Like Rachel, I am not much of a blogger, but I’ll try! My experience in teaching would probably sound irrelevant to the type of teaching that we are engaged with here. So I should start my post with an apology if my story was really beside the point. But I’ll try to look for some relevant aspects in it.
I used to teach English in an NGO in Tehran, called Omid-e-Mehr center. The center takes some of the most vulnerable, abused, and neglected Iranian or Afghan girls and works with them to give them the tools they need to be able to return to the society. Many of the students enter the center with the most terrifying experiences, addiction, rape, prison and even in some cases death sentence(and thus pedagogy of the oppressed, its justification, its contradictions and difficulties, became my main preoccupation before encounteringPedagogy of the Oppressed). So basically the aim of the foundation was to search for the most disadvantaged young women in the society and educate them in a way that they can find a way out of the “margins” and get involved with a different society (the one in which they could earn more respect and security).
The educational program of Omid foundation(http://omid-e-mehr.org/) provides two years of free education for each person and then helps them in seekinga job. There are two main kinds of courses, those like women right, human right and film courses in which students will learn about their rights in the society, the demands that they can/must have and the roles that they can/should play.And then there are more practical courses such as IT, English language and Arts (mainly photography and theatre) that are supposed to provide them with the practical tools of finding their way back to the society in the future, but this time with more respect.
Of course, most of the girls love the first type of courses when they first enter the center, those which involve the materials that directly address their own lives and experiences, involving activities that they had never experienced before (going to the cinema and theatre, visiting offices of newspapers and magazines, meeting with celebrities and artist and etc.). But when it comes to the courses such as English and IT most of the students see them asthe compulsory, boring part of the whole experience. (Many of the studentsare astonishednot by the educational opportunities but rather by the sudden support and respect that they get and of course with the free chance of communication which they get without being judged).
My apologies for all these detailed information but I find them important in making my point!!
Thus one of the many challenging issues(which might be relevant here and we have kind of discussed in the class) for me as an English teacher was to make my class interesting for the people who didn’t necessarily want to learn a foreign language but only had to, since it was compulsory. What I found most challenging was to make a balance between making my classes fun and enjoyable on the one hand and productive and motivatingon the other. The first task was doable after a while, but the second one was a lot harder; to make my classes productive to the level that the students would understand the value of what they were learning in a very short time (I had only 2 terms to get them to a stage in which they could decide whether or not they wanted to continue studying English).
I suppose for many of the courses taught in academicdisciplines there is a very short time for the professor to get the students intellectually engaged; to make the courses productively enjoyable to the extent that students would continue to ponder over the materials that they have learnt in the class even when they finish the course! In Omid I guess I could eventually make the balance to some extent and could bring “fun” and “education” together (I’ll avoid the details here because I think teaching a foreign language on a basic level is really different from the materials that many of us will probably teach or are teaching already). Having said this, one of the main things that I think I will always have to keep in mind as a teacher is to make this balance possible in my classes. It may sound quite stale but I would try to make the learning pleasurable;not one without the other.
(By the wayOmid-e-Mehr center in Tehran is featured in a documentary called 'The Glass House' filmed by Hamid Rahmanian, produced by Melissa Hibbard. Its trailer is on YouTube if anyone was interested:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_s941PBios&feature=related.)
I appreciate your raising the question of "fun" and "education," partly because the dichotomy itself seems worth exploring — in fact, it might even constitute a useful classroom discussion or assignment, a way of getting students to think about their position as learners. There are a lot of other angles on this that come to mind, like the distinction between "fun" (childish, unsophisticated, natural) and "pleasure" (adult, cosmopolitan, acquired), and where that lies in postmodernity when we supposedly all like fun. Hopefully someone has historicized this?
ReplyDelete