teaching unplugged - that's dogme with an e

7/29/2019 Teaching Unplugged - That's Dogme With an E

1/5

7/23/13 Untitled Document

www.thornburyscott.com/tu/Its magazine.htm

thornburyscott.com http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/Its magazine.h

Teaching Unplugged (Or That's Dogme with an E)

Ever see a Danish film called The Idiots? Or one called Celebration? Or Mifune? If so, then you may have

heard of Dogme 95. In 1995 a group of Danish film-makers signed a "vow of chastity". Their intention was to

rid cinema of an obsessive concern for technique and rehabilitate a cinema which foregrounded the story,

and the inner life of the characters. They rejected the superficiality and "trickery" of mainstream film-making.

Dogme 95's first "commandment", for example, is that :

Shooting should be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular

prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where the prop is to be found)

Films made according to Dogme 95 prescriptions (such as Lars von Trier's The Idiots) typically have a rough

gritty, even raw, quality and are certainly a far remove from the slick artifice and technical virtuosity of

Hollywood. You may not like Dogme films, but they are not easy to forget.

It has been my belief that it's time to apply similar, Dogme-like, principles to the language classroom. Thewealth of materials now available for the teaching of English, coupled with the wide range of classroom

techniques and procedures recommended on training courses, may have blinded us to "the story" - that is,

the essential conditions for language learning. Where, for example, is real communication? More often as

not, it is buried under a weight of photocopies, visual aids, OHP transparencies, MTV video clips, board

games, and what have you. Somewhere in there we may have lost the plot.

Think about it: how many of your best lessons just happened? For example, a really good discussion croppe

up, and you let it run. And run. Or something that had happened to a student in the weekend became the

basis of the whole lesson. Or, because you missed the bus, or because the photocopier wasn't working, you

had to go in unprepared. But the lesson really took off.

On the other hand, how many really memorable and engaging lessons have you given that were based on

slavishly following the coursebook? And how many times have you spent hours preparing material for a

lesson, only to see it fizz and splutter, like a damp sky rocket?

In her inspirational book, Teacher, the New Zealand primary school teacher, Sylvia Ashton-Warner records

similar frustration with materials:

I burnt most of my infant room material on Friday. I say that the more material there is for a

child, the less pull there is on his own resources () I burnt all the work of my youth. Dozensof cards made of three-ply, and hand-printed and illustrated. Boxes of them. There will be only

the following list in my infant room:

Chalk Books Blackboards Charts Paper Paints Pencils Clay Guitar Piano

And when a child wants to read he can pick up a book with his own hands and struggle

through it. The removal of effort and denying to the child of its right to call on its own resources

. . . . (I was sad, though, seeing it all go up in smoke.) But teaching is so much simpler and
http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/Its%20magazine.htm


2/5



clearer as a result. There's much more time for conversation . . . communication. (You should

have heard the roaring in the chimney!)

If time for conversation and communication was considered so important in a primary school class, how muc

more important must it be in a language class. Language, after all, is communication. So here is the first

"commandment" for a "Dogme of ELT":

Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the

classroom - i.e. themselves - and whatever happens to be in the classroom. If a particular

piece of material is necessary for the lesson, a location must be chosen where that material is

to be found (e.g. library, resource centre, bar, students' club)

(See below for the full Dogme ELT "Vow of Chastity")

It was with the intention of exploring the implications of a pedagogy based on this and related principles that

small but growing group of teachers around the world set up an internet discussion group called dogme ELT(www.egroups.com/group/dogme) with the by-line: For a pedagogy of bare essentials. By this means we

were able to share our beliefs and practices, and at the same time broadcast them to a wider audience. A

lively - and often heated - discussion developed, and a number of common themes started to emerge.

Concepts that cropped up again and again included such things as engagement, relevance, interaction, talk,

voice, dialogue, emergence, classroom dynamic, autonomy, empowerment and liberation.

Here, for example, is Graham (in Newcastle), describing an experience in which he found himself liberated

from the materials:

I was teaching on an Cambridge First Certificate course (in which, by chance, about half the

class worked in the health sector) in Hungary, where the exam took place a couple of weeks

before the end of the paid-up semester meant we had a few lessons in which we were free

from the pressure of the exam, its syllabus, and related coursebook. What subsequently

emerged was a period of time in which the learners explored (among other things) more

intricate/intimate vocabulary for parts of the body the connotations of vocabulary previously

heard but not fully understood the workings, advantage and disadvantages of the British

medical system compared to the Hungarian discussion of whether they would like to work

abroad (related to Eastern European salaries)etc. The discussions of their work (and, for the

non-health professionals, the use of these services) was relevant well-beyond the classroom.

Not too much grammar emerged, but after a semester of First Certificate practice, the learners

seemed to welcome the chance to exchange relevant stories and opinions, and the vocabulary

generated was their main aim and outcome (one of the most memorable vocabulary sessions

I, and hopefully the learners, can remember). It was perhaps the first time I stepped away from

text-books/materials for any length of time. I'm not medical expert and learned a lot from the

students. The point, it seems to me, is that really, it was the learners who generated these 2 or

3 lessons and the learning opportunites within them, talking about themselves, their lives, and

as a result, finding the English language necessary to achieve this.


3/5



Another teacher, Kevin, in Barcelona, discovered his teenagers really wanted just to talk:

We have done three more classes consisting of everyone sitting in a circle and "just talking". I

have been surprised how many really interesting things we've discussed and how well the

students have reacted to these lessons. I certainly get the feeling that the students can learn a

lot in these type of lessons, one reason being that they are so interested in what's being said.

A teacher in Romania (Carmen) commented that many of her colleagues confess to the fact that the teachin

they enjoy most takes place in the two months at the beginning of the school year - before the coursebooks

have arrived!

And a teacher in Scotland (Olwyn) described a writing class in which the content of the class came from the

"people in the room" :

My writing class wrote about the conference I had just attended. I gave them the first sentence

and said they could ask me any questions they liked so long as they were a) written down andb) grammatically correct. I handed back any incorrect questions for reformulation. After an

initial uncertainty, questions flew thick and fast from the writing groups. After half an hour they

had to organise the material they had collected into an essay and had an opportunity at the

end to fill in any gaps. The students commented that the questions helped them to write a lot

more than they normally would and they felt supported in the writing task by the error

correction of their questions. Next week we'll look a little bit more at how they organised the

mass of answers into a coherent text.

The implications for teacher training have also been explored. Neil, a teacher trainer in Barcelona, noted a

mismatch between trainee teachers' attitudes and students' expectations:

I have recently started a CELTA (Certificate) course and I set my 12 trainees the task of

deciding which of the three teacher roles was the most important - the social, the educational,

or the organisational. The final result was that they could not decide whether educational was

more important then organisational and vice versa, but they were unanimous that the social

role was the least important. With my Advanced A group of students I did the same task. Again

they were undecided about organisational vs educational and unanimous about the social - but

that this was the most important.

What, then, makes a Dogme lesson? A Dogme lesson is one that is grounded in the experience, beliefs,

desires and knowledge of the people in the room. It is a lesson that is language-rich but where language is

not used for display but for meaningful exchange. It is a lesson where the learners are motivated not by the

need to pass a test or to earn a tick, but by the commonly felt need to express their membership of a small

and interdependent culture. It is a lesson where the teacher is simply another member of the group -

somewhat more knowledgeable when it comes to the target language - but who asserts her authority only in


4/5



order to facilitate the group's common purpose - to extend the frontier of the second language, to turn

learners into users.

Is Dogme a dogma? No, I hope not. I think, rather, that Dogme is more like a state of mind, a stance, that

inevitably permeates all of one's classroom practice and one which will (must) adapt to local conditions. In

that sense it is not a dogma. It may even be compatible with a coursebook. But the principle - or belief - that

must hold true is the foregrounding of the "inner life" of the learner - and teacher for that matter. And if there

are rules, they are not so much prescriptive as facilitative: as Lars von Trier said in an interview: "That's the

whole point of these rules - they are a tool to be used freely".

1. Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the

classroom - i.e. themselves - and whatever happens to be in the classroom. If a particular

piece of material is necessary for the lesson, a location must be chosen where that material is

to be found (e.g. library, resource centre, bar, students' club)

2. No recorded listening material should be introduced into the classroom: the source of all

"listening" activities should be the students and teacher themselves. The only recorded

material that is used should be that made in the classroom itself, e.g. recording students in pairor group work for later re-play and analysis.

3. The teacher must sit down at all times that the students are seated, except when monitoring

group or pair work (and even then it may be best to pull up a chair). In small classes, teaching

should take place around a single table.

4. All the teacher's questions must be "real" questions (such as "Do you like oysters?" Or

"What did you do on Saturday?"), not "display" questions (such as "What's the past of the verb

to go?" or "Is there a clock on the wall?")

5. Slavish adherence to a method (such as audiolingualism, Silent Way, TPR, task-basedlearning, suggestopedia) is unacceptable.

6. A pre-planned syllabus of pre-selected and graded grammar items is forbidden. Any

grammar that is the focus of instruction should emerge from the lesson content, not dictate it.

7. Topics that are generated by the students themselves must be given priority over any other

input.

8. Grading of students into different levels is disallowed: students should be free to join the

class that they feel most comfortable in, whether for social reasons, or for reasons of mutual

intelligibility, or both. As in other forms of human social interaction, diversity should be

accommodated, even welcomed, but not proscribed.

9. The criteria and adminstration of any testing procedures must be negotiated with the

learners.

10. Teachers themselves will be evaluated according to only one criterion: that they are not

boring.


5/5



teaching unplugged - that's dogme with an e

Documents