My Teaching Beliefs

I understand and commit with language as action and discourse. Not as structures, but as a social mean to get things done.

Teaching is an act of love, of commitment and sharing, where we, as teachers, form, educate people to get the best things from them [this according to Rousseau’s conception of student¹] and put them into play in the social system.

If the student doesn’t understand it is, at first, whether I’m not addressing the topic, the skill, the content, in an interesting way to him/her; or, there are some emotional barriers or psychological problems related to the student’s family, for instance (I could be others), I would have to fathom in and deal with the family of the student. It is not matter of finding who the fault is. There are not guilty persons, only incomplete, insufficient processes that aren’t able to reach the student in a holistic way: as a learner, as a citizen, as a human being, as a boy or a girl, with moral and ethical values, with cultural construes, affective history (Villarreal 2000:45), etc.

Thus, education ought not to be regarded as transmission. Education is a formation process, not a self-development, but a social-development process; where we shape in the student the citizen we would like to have.

Through language--and formal education--students get to know who they are (conveying their identities, whether ethnic or linguistic), what the society asks (and wants) from them and where will they go.

1 Rousseau’s sees the child as having “an inherent potential that should be allowed to grow or flower in the school” (1762) in Crookes: 2003: 56.

Teacher, I know you will think that I have just published this post, however, I have done it in other blog called Sharing FL concepts long time ago, but I just realized that I should have published it in Affectivity in the Classroom, please check this blog and you'll see:

http://sharingflconcepts.blogspot.com/

Thank you, happy new year 2009

Wiki, what is a wiki and how we can use it as FL teachers

What:

Wikipedia’s definition:
1. A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information.

What is a wiki’s definition:
2. Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser.

Own definition:
3. A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified language. Wikis are used to create collaborative websites and to encourage community websites. The encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.


Features:

1. A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.

2. Common uses include project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users.

3. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets.

4. A wiki enables documents to be written collaboratively, in a simple markup language using a Web browser.

5. Wiki pages can be created and updated easily.

6. Wikis are featured by non-linear navigation, enabling the user to create links and hyperlinks, multimedia and so on.

Types of wikis:

• There also exist WikiNodes which are pages on wikis that describe related wikis. They are usually organized as neighbors and delegates. A neighbor wiki is simply a wiki that may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A delegate wiki is a wiki that agrees to have certain content delegated to that wiki.


So what:
Advantages: it enables cooperativeness, development of social skills, critical thinking and negotiation of meaning. As this tool is aimed to enable interactivity and sharing of knowledge, whether academic or not, students learn to work in groups, to discuss and support their ideas and points of view, endorsing previous approaches and methods that prompt individualism.

Disadvantages: as these sites are visited by whoever wants to share his/her opinions, it is said that most of the information could be altered and then it would lack of the weight and reliance academic purposes would need. However, nowadays there are several tools to avoid vandalism and not trustworthy information, like:

For example Media Wiki allows users to give an "edit summary" when they edit a page. This is a short piece of text (usually one line) summarizing the changes, allowing the users to explain what has been done and why.

Moreover, most wikis keep a record of changes made to wiki pages; often every version of the page is stored. This means that authors can revert to an older version of the page, should it be necessary because a mistake has been made or the page has been vandalized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki).

Otherwise, wiki’s design involves an additional task to the teacher in terms of time, technology management and implementation. Then, the extended use known wikis like Wikipedia, Copernicus or Terra, rather than the creation of personalized wikis.

Furthermore, low proficiency students would not reach high levels of communicative competence.

Schools with few hours to teach English cannot use this tool inside the classroom but as extra-curricular activities or tasks, what would lead to less quality of the outcomes.



Now what: In second and foreign language learning everything that could be used to storage information serves to increase or work on memory. As Oxford (1990) claims, these kind of activities are purported to enhance direct strategies (memory), and specifically, to create mental linkages through grouping and making associations, what leads to meaningful learning. In this sense, wikis could be used to, on one side, work on memory, by for instance, creating a dictionary, a glossary or a vocabulary list about a specific topic, etc. On the other side, because of its own nature, wikis allow students to cooperate among themselves (developing social skills), and thanks to internet, they can share their products with other students around the world; what means that students can interact one with another in a real setting, not constrained by the teacher, and using language with communicative purposes.

Accordingly, wikis could be implemented within tasks, or projects, as tangible outcomes, able to be updated, able to be researched and watched for more students and parents. Personally, I would apply wikis in my foreign language classroom because they enhance negotiation processes among students (negotiation of meaning, cooperation with peers), and develop critical thinking skills; students have to transform long and complex definitions, texts, mind maps, into concise ones, these featured by their own language and contextualized examples. Thus, they (wikis) are useful tools that allow students to work outside the classroom and by themselves (as Oxford (1990) says, it encourages metacognitive strategies, by letting the student the opportunity to arrange his/her own learning).

Example of a wiki developed within a project:
- Aim: to compare and contrast American Christmas with the Colombian.
- Level: 9th through 11th of a private, non-bilingual school.
- Amount of students: 30
Students have the task to pin down differences and similitudes within this celebration; so, it would be useful and helpful for them to have the definition of each Christmas icon: the tree, the star, the stall (pesebre), the turkey, the colors red and green, etc. Moreover, it would be interesting to have a brief description of each Christmas character: like baby Jesus, Santa-Claus, Saint Nicholas, Mary and Joseph, the Three Wise Men, etc.

Finally, as these kinds of projects could be developed in a cross-curricular way, this wiki can be part of a larger collaborative project, where different classrooms or groups contribute with one specific aspect of the subject, and then they share their outcomes among them.


References
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

- http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences

In the following text you will find a brief idea of what Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences are and how I would carry them out in a foreign language classroom.

What?

Multiple Intelligences is a model out of a variety of learning styles models that have been proposed in general education and have been applied to language education.

According to Dr. Gardner intelligence is defined as follows:
“Intelligence is the capacity to do something useful in the society in which we live. Intelligence is the ability to respond successfully to new situations and the capacity to learn from one’s past experiences.” And he proposes eight different intelligences:
- Visual
- Linguistic
- Logical
- Naturalistic
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Musical
- Kinesthetic

Moreover, MI is an approach to teaching that focuses on learning differences between learners and the need to recognize learner differences in teaching.

According to Brown (2002, p.6) Learning Styles “are ways of remembering thoughts and ideas and of practicing skills.” Learners, according to this model, can be categorized into three sensory styles: visual, auditory and kinesthetic.


So what? Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:
1- Learners are viewed as possessing individual learning styles, preferences or intelligences. Accordingly, students are not taken into account as a homogeneous mass; on the contrary, students have--innate--talents, gifts and potentials to be enhanced.
2- It takes into account the huge range of human potential in children as well as in adults.
3- Both, Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences, explore what Luis Carlos Restrepo said what teachers should be:--escultores de sensibilidades--sculptor of sensibilities, formers, educators, and not merely knowledge givers.
4- They both, Learning Styles and MI correlate to enhance on one hand, the learners’ differences, in terms of their learning style and processes; and on the other hand of personality, making aware the learners of what careers or studies they should follow, therefore, strengthening learners’ self-awareness and self-esteem.
5- When the content is embedded in the intelligence frame (one or several intelligences), students will learn most quickly.
6- MI aims at making the language learner a better designer of his/her own learning experiences.

Disadvantages:
1- The disadvantages come from teachers’ performance and curricula design. If teachers do not understand, master and commit with MI’s theory, they will not be able to design and perform the variety of multisensorial activities needed to address each type of intelligence.
2- Moreover, in this approach (MI) teachers have to become in short period of time lesson’s designers, activities’ analysts, and curricula developers.


Now what? What can I do as teacher?

As Foreign Language Teacher, I consider that both, Multiple Intelligences Theory and Learning Styles could be integrated to perform better courses; because language could be integrated with music, kinesthetic activity, and interpersonal relationship and so on.

Moreover, classes would not be bored, repetitive or monotonous because we could teach the foreign language through other means, like music, dance, games, etc.


Now then, as teacher, I have to know first, by means of a diagnostic test, what are the primary intelligences and learning styles of my students. Then, once identified how they learn better, I would design and apply tasks that embed content with a particular or several type of intelligences.

However, to perform a real diagnostic test, it would take too much time. In addiction, it would demand an individual pursuit; a curriculum design; and an institution’s ideology to keep tracking on the evolution of each student. There must be a cross-curricular approach to teaching, in which all teachers are involved and committed in the same task (discovering and enhancing the students’ intelligences), not only the language teacher.