Category Archives: pedagogy

Context Matters – views from around the world

clmooc, Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, pedagogy

By Maha Bali and Tanya Lau (EdContexts Facilitators)

As facilitators of EdConteXts, we tend to notice when others speak about context in sensitive and thoughtful ways, and we thought we would share some of our “picks” this month for posts we’ve come across on the web that showed sensitivity to context in education. This is like what CLMOOC call “Find 5 Friday” (#f5f) – so here are our five for this month.

Hybrid Pedagogy (open access journal)

We like the journal Hybrid Pedagogy for many reasons, including the fact that they published a couple of articles by two of our facilitators (Shyam and Maha) just before EdConteXts was launched. A recent article we liked on Hybrid Pedagogy by Janine deBaise debunks the myth of “best practice” in education. She poses the problems of using any best practice guidelines universally and regardless of context, without considering individual student needs, abilities and interests, and gives examples from her own teaching.

Continue reading Context Matters – views from around the world →

Bland Culture

Contexts Matter, pedagogy, Teacher Education

Ana Carolina Calil, Brazil

Author: Ana Carolina Calil

English has come to be a global language. Nobody would deny that. However, what does it mean and what does it take for a language to reach this status? According to David Crystal (1997, 2): “A language achieves a genuinely global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country”.

There are around 350 million first-language speakers of English and just as many speakers of English as a second language. English has become the language of business, science, government, international communications and tourism. Speaking English became a synonym of status. In the words of the editor of the Oxford English dictionary: “… any literate educated person is in a very real sense deprived if he does not know English” (Burchfield, 1985).

As a typical middle-class Brazilian kid, I was ten years old the first time I set foot in an English classroom and seventeen when I took my first proficiency exam, and not once was the reason for my studies explained to me. I remember being dragged to class because we HAD TO learn English. It would be important for my future, whatever that meant. So, like many other children of the nineties, I spent part of my week amongst books and cassette tapes which showed a culture I knew nothing of and couldn’t get myself to relate to. When I look back, I can still remember my first textbooks “Touchdown” and “Sam on radio 321”, and how little they reflected my interests and culture. I can still sing most of the “Grammar Chants”, “Jazz Chants” and “Muzzy” songs. Continue reading Bland Culture →