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

Dogme meets Coca Cola

For anyone whose clicked on over here without really knowing or understanding what dogme is, you might enjoy reading the older posts first (linked above).  For the ELTers, who've heard me rabbit on and on before, let me tell you all about how I came to realize that dogme and Coke have something in common...

It kicked off in the dogme yahoo!group.   A long time member said  "anything 'online' has absolutely nothing to do with the materials-free ethos which is Dogme."

Now, I've heard this argument so often before that this time I couldn't even be bothered with the illogical bias against technology as every single other generation has been frightened of changes too... didn't stop them from coming though...  (yawn)

at the end of the day...

some people in the world have access to computers and some people don't  (yeah, and... are we expected to feel so sad for them that we should not move with the times but wait patiently for them to catch up or do we just get on with it  - I mean go work for or donate money to a charity  if the social conscience itches I say, that would be heaps more effective),  because let's face it,  in a few years, just like Coca Cola, most people will have a computer* just down the road or maybe even on their mobile phone...

some teachers use computers in their classroom
and
some teachers don't
(yawn!)...

I mean why bother pretending that life as we know it hasn't changed., draaaassssttttiiiicccalllllly in the last ten years, five years, three years...

personally, it's become so completely normalized in my own teaching practices that I could hardly give a hoot whether or not another teacher finds this a good thing or not.   I don't make value judgments of those who're still use whiteboards instead of laptops or IWBs - in fact blackboards are very much still around  in some German community colleges (along with the beamer on the wall) and chalk, well chalk is still a staple in any local stationers. 

I like computers.
(Your turn to yawn!)

I find them useful and supportive and they happen to suit my approach to teaching and those of lots of others but so what?

After all, my favorite chocolate is made of 80% cocoa beans, comes from Ecuador and has a cherry chili flavored nougat center. Does it matter than many other people would rather eat a flavored milk product  which only smiled at a cocoa bean for a micro-second before it was drowned in a vat of sugar?

Not a jot, it doesn't.

Anyway, I didn't start this article to talk about chocolate or have a dig at some guy who thinks that the computer is the end of civilization, but instead to compare Coca-Cola to Dogme.

Dear Scott and Luke, forgive me...

Regular Coke = 139 calories in a 33cl bottle.

Coke Light = 1.3 calories

Coke Zero = 0 calories.


The calories, while negligible, count.

Materials Lite 

is not 

Materials Zero.

The reason why we churn out students after 8 years of language lessons in English, still not speaking English, is because in class they're loaded up with a whole bunch of stuff they don't need and not given enough chance to express themselves about what they do need.

It's not the students.

Nope.

It's not the students.

It might, oooooh, dangerous territory, not be, indeed, just the book's fault, in part it might be the teacher's too.  Thing is, Meddings and Thornbury even included a section in Teaching Unplugged on working with coursebooks and I've heard many a teacher say they see parallels in dogme to many a methodology and of course,  Thornbury did acquiesce, somewhat, at SEETA last year on the issues of Dogme2.0.

If a teacher is personalizing a text to extract the students own thoughts on it, creating an environment of communication, enabling the emergence of new language and then scaffolding this process, then heck, the use of the book doesn't matter, what matters is it's been used lightly to go deeply...

see, the crux of the issue, the matter, the philosophy, the dogma, once the gold foil wrapper has been unwrapped and all that is that

Dogme

is 
not 
a

methodology,

it's 
an 

approach. 

It's the how you teach, not the what or the with what you teach.
It's keeping the classroom all about the participants within.


Useful links related to this posting:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top25.htm

Best,
Karenne
image credit, by Lvklock on wikimedia commons

education

Bottom Up vs Top Down English Language Teaching

They're really not getting it.

They think coursebooks can be student-centered.

Well, let me see if I can make it the slightest bit clearer: 

• if you walk into class with an objective that is anything other than extracting language from students and then building on that (scaffolding) whether you've got a book in your hands or not - 

• if you walk into class with an aim that is anything other than working with your students' needs, wishes and wants and working the kinks out of their grammatical weaknesses - 

• if you're building a sort of random lexis, based on the unit of a book, and you've no actual idea whether or not they will be able to put that language to use -

• if you're spending more than 50% of your class time in activities that don't require your students to speak to each other about themselves and their lives then you're teaching top-down.

If that sits good with you, so be it.

But if you want to teach English from the bottom up: Join the dogme group, read Meddings and Thornbury's book Teaching Unplugged and/or read my previous posts on dogme and those of my esteemed colleagues around the globe, do a google search on dogme ELT.

Because of all the things it is or isn't, it's not a "style."

Best, Karenne
imagecredit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunface13/415520633/sizes/m/

Interesting link

(There's a poll going on the Lexiophiles site to determine a list of the best language blogs, see my post about that here so if you haven't yet voted and you don't this is really totally tacky of me to ask, do please click and visit the site to let them know :-) thanks muchly).

Dogme ELT 2.0

Making the simple complex
or
Making the complex simple?

This post is part of a teacher-training workshop on using the web2.0 platform, Ning, with adult language learners, I'm Ningin' it, and also is a comment on the comments on Nick Jaworski's Crazy or Enlightened.

• KS on Dogme 
• Wikipedia on Dogme ELT
• Communicative Language Teaching
• Task Based Learning
• Bloom's Taxonomy
• Web2.0
• Dogme3D / Virtual Worlds Language Learning

Best,
Karenne

Any Given Dogma

The title of this posting was first coined by Lindsay Clandfield as Any Given Dogme in reference to his hilarious spoof video (below) of Scott Thornbury, starring Al Pacino. I borrowed it for this post as Any Given Dogma as it's incredibly fitting to the themes within my own article: the results of the SEETA forum on teaching with or without technology and topics recently explored within the dogme yahoo!group.


Raised Lutheran, junior-schooled Catholic.

Explored Buddhism and Taoism while exploring the Asian world.

Read a fair amount of the translated Qu'ran with one of my Ecuadorian language students because she liked Cat Stevens and was interested in understanding the appeal of Islam... so, pretty much, when it comes to talking about dogmas I can opine with the best of them.

There is a point the Christians fight over with such passion you would think it really matters.

The Eucharist: Wine and Bread or the Body and Blood of the Christ?

Transubstantiation, trans-elementation, re-ordination or just fermented grape juice and baked flour?

Now I'm not going to upset anyone here by telling you what I think because if you're in one of the above camps you know what you think and that's good enough.

Instead I'm wittering on again about the English Language Teaching methodology kicked off by Scott Thornbury.

In my previous post, entitled the Dogma of Dogme, I gave you some of the background to the methodology and also talked about its new bible, Teaching Unplugged.

Dogme has been referred to as a movement, off and on, with Thornbury hailed as its guru (by me including but with respect), has been prodded and poked, deemed impossible, made fun of by a large body of know-a-lots and the-would-like-to-look-like-they-know-a-lots who feebly attempt, at every turn, to show how actually it was so and so who came up with the idea before Scott did.

An exercise in grossly missing the point: akin to quoting Dionysus’ birth story, his 12 disciples and the ability to turn water into wine or the star in the east announcing Krishna, the crucifixion of Horus and subsequent resurrection as … infallible proof the Sermon on the Mount never took place or doesn’t hold any truths.

Yeah? Like whatever...

The methodology of dogme: pray tell, when are we lot going to get around to talking about the how, why, when, where and who it does really work with?

When are we going to start empirically proving it?

Given that dogme is Danish for dogma and dogma is, according to Merriam Webster, a point of view put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds… it really is about time this methodology was put up to the test and not just for a week or two.

Thornbury brought the ways of thinking about student-centered learning together, organized them so there could be a code of tenets, doesn't claim to have been the only one with the idea (you should see the list of sources he has to quote each time he speaks) but basically, is the one that made this way of teaching sexy.

His more fundamentalistic followers do really like to split hairs on what teaching dogme-style actually means, even those of them who are no longer teaching and are rather instead, philosophizing.

Some dogmeists focus on the social change, the critical pedagogy, some the concept of bare essentials and others, the damning of technology and a yearning for a simpler life. Some just claim to live in the same city as he does and therefore have special knowledge into its function and purpose.

For others, like myself, it's a mindset - a way of being in the classroom where my students are the co-creators of our curriculum.

Yet it is actually shocking how often you will see written "well, that's not dogme" about anything not that does not fit into someone's personal take of what a dogme class looks like.

In its most simple form: teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom – ie themselves – and whatever happens to be in the classroom.
Teaching Unplugged, Scott Thornbury & Luke Meddings

Whatever happens to be in the classroom – herein is probably the root of the confusion - many of us live in a fairly modern world with technology in our rooms, whether it is in our students’ pockets, in our own, on their desks, on the table or on the wall. Does a classroom not contain books?

Sometimes relying on only that which is within the classroom's walls is not enough to hold a conversation together for hours, consistently over a long period; at times there are external pressures which require thought and consideration like exams or HR requirements; it's probably not a very easy or comfortable practice for the new or set-in-their-style or very stressed teacher and in my own opinion, there is a lack of monitoring (I created conversation control sheets which do the trick).

Here is my student, Phillip, talking about what it means to learn English with a dogme teacher.





Fellow dogmeists: consider yourselves most duly called, what will you be doing this year to prove dogme?

• will you buy Teaching Unplugged, study it, read Thornbury & Meddings’s articles and put the pedagogy into practice?
• will you convince your DOS to let you try dogme with at least one group?
• will you talk to your students, explain what’s going to happen in the class and ask them if they want to try it?
• will you apply the tenets to exam classrooms? To large groups?
• will you try it out with the kids? With the teenagers?
• will you walk into class without being the one in control and allow the language to emerge?
• will you give up your textbook and just teach?
• will you record what happens in log books, blogs, ning groups?
• will you share the process? The progress and/or failure (DogmeYahoo!Group)

I, of course, would not call upon you without subscribing to the same and will be recording a new lot of language students right from the get-go, but as the protest-ant here, I'll be doing this with my dogme 2.0 approach, i.e. following the commandments as laid in the council of SEETA:

Scott Thornbury: "I am prepared to admit that my own position, while intentionally provocative has been dangerously reactionary at times.

At the same time, my main complaint about those who advocate the use of technology in the classroom is that they are seldom very explicit about the learning theory that would ground such use. As Neil Postman wrote (in Technopoly) "To the question 'Why should we do this?' [i.e. introduce computers into the classroom] the answer is: 'To make learning more efficient and interesting.' Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in Technopoly efficiency and interest need no justification.

It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question 'What is learning for?' 'Efficiency and interest' is a technical answer, an answer about means, not ends; and it offers no pathway to a consideration of educational philosophy" (p. 171).

This failure to distinguish between means and ends is why I reject the argument that we should use technology simply because it is here. Or there. Or everywhere. Or because it is fun. Or because not to do so is willfully perverse. Or incongruent. Or hypocritical. And so on. These are arguments not about ends, but about means.

Let me suggest some ends for which technology might be facilitative. To me, there are at least four. For convenience I'll label them DDCC. In ascending order of importance, they are:

• Delivery: technology should be capable of delivering content in ways that are more efficient, more immediate, more impactful, more customised than many traditional means such as print materials;

• Dialogue: technology should be capable of providing means for learners to interact with one another and with their teachers, and to do so in a collaborative, communciative way, that might radically increase learning opportunities.

• Creativity: technology should offer the means for learners to be creative either inividually or collaboratively, using a variety of media and modalities, in ways that enrich their language learning experience;

• Community: technology should offer the possibility of building extended but close-knit communities of practice among learners and teachers, distributed over time and space and in ways that motivate language learning and use.

To me, then, a technological tool - such as Skype, Moodle, YouTube, Powerpoint, Second Life etc - needs to be evaluated in accordance with its potential to meet at least one, if not all, of the above criteria.

At the same time, the feasability of the technology must be assessed in relation to its costs - in terms of hardware, training, maintenance, built-in obsolesence and so on.

If, in the end, the "DDCC" ends can be achieved just as efficiently and as economically without Skype, Moodle, YouTube etc - then fine.

Let's not be seduced by technology for technology's sake. Language teaching has been going on very nicely, for centuries now, with little more than a few people in a room."

I look forward to many lively conversations on these themes.


And now for fun, the video, Any Given Dogme, starring Al Pacino as Scott Thornbury, directed by Lindsay Clandfield.






Best,
Karenne

Useful links related to this posting:
• Dogme, nothing if not critical
• Marisa Constantinides, Technology: with or without you

• Wikispaces, dogme2.0

The Dogma of Dogme

I still need to answer one of my reader's questions on what do with her problem class but as I'll be starting off my posting with

"As a dogmeist..."

I thought I'd better give you a heads up on what dogme actually is.

The term dogme is borrowed from a film movement initiated by Lars von Trier in a backlash against the overuse of the monomyth, Journey of the Hero, uncovered by Joseph Campbell and made famous by Chris Vogler.

Have you ever been watching a film and had a premoniton or two: the 'oh, right, everything in his natural world is just about to change, sigh. I bet he'll meet an old man right about now who'll tell him what he has to do.

Or, wait, time for some suffering - he probably won't win this fight, ah here's the pretty girl, they'll hook up - whoops, he's going to learn a lesson now and finally, everything will be right again.'


Done that?

Well, basically, that's because you've been subconsciously aware of the mythic structure all along.

Its plot points are the structure of most Hollywood movies, post 70's, and is the backbone of Matrix, Star Wars, The Terminator, The Pursuit of Happyness, Whale Rider, The Lion King or even American Quilt.


However, before I bore you, what does all of this have to do with textbooks, methodology and teaching English?



Er, pick up the nearest course book on your desk. Next time you're in the library, compare it against Headway and against just about anything produced since. Whether they've added a handful of unrealistic case studies or dilemmas, got gap fills or pointless vocabulary exercises, been jam-packed with grammar explanations or don't have any, they're all playing off a similar structure.

Somewhere in the deep dungeons of most ELT publishing houses, someone whose name we don't know, but at a random guess he's not a socio-linguist, has done some kind of very-necessary-to-show-on-the-page-so-it-feels-and-looks-like-Headway-because-the-teachers-might-be-afraid-if-it's-different kind of breakdown which goes -- well, if I knew the plot points I'd tell you.

Now there's no doubt in my mind that someone much cleverer out there than me is reading this and has figured out the structure of your average textbook so I'll just ask go on ahead and tell you: share it with us!

I mean do the publishers even care that the unit themes they've chosen have no direct relationship to the following one?

That they rarely have anything to do with our students' lives?

That the lexis presented on one page doesn't show up in the next unit or even the one after that?

That there's no space on the page to write?

That from one house to another they're parodies of each other?

More in kin with Howard the Duck, The Postman, Dumb & Dumberer than Citizen Kane.

Anyhoo, let me get on with talking about the alternative to all this.


Dogme in ELT

Back in '00, Scott Thornbury highjacked the phrase dogme to launch his, often accused-of-being-Luddite methodology, burn-the-books-and-talk-to-the-students message, based on frustration and an anti-wizardry battle yelp for teaching practices to become more student-centered.

Thornbury defined teaching without a course book as:

• conversation driven
• materials light and
• focusing on emergent language

Sharing subjects and themes, which

• are relevant to the learner
• provide a space for the voice of the learner
• scaffold, shape and support the students' conversations
  
• pay attention to features of the emergent language.

In his latest book, Teaching Unplugged, co-authored with Luke Meddings, they stress that teaching practices should

• encourage a dialogic process,
  
• acknowledge that knowledge is co-constructed
• empower the learner
  
• engage the learners and
• trigger the learning process which is already there

Basically adding a bit more of Before Sunrise to the classroom.

In the same way that Christopher Columbus was not the first to 'discover' the Caribbean and Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone, Thornbury and Meddings neither invented nor discovered the process of teaching without coursebooks.

Teachers all over the world have been working without textbooks for a very long time (probably as long as English teachers have been around) some because

• there is no choice nor access to materials
• their students have requested this
  
• they like supplementary materials, making their own stuff and others
  
• are simply not happy with the standardization, monomythic production of many an ELT publisher.

Are you one of these teachers?

In the way that Bell made the phone sexy (or was that Steve from Apple?) and Columbus renamed the islands and charted maps so we could all go have great vacations, Thornbury and Medding's explorations into this theme are turning teaching sans parachute into a very cool dialogic methodology so I, for one, am very happy referring to myself as a dogmeist.


Which makes it kind of difficult to answer S.F's question regarding what she should do with her runaway class.

Would you like to help me answer her?


What about you?

Want to join the 'movement'? Then follow the links below and/or buy Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching (Amazon UK / US here)
- with its in-depth analysis of the practice and relevancy of dogme in our modern classrooms: highly readable, packed with teaching tips and lesson ideas
(some new, some very 700 Classroom Activities
and some surprisingly innovative).

Or do you think this whole dogme thing is a load of tosh? Whatever your views, feel free to add in your 2c, nickels or dimes by clicking on the comments below.

Useful links related to this posting:

Dogme, the movement

• Dogme (film genre)
• Technology and culture, the film reader
  
• Interview with Lars von Trier (article)
• Interview with Lars von Trier (video)
  
• Dogme'00 in music (post Luddite parody)
  

Dogme in ELT

• What does a dogme classroom look like?
  
• Nik Peachey' interview with Scott Thornbury while in SecondLife
  
• Article by Scott Thornbury on Dogme
• Article by Luke Meddings on Dogme
  
• Article on Dogme 2.0 by Howard Vickers
• A teacher's view of Dogme (strict dogmeist in a way I'm not)
  
• The Dogme Yahoo Group
• Delta Publishing ELT methodology /contents+sample pages of Teaching Unplugged
  

Best,
Karenne
p.s. dogme is the danish word for dogma

n.b Most of the photographs on this page are by Pareerica on Flickr and a very special thanks must go to her for allowing these fabulous pics to be used under a creative commons license.


Update 13 May 2009

And now there's even Dogme ICT, spearheaded by Gavin Dudeney, looks rather tempting! More AI than Dogville!