The Dogme Challenge: Introduction

The other day, Jeremy Harmer wrote the following on Andrew Pickle's blog post:

Andrew,

Nice lesson. Good use of vocabulary and students’ imagination.
Course I don’t want to rile Luke and Scott (again!!) ,but is it Dogme, really? If people were doing this kind of thing before the Swedish film makers published their manifesto, can you still give it that name?
But it does show what can be done successfully with very little.
Jeremy

I've seen this sort of comment before, a lot.  And it's not that Jeremy is wrong, that this sort of "lesson" even with the google-fight (post-manifesto) hasn't been done before, it's that who cares?   If you're teaching dogmeically then there will always be someone, somewhere out there who wants to sagely say, that dogme existed before dogme existed.

Yup...

it did.

And before the i-phone, smartphones were a-plenty (as were tablets before the i-pad and portable mp3 music devices before the i-pod).  

Before Crocs, garden shoes existed.  Everywhere, only they were green and there weren't a clog with holes nor made of foam and plastic. 

The Kalinago populated and ruled the Caribbean before it was ever named the West of India.

Sunglasses before Ray-bans.

Vacumn cleaners before Hoover.

Anti-Art before Dadaism.

The BRAND name of a thing is not the thing.   Distracts but also adds.  I mean an i-phone is an i-phone after all.  

But this is hardly the point, whether or not (sigh) Dogme is an approach or a methodology or a style or a fad or the fool's way out.... it actually doesn't matter what the thing is called, it was named so by Thornbury  in an apparently uncharacteristic rant against the world of ELT but like all things in life, once a thing has a name it has a life.

Can you imagine students actually giving a crap about what you call the way you teach?   

I think the main point for them is whether or not they walked out of their lessons with you with a higher level of English communicative skills than when they walked in.  And that is the singular goal of conversation-driven teaching.

Andrew Pickles shared with us a great lesson plan for a lesson which no doubt didn't have a plan until he wrote it down and I understand this completely - I had the same problem, recently, when writing a case-study based on a 20 week course with five groups which I'd done in a mix of dogme and dogme 2.0 - the question of how on earth could I lesson-plan backwards in order to extract and tell what occured, what emerged in my classes..?   The mind boggles but I did do it (more on that later).

The thing is that to share the "experience" of dogme sometimes you've got to share the experience.

So, anyway, folks I have an idea...

From tomorrow and every Thursday for the next 10 weeks, I am going to lay down a challenge where we will attempt together to take a deeper look into some of the specific points Meddings and Thornbury have been trying to teach us through their book Teaching Unplugged.  

Perhaps it'll turn into yet another polemic discussion akin to why Acer is better than Apple (any day, hands down) or maybe this time instead we'll focus: unravel the knots, discover the gold, think about what separates a dogme class from a non dogme class, what really matters in the real classroom and teaching practice rather than mere theories of what it couldn't be before it had a brand and we'll attempt to challenge ourselves to teach in ways which are ever more student-centered, regardless of the name(s) we want to use.

You are a blogger:
After each challenge, write a blog post answering the question(s) I put forth.  Then you can  DM or email me (see the side bar) with the specific URL to your own blog post(s) or link back here (the trackback will show up at the bottom of the post) so that we can all travel on to your work in a so-called "dogme blog ring." 

I'll try to provide you with instructions of who to link on to (who was before and after you) but you can also keep track of this through the 'sphere and 'verse.

You are not a blogger but you are part of a forum/ ELT discussion group of any description:
Take my question into your forum and ask your fellow members what they think about each question.   Email me a link to the forum or a summary of what's been said so that we can post responses anonymously (if you/they want to).

You are not a blogger and you don't participate in groups:
Answer the question posed in each post, either in the comments of each blog challenge (if you feel like it) and then visit the blog posts on this subject within the 'sphere and agree or disagree with what the bloggers have written!

Sounds fun?

Talk to you tomorrow,
Karenne


Blog posts on teaching Dogme
The dogma of Dogme
My own musings and guest-posts from other bloggers
Dogme2.0-style teaching tips

• Candy Von Ost, Is this dogme?
• Hugh Graham-Marr, Push and Pull and ZPD and dogme
• Jason Renshaw, Why I teach unplugged but don't do Dogme
• Jason Renshaw, archive of his 'unplugged' posts
• Enda Francis Scott Byrne, A dogged approach
• Rick Oprea, Curse books
• Rick Oprea, Unplugged or Dogme
• Sara Hannam, Critical dogme or dogme with sympathy for the critical
• Eisensei, Dogme EL-what T
• Strictly Nicky, Don't you dogme me
• Eva Büyüksimkeşyan To use or not to use coursebooks 
• Nick Jaworksi Lessons from scratch 
• Richard Whiteside The Course book debate 
• Marxist TEFL group Romantic Comedy with a Sinister Twist

• Chia Suan Chong, Improvised Principled Eclecticism - a dogme research project 

 Other related
Sue Lyon-Jones on Ken Wilson, on teaching the unteachable
Emma Herrod, Failing to plan is planning to fail?
Darren Elliot, an interview with Scott Thornbury

and of course, D is for Dogme by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings, Dogme and Identity

Videos:
Scott Thornbury on the Myths of Dogme

Challenges:
Co-construction? #1 
It's emergent? #2
The scaffolding #3
Being Light #4 
The Learners' Voice #5
NNESTs vs NESTs #6

Miscellaneous
ELTchat 20 October 2010
Merchandising gimmicks for dogme teachers by Lindsay Clandfield
And...a little light relief or inspiration