Few readers, I predict, remember the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the world held its breath knowing that all life on the planet could be wiped out at any moment. Some readers, I suspect, may remember Vietnam war days with the napalming of villages and the relentless dropping of bombs from B52s. Later, when Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse now’ portrayed Conrad’s ‘The […]
Tag: TEFL
E is for Empowerment
‘I’ve got the power’ sang the German band, Snap: To do what? To command, to coerce, to protect, to punish, to access resources, to effect change…? As TEFL teachers we aim to empower. We believe that the learning of English will give students greater employment possibilities and a greater all round quality of life. This […]
TEFL Ethnomethodology
OK. So I’m side-stepping outside of postmodernism and going back to the anthropological interest in human interaction. Welcome to ethnomethodology. So, what goes on in an English language classroom? During CELTA training, trainee teachers are taught to feel like students – to personally experience language learning; to experience the stress of being out of their own language comfort zones; […]
Hermes & Second Language Identity
Hermes, the Greek god, was a pretty cool dude – and a bit of a prankster too. He stole Apollo’s cattle as a kid; just for a laugh. But having Zeus for a dad, and Atlas for a granddad (on his mother Maia’s side) – well, that gave him a lot of street cred. He was pretty […]
Empathy
Hard facts and figures. Rationality. Logic. Quantification. Grammar rules, course books and syllabuses. These all belong to the modernist phenomena (see Scott Thornbury’s ‘P is for Postmodern method‘). This is mechanistic, Cartesian thought. This is René Descartes’ separation of mind and body, with the mind/brain being a computer calculating life independent of activities of the body. This is […]
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The basic ideas of Postmodern TEFL have now been laid out. Links between anthropology, Postmodernism and ELT have been suggested. Whilst keeping each blog short, more detailed ideas are included on attached pages. (click – welcome page) However, this is still only touching the surface. A deeper exploration of Postmodern TEFL is forthcoming. Details will […]
Postmodernism, Anthropology & ELT
The golden triangle. Interlinked and enmeshed. Individually they are different fields – but they overlap like ‘egg fried rice’; like ‘red, green and blue’, like ‘morning, afternoon and evening’. They overlap in perspective – in their open-hearted interactions with other human beings. They overlap in the ways we listen and empathise. They overlap in being inherently reflexive. They overlap […]
