Interconnections: Learner Autonomy Teacher Autonomy
In this conversation over e-mail, Richard Smith explores the patterns of connection between learner autonomy and teacher autonomy. Richard explores how teachers, as much as learners, can benefit from the institutional possibilities for autonomy in education, as well as suffer from the pressures that institutional control and inertia exert.
(Co-founder with Naoko Aoki of the Learner Development SIG, Richard Smith taught in Japan for several years before moving back to the UK as a lecturer at the Centre for English Language Teacher Education (CELTE) at Warwick University, England.) E-mail: R.C.Smith@warwick.ac.ukAndy: Richard, hi, I wanted to talk with you about how you see the interconnectedness between teacher autonomy and learner autonomy - what are some of the patterns for you?
Richard: Pleasure, Andrew - but first of all I should define what I mean by 'teacher autonomy'. I tend to think of this in terms of our (i.e. teachers') autonomy 'as learnersÍ: 'teacher-as-learner autonomy', or 'teacher-learner autonomy' as I've been calling it. I think defining teacher autonomy in this way might in itself make one connection clear: if we accept that as teachers we're career-long learners (in a variety of areas of professional expertise), then reflecting on and 'taking control of our learning' has an intrinsic value for us - just as it does for students - as well as potentially having a positive impact on our ability to develop students' autonomy.
So, to give you some specific examples, when I first started to think seriously about learner autonomy it was in relation to my own learning of Japanese, in collaboration with others in the Learner to Learner network (which subsequently evolved into the JALT Learner Development SIG). Non-Japanese members of this network (myself included) saw taking control of their Japanese language learning as important in their professional as well as personal lives by reflecting on our own language learning experience, I think many of us became better able to place ourselves 'in our students' shoes'.
In my own case, sharing ideas with colleagues about Japanese language learning led me to encourage my students to share their own ideas about English language learning, and subsequently to engage in various experiments with 'pedagogy for learner autonomy' in a Japanese university (over a period of about 5 years).
In the course of these experiments, I began to be aware of another connection between (my own) teacher-learner autonomy and the autonomy of my students: As they assumed/as I legitimised and supported their assumption of an increasing degree of control over classroom arrangements, I began to perceive my own teaching role more and more as that of a learner about what they were doing beyond my control/beyond my current understanding (I became a kind of 'ethnographer' of their attempts to learn in a self-directed manner appropriate to themselves).
I needed to know what they were doing, in their various groups, not only to retain a sense that things weren't getting 'out of hand' but also to be able to support their work - provide it with some structure, enable them to reflect on what they were doing, and learn to intervene when it seemed to be necessary. So, teaching these classes itself became the primary source of teaching-related learning for me.
I gained a sense of being 'in control' of my own learning of teaching - in other words, not dependent as much as I had been on insights from outside into how I 'should' be teaching, much more in touch with students' priorities - and, I felt, developing 'appropriate methodology' because what I was doing reflected the needs 'they' perceived.
So, I'd suggest from my own experience that pedagogy for autonomy can enhance the development of teacher-learner autonomy, just as enhanced teacher-learner autonomy (in my case, initially, in relation to language learning) can lead to / support learner development. A kind of 'virtuous circle', in other words!
Andy: But getting outside that personal 'virtuous circle' , do you feel at all that you were able to extend the collaboration on learner autonomy with your students to some kind of cooperation with other teachers? In other words, was the circle just a closed one between you and your own students?
Richard: Well, that's a very good question because I think it raises all kinds of important issues to do with the wider institutional/social contexts we work in. I said I thought what the students and I were doing in class was appropriate (in that it depended on what 'theyÍ wanted to do, not on an 'imposed' methodology); at the same time, though, I was reluctant to talk explicitly about the way classes were going with my immediate Japanese colleagues, thinking what I was doing might be considered too 'avant-garde'. That's a feature of Japanese universities generally, though, isn't it? I mean teachers often have (or have had?) a great deal of freedom to teach and grade students as they like, without having to be very accountable to colleagues, the institution (or students!). In a positive sense this 'teacher autonomy' (in the sense of freedom from outside control) enabled me to experiment, including trusting student self-assessments when I gave final grades. In a negative sense, it meant that the kinds of practice I was developing with these students couldn't be extended further across the curriculum (and I still think students would be grateful if they were extended!).
I have to say, though, a kind of solution to this teacher independence / lack of teacher interdependence conundrum was provided for me by sharing ideas with colleagues in other institutions through JALT, and the Learner Development and Teacher Education SIGs in particular - in Japan, where disclosure among immediate colleagues can often be minimal, trans-institutional associations like JALT might be crucial in enabling teachers to really share ideas.
(....to be continued in the next issue of Learning Learning)