Sunday, September 19, 2010

Toward a postmethod pedagogy

In Kuma's article, "Toward a postmethod pedagogy", he uses the term pedagogy in a broad sense.  He includes pedagogy as classroom strategies, instructional materials, curricular objectives, and evaluation measures.  The most interesting part of the article was actualizing this postmethod pedagogy by including the lead players: the postmethod learner and the postmethod teacher.
         The postmethod learner is an autonomous learner.  They take charge of their learning and how they think, something that I never did when I was in elementary school.  Learners do this by evaluating their learning outcomes by monitoring their language learning progress through personal journals.  Learners use academic autonomy in this way.  On the other hand, learners use their social autonomy by collaborating with other learners to pool information on a specific project they are working on. Therefore, academic autonomy encourages them to be effective learners whereas social autonomy empowers them to be collaborative partners. 
        The postmethod teacher is just like the postmethod learner.  To learn more about my students, I would take Kuma's suggestion about learning about the context of my classroom.  I could use questionnaires, surveys, and interviews to gather information such as the contexts of, family life, learning styles, attitudes towards learning, etc.  To help them become a postmethod learner, I could also develop strategies to observe, analyze, and evaluate their own teaching acts. This was very interesting to me because this is only one little part of a postmethod pedagogy.  But, in reality, it is going above and beyond the "method" that will help create prospective teacher's pedagogy. 

1 comment:

  1. Tina,
    I really like your idea of using questionnaires, surveys, and interviews to find out more about your students. If all teachers did this, they would be able to come up with teaching approaches that are much more suitable for their students and therefore maximize their learning.

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