บทความนี้น่าสนใจหลายจุดนะครับ ไม่ว่าจะเป็นเรื่อง
- การสอน เราควรสอนยังไงโดยเฉพาะในยุคที่ห้องเรียนไม่ได้มีเพียงคนที่พูดภาษาอังกฤษเป็นภาษาหลัก แต่ผมก็อยากจะเสนอแนะว่าบทความนี้อาจารย์ทั่วไปก็อ่านได้ ไม่จำเป็นต้องเป็นอาจารย์ที่สอน ESL เท่านั้น ถ้าเรามองคำว่า "different" เป็นความแตกต่างทางด้านเพศ เชื้อชาติ ศาสนานะครับ แน่นอนนักเรียนในห้องเรียนเราไม่ได้มีแต่ผู้ชายเท่านั้น ไม่ได้มีแค่คนที่นับถือศาสนาพุทธเท่านั้น เป็นต้น
- composition ด้านล่างสุดของบทความ Sieber พูดถึงเรื่องการเขียนและการใช้การเขียนในกระบวนการเรียนนะครับ
- ความร่วมมือกันของอาจารย์ในแต่ละฝ่าย ผมเคยเขียนไว้ทีนึงว่าถ้าเราจะช่วยให้นักเรียนเขียนได้จริงๆ (ไม่ใช่เพียงแค่สอบผ่าน) อาจารย์ทุกคนต้องช่วยกัน อย่าปล่อยให้เป็นแค่หน้าที่ของอาจารย์ใน English Department เท่านั้น (ใช้ภาษาอังกฤษแทนภาษาไทย -- อักษรศาสตร์ ศิลปศาสตร์ มนุษยศาสตร์ -- เพื่อไม่ให้เกิดข้อโต้แย้งว่าผมพูดถึงมหาวิทยาลัยใดเป็นหลักหรือเปล่านะครับ) แต่มันเป็นหน้าที่ของอาจารย์ทุกคณะ
Learning to Listen to Students and Oneself
Excerpted (Pp. 61-66) from "Learning to Listen to Students and Oneself" Tim Sieber.
"It is in listening to the student that I learn how to speak with him or her." - Paulo Freire (1)
At the end of the semester, I was reading a student's fairly conventional research paper on "Effects of Adoption on the Family" for my interdisciplinary course on "Childhood in America" and reached that last, unexpected sentence: the student had written, "I'm very familiar with this situation, since my brother is adopted." There it was again - so odd, I thought - that brief mention at the end, almost an afterthought, of a personal connection to the paper topic. For this student, I had never imagined that he had an adopted brother until I read the last sentence.
At first I thought it was a coincidence that students often chose topics of personal interest, even if they alluded to their personal link in such limited ways. Having given them completely free choice on the paper topic, so long as it concerned problems of children in the United States, I wondered if this effect were just random. It did seem, however, that students often chose topics - adoption, divorce, single-parent families, immigration, etc. - related to their life experiences, even if this leaked through their work in indirect ways. It crossed my mind, at times, whether it was appropriate, or maybe even an easy way out for them, when students chose topics they were so personally connected to. If social and cultural analysis was suitable only for applying to the "other," the unfamiliar, or the different, did a personal connection with the material hamper, rather than help, effective learning?
Still, papers like this suggested to me in some inchoate way that there was a puzzling disconnect between personal experience and academic analysis in the work that students were doing in my course. Why didn't the students discuss the link earlier, and more openly? I spent some years observing this pattern, though remaining a little uncomfortable with it. In my early teaching, two decades or more ago, I unconsciously assumed that participation in the academic enterprise, and academic achievement itself, required - even depended on - such a disconnection. It was the pattern I had learned earlier as the secret to success, and my own entry as a student, into the academic world….
Learning How to Teach from Supportive Colleagues
Supportive, knowledgeable campus colleagues have always been essential in my growth and learning as a teacher. Several departmental colleagues as individuals have always been dedicated teachers who as friends and collaborators have always helped me, especially in the years when I was struggling to find new teaching strategies that would work better for me and the students. In the early years of my career, however, the overall faculty understanding of teaching at the university was quite traditional educationally. Teaching was defined as a matter of ensuring that students mastered basic bodies of fixed, expert knowledge, and few departments in the arts and sciences disciplines welcomed much critical examination of pedagogy, student learning, or educational philosophy.
Faculty deliberations about teaching were infrequent, usually limited to discussions over what content should be transmitted, and even more so to complaint sessions about students' abilities, unpreparedness, and propensity to evade what the faculty thought they should learn. Colleagues in many departments continually resisted discussing pedagogy or assessment in department meetings, insisting that superior credentials in research are what make faculty good, qualified teachers. Teaching was also seen as decidedly secondary in importance to scholarship: in yearly merit awards until recently, for example, writing one short book review normally brought a higher salary increase than developing and teaching a new course, or even creating an entirely new curricular program. Furthermore, faculty did not encourage meaningful critical input or feedback from the students on curriculum matters, or even on individual courses. Student course evaluations were depreciated as unreliable instruments; high marks from students were suspected of measuring popularity, easy grading, or questionable standards. Low marks from students, in contrast, were thought to show the faculty were "rigorous" teachers with "high standards." …
…[I]t has always been chiefly through involvement in multi-disciplinary contexts with colleagues and programs outside my own department that I have found the most practical help and intellectual support in rethinking and changing my teaching practices. The most important of these involvements was an early 1990's grassroots faculty, staff and student movement, linked to our Center for the Improvement of Teaching, for transforming the university curriculum to take more account of diversity. I became a part of the effort early on. Our movement and proposals for change involved not simply curriculum content and academic requirements, but also implied significant attention to pedagogy. I joined a series of ongoing conversations, formal and informal seminars, forums, and conferences with colleagues about making our teaching more responsive, in pedagogy as well as content, to our university's unusual, older, essentially "non-traditional," and culturally diverse student body. A number of these activities were funded by the Ford Foundation. Three times I have been able to discuss my Childhood course in detail in faculty seminars, and receive helpful, constructive criticisms from colleagues. My participation in this supportive collegial network, and my valuable learning through it, including from most of the contributors to this volume, continue today.
Featuring culturally diverse voices and experiences in the curriculum had always been a given for me as anthropologist, as the cross-cultural, comparative approach is the traditional orientation of my field. My greatest changes as a teacher came in the realm of pedagogy. My own department's program, and my own practices within it, made clear to me the limitations of seeing teaching as simply an issue of content alone, of seeing the core of the teaching act as the professor's transmission of knowledge to the student. Colleagues and my students increasingly helped me to understand how much teaching constitutes a dialogue with students, in which who the students are, and what they think, is central to the learning equation, and to shaping the faculty's own contributions to the educational encounter. It was becoming more and more clear to me that to be an effective teacher I had to offer more support for my students to tell me about themselves and their own thinking than I had been doing.
At this same time, I also began teaching a new course on cross-cultural relations within the university's Applied Linguistics masters program, which trains teachers to work with non-native speakers of English, mostly immigrant minorities. The program is deeply influenced by a Freirean philosophy and inspiringly directed by Donaldo Macedo, a close collaborator of Paolo Freire (2). Participation in this program allowed me to rediscover Freire, who visited campus a number of times, and with colleagues' encouragement, such as Donaldo's, to examine the relevance of his critical pedagogy for my own teaching.
Freire's critique of the "banking" model of education had pointed directly to the teaching practices modeled in my own education. Freire's own emphasis on seeing teaching as a dialogue, in which both teacher and student learn, made increasing sense to me, as did his other key ideas, especially (1) his advocacy of grounding learning in themes culturally relevant to the lives and daily practice of students, and (2) his emphasis on the need that all learners have to critically construct new information in the light of their existing knowledge and experience. Freire's teachings confirmed that I should include materials, wherever possible, relevant to areas of problem-solving, application and experience in students' lives: this was not hard to do in courses on educational application, or on childhood. He also made clear that I should welcome students' interrogation of new information, through writing and discussion, in the light of their previous learning and experience, and their need for active critical understanding and practice in remaking their own worlds outside of school (emphasis mine).
Most of all, the students in Applied Linguistics were a key impetus for making me rethink my approaches to teaching. These were the first classes on culture that I had ever taught where students of color, often immigrant students who spoke two, three, or more languages, usually made up the majority. Material I taught on multicultural relations that seemed more abstract and conceptually cut-and-dried in my predominantly white undergraduate classes, had much more resonance in this class where most students lived those multicultural realities concretely for their entire lives, and were already mostly practicing teachers themselves, whose own students were also linguistic, usually ethnic/"racial" minorities.
My students had a lot to say, to confirm, augment, expand, illustrate, explain, and sometimes revise the course materials. Minority students were not so quiet as they were in my predominantly white classes, and made their voices and perspectives heard, for example, on their own experiences of racial barriers or their own or their students' struggles over identity. It became more obvious to me than ever before, in any class, that my students had much to teach me and one another, and that the most educationally productive class would be one where all our voices - students' as well as my own - were strongly represented in recurrent written and spoken dialogue on the issues at hand. In all of this, the irony of my being a white man teaching this mixed class did not escape me.
In my early years of teaching that course, and especially the first time, I had to struggle mightily with a feeling that I was somehow neglecting my duty by not monopolizing the class communication: Was it irresponsible not to work harder toward asserting my authority as an expert, even in the face of the recognition that my expertise in handling these issues was still limited? I had all these doubts despite my students' positive evaluations of the course, and my own high satisfaction, even excitement, with the level of engagement and quality of work the students had offered. Old models of teaching die hard.
Meanwhile, learning from workshops with English Department colleagues conversant in composition theory and process-writing, I began experimenting with asking students to do more informal types of writing that would encourage them to register more freely their thinking about the course material, first in my class on childhood, and eventually in all my other classes. The channel of written communication that proved to be the most useful to me was the weekly, ungraded critical reading journal. The broad guidelines I gave students asked them to critically engage with the course material, to reflect on their learning process in the course, and on how their new learning connected with what they already knew, both from their wider studies and from their professional or life experiences. The students could choose each week which issues to address, and how to write about them.
(1) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Patrick Clarke, trans. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 106
(2) Donaldo Macedo, Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1994)
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