colombia ingles elt conference 2010 presentaciones yamith fandino

7/29/2019 Colombia Ingles Elt Conference 2010 Presentaciones Yamith Fandino

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CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT AND SYLLABUS DESIGN IN THE POSTMODERN ERA

XIII NATIONAL ELT CONFERENCE

CHALLENGES FOR THE ELT SYLLABUS: DEVELOPING COMPETENCIES FOR THE

21ST CENTURY

UNIVERSIDAD DE LA SALLE - APRIL 21 23, 2010

HOW POSTMODERNIST ARE YOUR CURRICULUM, YOUR SYLLABUS, YOUR

LANGUAGE CLASSROOM AND YOU?

Is your curriculum, your syllabus and your class postmodernist? Use this survey based on an article written by Michael

Breen in 1999 to realize how present postmodernism is in your school, your class, and even you.

STATEMENT Insufficiently Acceptably Effectively

Your school, your class, and you distance from grand theory (totalizing

theories) to multiplicity and multidisciplinarity.

Your school, your class, and you move away from membership ofstable organizations to multiple "identities" of changing communities.

Your school, your class, and you avoid conceptualizing reality as static

and unique to understanding reality as simulated and alternative.

Your school, your class, and you favor creative thinking and complex

doing over logical thinking and sequential doing.

Your school, your class, and you use and benefit from the pluralism of

learners' own familial, cultural and linguistic identities so that it

becomes a resource to be explicitly valued and mined. In other words,

the particularities of learners experiences, attitudes and points of view

become the very focus and springboard of both the content and

procedures of lessons.Your school, your class, and you strive to achieve agreed common

purposes alongside individual learning agendas. In other words, there

is a commitment to confronting, in explicit ways, the on-going tensions

between the group and the individual.

Your school, your class, and you strive to focus on doing things and on

interpreting the experiences of and outcomes from action. In other

words, the language classroom serves as an ideal laboratory for the

construction, recollection, simulation, and (re)interpretation of

experiences.

Your school, your class, and you refrain from orchestrating a

reasonably well-structured dialogue to make the language classroom

a place where discourse can be experimented with; a place where

discourse can be inventive, creative or unlike discourse anywhere else.

Your school, your class, and you make the language classroom become

a location in which established conventions governing texts and

discourse are critically evaluated and new conventions explored. In

other words, the process of discovering the conventions governing the

form and use of a new language coincide with the supportive

experience of discovering and taking on new identities and new ways

of being through alternative language forms and uses to enable multi-


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vocality and multi-literacy.

Your school, your classes, and you question established knowledge,

propose that alternative meanings are not only unavoidable but to be

searched for, and assert that the forms and conventions of any

language are always open to change and invention.

Your school, your classes, and you regard the teacher as the person

who explicitly encourages diverse interpretations and who entices

other voices to speak, and especially those of the oppressed (however

we may define that term).

Your school, your classes, and you regard the learner as an

experimental scientist who constantly tests hypotheses, questions,

hunts for evidence and confirmation, and invents the world. In other

words, your language classroom involve a "fun-driven" component

that encourages the learner to compare and contrast L1 with aspects of

the new language, (re)construct different meanings, and deliberately

seek severa1 interpretations of the same item or text.

Breen, M. (1999). Teaching language in the postmodern classroom. BELLS: Barcelona English language andliterature studies, 10, 47-64. Retrieved from www.raco.cat/index.php/Bells/article/viewFile/102825/149230

Postmodern schooling must reconnect students and teachers, space and time, meaning and context, the knower and the

known, humanities and sciences, and especially past, present, and future. What modernity has rent asunder,

postmodernity reevaluates as radically eclectic by embracing the fragmented beauty [of reality]. (Slattery, 2006, p. 293)

Also, you can use this table created by Andrew E. Finch in 1996 to see if your curriculum, your syllabus, your classroom

tend to follow and implement modern or postmodern educational concepts.
http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Bells/article/viewFile/102825/149230http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Bells/article/viewFile/102825/149230


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Finch, A. (2006). The Postmodern Language Teacher. Studies in British and American Language and Literature,

78, 221-248. Retrieved from www.tblt.org/download/finch_handout.doc

Worksheet created by Yamith J. Fandio MA in teaching
http://www.tblt.org/download/finch_handout.dochttp://www.tblt.org/download/finch_handout.doc

colombia ingles elt conference 2010 presentaciones yamith fandino

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