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I'm in the process on writing a 'reflection' on a chapter in one of my texts on participatory language teaching. Participatory teaching (language or otherwise) involves a lot of power sharing between students and teachers - allowing students to take more of a role in deciding what and how they are going to learn. While there are many aspects of participatory teaching (language or otherwise) that I think can be incorporated into a classroom in a useful manner, I think the teacher/professor/instructor should always be careful not to hand too much power over to the student. The student is still the student for a reason. If he could teach himself, he wouldn't be taking the class. I don't say this because I'm a teacher and want to keep hold of the reins of power in the classroom (well, maybe to a certain extent...). My biggest problem with this concept dates back to some experiences I had in high school. I've been writing about it in my reflection, and I'm trying really hard not to reference the Verve Pipe, but...
Over the winter break spanning 1993-1994 (while I was in 9th
grade), two of my teachers (English and Biology) attended a conference on
participatory teaching which really inspired them. During the fall semester,
our classes had been very normal and boring. My English teacher spent a lot of
time drilling us on parts of speech (which was annoying, as my peers who studied with other
teachers were reading Romeo and Juliet), and my biology teacher gave daily
science lectures. Normal but boring. After Christmas break, both teachers came back,
having attended said conference, full of new ideas on how they planned to
completely reinvent our classrooms. In both classes, the teachers decided, would be run as “businesses.” We divided ourselves up into “departments,” and
each “department” was supposed to be in charge of teaching part of our Language
Arts or Biology textbook. One group was elected to be management, and their job
was (ostensibly) to oversee the rest of us and make sure we were on-task. At
the end of each grading period, we were supposed to meet with our group members
and determine what grades we felt we deserved.
At the beginning of the process, we were all very excited.
This was something new, something we’d never done in a class before. However,
it was problematic from the get-go. The “popular” kids were all elected to
management, and friends formed their own “departments.” The teachers insisted
that we (the students) were in control, and that we were responsible for
planning and executing all tasks. For the first few weeks, we struggled to do
some work – but as our teachers had taken to giving us no guidance, English and
Biology rapidly devolved into gossip hour and study hall for other classes. We
had to turn in final projects by the end of each grading period, and of course
we all scraped something together at the last minute… but as we were deciding
our own grades, none of us put much effort into it (especially after the first
grading period ended and we learned that our teachers really had been serious
about letting us decide our own grades).
I can see some merit to the general way in which my
English and Biology teachers attempted to run our classes that semester;
however, it is obvious to me that these specific projects were a failure. I did
not learn anything in either of those classes that semester, other than how to
do the bare minimum to scrape by. We, as ninth graders, were not mature enough
to handle the complete responsibility for our education that our teachers
turned over to us – and being immature and irresponsible, we took advantage of
this opportunity to goof off as much as possible. This is one of the dangers in
taking participatory education too far – it expects a lot from students, and
often expects more than the students are able or willing to give. In my high
school English and Biology classes, things would have gone a lot better had “management”
been the teacher, as opposed to the cheerleaders and the football stars. We
needed someone to guide us, to show us what we needed to do and how we needed
to do it – and to make sure we stayed on task. Instead, our teachers turned the
classroom completely over to us, and we took advantage of it in the worst
possible way. After all, we were only freshmen.
