with the English language, which kept me quite busy for a year or so, until I finally began my years as an Anthropology undergrad at the University of Brasília. My dad had, nonetheless, been less than pleased by my academic career choice. Anthropology did not (and does not) rank among the highest paying careers, no matter how intellectually fascinating or personally fulfilling it may be.

That was when teaching chose me. I’d taken a teacher training course at a small English institute in Brasília, and by the end of the six-month training, I received word from my tutor that I was what they called “a natural-born teacher”, offering me a job as a substitute teacher. I was about to turn 21 years old and was more than happy to begin earning my own money, doing something that I really enjoyed: being with people, communicating and connecting, every day. 18 years later, I look back at my path and I feel I’ve been lucky in so many ways. I survived a broken home, with my parents’ divorce at the age of nine. Not that it didn’t take its toll on my future relationships, but I have become a stronger individual as a result of this and so many other hardships I’ve come up against in my life.

There I was, reading Maha’s instigating thoughts and questions on the subject of oppression. Something inside of me began boiling. It began to dawn on me that I, too, had been in so many ways oppressed. Oppressed by expectations, by the threat of failure in not being able to find a worthwhile career that would keep me from sharing the fate of the vast majority of the population of my country, with no opportunity, no future, no dignity. I had been very well educated alright. It had all been funneled down to me, and it had somehow sunk in and taken the shape of an education that worked at its ultimate purpose: getting me into a federal university, a luxury (still to this day) to a select few, to an intellectual elite, to the middle-class kids who were (and still are) pushed to make a career choice many a times too soon, one that they’d very likely not practice in their professional future, one that they’d probably just drop midway through college (those who were brave enough to stand up to the status quo, that is).

What emerged from within my deepest inner space was a realization that I had spent most of my life oppressed by other people’s curricula and agendas. I’d been oppressed to conform and fit in the mold that was made for kids with my cultural background and my social class. I had turned into a teacher in my own right, but how much of my teaching persona had also become a replication of what I had experienced as a learner during my school years? I had been questioning beliefs that I thought were so solid, principles so sound. I had been experimenting with my intellectual abilities via my own devices, and it had all been happening in connection with others. I had been allowed to revisit and revive that exhilarating feeling I had experienced when I first began teaching, a feeling that it was all worth it and that so much meaningful learning happens in becoming part of a network, a community, in connecting with others (and with otherness) regardless of your social class, your cultural background, your formal education.

Never before had I seen so great a part of the big picture of my life, of what it was, has been, and of what I truly want it to be from now on. I really might have been working my way around oppression, tolerating it, accepting it as the only viable pathway. It is as if I have been through the kind of consciousness shift that only a powerful education, aiming at freeing the individual and allowing him to (re)create his own reality, ultimately impacting the society in which he is inserted, making it fairer, more humane, is ever capable of fostering. I might have gained greater critical consciousness, in that I have found new perspectives, explored new perspectives, and all in my own terms, working with my own cosmology/context/history.

I have experienced an existential breakthrough. I have been deeply changed by the connections and exchanges that took place during rhizo14, and not only with others, but also via others and back to my own self, allowing otherness to reverberate within my ‘uniquely furnished room’ and checking to see what possible chords would spring up. I owe it to this network/community/connections/people. I deconstructed my oppressions, and never before have I been able to see inside myself with such clarity. Not that it has given me any promises of certainty – much to the contrary. I had never cherished the unknown. I had always been afraid of not knowing the answers when the time came for me to show that I did. Never before had it been so pleasurable to learn, and to stretch my intellectual (and even artistic?) legs.

I have finally owned my education. I have made it mine via the connections with other individuals who care about owning their education as much as myself, or even more. I have learned the meaning of agency. I have had an insight into what Paulo Freire advocates in Education and Change. That education is not a mere adaptation of the individual to society. That we must transform our reality to transcend. That domestication is the opposite of education, and that education is more authentic to the extent it entices our curiosity to learn, to create and recreate reality. The learners must be themselves.

My pedagogue mom’s words on what she believes to be the core of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy:

“O homem deve ser o sujeito de sua própria educação. Não pode ser objeto dela. Por isso, ninguém educa ninguém. O homem se educa em comunhão.”

“The individual must be the agent of his own education. He cannot be its object. That is why no one educates anyone. The individual learns/self-educates in communion.”