Afterword: Dogme for Beginners – the Autonomy of the Group Scott Thornbury

Afterword: Dogme for Beginners – The Autonomy of the Group Scott Thornbury In 2000 the Danish film-maker Lona Scherfig made a film called Italian for Beginners. Set in a small town in Denmark, the film tells the story of a mixed group of townsfolk who regularly meet together in a local community centre to learn Italian. After the sudden loss of their teacher (he drops dead of a heart attack while correcting a pronunciation error!), one of the group members volunteers to assume the role. In the absence of any textbook – or even a blackboard – he uses his marginally better Italian (motivated by an obsession with football) to elicit from the students what little they know in order to construct conversations based on their common interests and needs. By the end of the movie, they have assembled enough Italian between them to venture to Venice – but, of course, the film is less about their language learning than about their individual narratives, and how these converge and diverge in the context of these occasional classes. Nevertheless, in its credible portrayal of a self-directed and communal language learning experience, the film offers a suggestive, albeit fic- titious, representation of learner autonomy. In an apparently intuitive way, it serves both to encapsulate and to dramatize a number of concepts that are inextricably linked to the notion of autonomy, and which have figured prominently in the chapters in this book. For a start, as men- tioned, it is self-initiated and self-directed: there is no person or insti- tution mandating autonomous learning; instead, it is motivated and managed by the learners themselves. (Admittedly, the initial impulse was accidental, but, then, perhaps part of being autonomous is respond- ing creatively to the unpredicted!) Taking charge of their own learning does not mean – in this instance – the dismantling of traditional classroom hierarchies: the teacher’s role is retained but is devolved on to one of the learners. (The viability of all learners assuming a peer-teaching 257 258 Afterword role, at some point, is the theme of Wharton’s chapter (Chapter 3) in this book.) But, even with the traditional roles intact, the jointly-constructed and democratic nature of the newly established class (including the quality that Kojima refers to, in his chapter, as positive interdependence) con- trasts with the somewhat teacher-fronted, transmission-mode teaching of the class’s previous teacher – judging by the short extracts we’re shown. The group – despite their diversity, both of learning styles and motivations – coalesces around a shared enterprise to form an emergent community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Rundle, in his chapter in this book, describes similar socializing processes, whereby learners are empowered “to co-construct contexts in which expertise emerges as a feature of the group” (Lantolf, 2000, p. 17). This expertise is manifested as successful performance, when the group of Italian learners travels to Venice. (In the same spirit, Fraser, this book, emphasizes the importance of “performing” one’s autonomy.) The community of practice also has to accommodate difference, and the charm of the movie is the way that the narratives of each of the diverse characters intertwine, while potential conflicts are avoided or defused. Likewise, Ikeda, Saito & Ieda (in this book), acknowledge that, within a diverse group, autonomous learners will fashion their individual learning trajectories in idiosyncratic ways. By the end, anxieties are (temporarily) parked, and – in the soft glow of a Venetian afternoon – a supportive self-assurance reigns. (Harada, in her chapter in this book, also attests to the importance of learners overcoming their anxieties and developing emotional maturity as a pre-condition for autonomy.) But Italian for Beginners is more than just an allegory of self-fulfilment through shared communal enterprise: for me it has a particular fascina- tion, being one of the first of the wave of films that conformed to the cinematic “vows of chastity” as promulgated by the Dogme 95 group of filmmakers, centered in Denmark, and led by Lars von Trier. Seeking to “rescue cinema” from the clutches of the Hollywood-dominated, big budget, and technologically extravagant film-making that then pre- dominated (and still does), they drew up a ten-point manifesto, and gave themselves the name Dogme 95. To earn the Dogme seal of approval, a film needed to be made in accordance with the manifesto, the first rule of which was that: Shooting should be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where the prop is to be found) (Kelly, 2000, p. 227). Afterword 259 Films made according to Dogme 95 prescriptions (such as Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners) typically have a rough, gritty, even raw, quality and are certainly a far remove from the slick artifice and technical virtuosity of Hollywood. The Dogme 95 movement, albeit short-lived (it officially disbanded in 2005) had an important influence on contemporary film- making, not least in staking a claim for a degree of cinematographic autonomy. At around about the same time, as a teacher trainer, working mainly with in-service teachers, I was becoming increasingly concerned that an overreliance on classroom materials was compromising opportunities for real language use: this, despite the fact that the teachers themselves declared an allegiance to the principles of the communicative approach. The lack of any real communication in the classroom – it seemed to me – was directly attributable to the overabundance of materials and aids, which, in a sense, had colonized the classroom space. I was struck forcibly by a comment of Michael Swan’s, in an early critique of the communicative approach, in which he characterized course book communication as being of the type: “You are George – ask Mary what she does at Radio Rhubarb”, and where he added: “There are times when the same language practice can take place more interestingly and more directly if the students are simply asked to talk about themselves” (1990, p. 94). Hence, the Dogme 1995 philosophy offered me, as a teacher educator, a convenient and timely analogy: one that I believed might help redress an overdependence on materials, and restore real communication to classroom life. As I wrote at the time, “My belief is that it is high time Dogme-type principles were applied to the classroom” (2000, p. 2), and, in the spirit of the Dogme 95 manifesto, I suggested (somewhat face- tiously) that the first “vow” of Dogme ELT might be: Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom – i.e. themselves – and whatever happens to be in the classroom. If a particular piece of material is necessary for the lesson, a location must be chosen where that material is to be found (e.g., library, resource centre, bar, students’ club ...) (Thornbury, 2001, p. 14). Curiously, the classroom scenes in Italian for Beginners are conducted very much in this spirit: as the student–teacher observes, there isn’t even a blackboard in the room, and the lessons are improvised around the daily lives of the learners and their possible linguistic needs once they get to Italy. The film is Dogme 95 in style and Dogme ELT in spirit. 260 Afterword Of course, the notion that language learning should be centered in the concerns, interests, needs, and desires of the learners – with the corollary that such an approach might sit uncomfortably with an educational tra- dition based on pre-packaged “teaching materials” – has a long history, and certainly pre-dates Dogme ELT. In 1961, Lionel Billows, in calling for a pedagogy grounded in “real things”, had argued that “we should never allow [the textbook], or any picture or sentence in it, to stand between our pupils and the concrete world ... The language must not be allowed to stay imprisoned between the pages of a book” (1961, p. 71). Likewise, Strevens had made a similar appeal for the authentication of classroom language (using a wording that closely prefigures that of the Dogme 95 first “vow”): “Language is not a sterile subject to be confined to the classroom. One of two things must be done: either life must be brought to the classroom or the class must be taken to life” (1956, p. 69). And, in the context of the new-found concern for communicative competence that ushered in the communicative approach, Allwright (1990) was asking the question “What do we want teaching materials for?” and arguing that “the whole business of the management of language learning is far too complex to be satisfactorily catered for by a pre-packaged set of decisions embodied in teaching materials” (p. 136). For a start, the “content” of the language lesson – “if we define ‘content’ as the sum total of ‘what is taught’ and ‘what is available to be learned’ ” (p. 134) – is not predictable. “It is, rather, something that emerges because of the interactive nature of classroom events” [emphasis added]. As an alternative to “teaching materials”, he proposed that learners need to be trained to become more “invested” in the learning process, for which “learning materials” – such as “a learner’s guide to language learning” – might be more useful. In the same vein, Willis (1994) made the case for prioritizing the learners’ linguistic needs, an objective that a pre-selected syllabus of grammar items was unlikely to meet: In helping learners manage their insights into the target language we should be conscious that our starting point is the learner’s grammar of the language. It is the learner who has to make sense of the insights derived from input, and learners can only do this by consid- ering new evidence about the language in the light of their current model of the language.

Load more