Janpha
Thadphoothon
Abstract
In
this article I discuss new power relationships between teachers and students as
IT-based learning has emerged as teaching aids mediated teachers, students,
and subject matters. First I briefly explore history of the teacher-student
relationship in general. Next, I present some features of the IT-based learning
that have influenced the relationships. Then, I discuss the notion
of empowerment. Finally, based on the proposed theoretical framework, I discuss
ways in which IT-based learning
can be designed to empower the learners.
EFL/ESL
professions emerged at the beginning of the 20th century with Daniel
Jones (1881-1967) and Harold Palmer (1877-1947) perceived as the early founders.
During that time, teachers were native speakers and students were foreigners,
and the method used appeared to be the direct method which emphasizes
question-answer techniques using English as a medium of instruction (Howatt,
1984). Like other fields, teacher-student relationship as one might expect was
asymmetrical, with teachers as tellers or controllers and learners as followers.
Rousseau’s satire, in the context of moral education, can best picture such power relationship:
Master:
You must not do that.
Child:
Why not?
Master: Because it is wrong.
Child:
Wrong! What is wrong?
Master: What is forbidden you.
Child:
Why is it wrong to do what is forbidden?
Master: You will be punished for disobedience.
Child:
I will do it when no one is looking.
Master: We shall watch you.
Child:
I will hide.
Master: We shall ask you what you were doing.
Child:
I shall tell a lie.
Master: You must not tell lies.
Child:
Why must not I tell lies?
Master: Because it is wrong, etc.
(Rousseau’s
Emile, p. 54)
In the similar vein, Rogers (1978), while promoting the idea of ‘person-centred education’, has criticised the politics of power play in traditional education. In the teacher-centred education, Rogers describes some of the typical phenomenon:
- The teacher is the possessor of knowledge, the student, the recipient. There is a great difference in status between instructor and student.
- The lecture, as the means of pouring knowledge into the recipient, and the examination as the measure of the extent to which he [sic] has received it, are the central elements of this education.
- The teacher is the professor of power, the student the one who obeys. The administrator is also the possessor of power, and both the teacher and the student are the one who obey. Control is always exercised downward.
- Authoritarian rule is the accepted policy in the classroom. New teachers are often advised, “ Make sure you get control of your students the very first day.”
(p. 69)
Teachers’
power has its root in the ancient societies when priests and prophets
enjoyed their high prestige and privilege. One may observe that today the
situation has changed as students have more says. Teacher-student power
relationship, nevertheless, in whichever way it is viewed from, is never truly
symmetrical. It is a matter of degree. As Wright (1987) has said, “ In most
societies, the social roles of teacher and learner are accorded high and low
status respectively (p. 12)” Apart from teaching and organizing the subject
matter of lessons, Sinclaire and Brazil (1982) point out that the teachers’
role in the disciplinary area is also significant. Such a role relates to every
aspect of the teaching and learning environment. In many Asian countries, as Mok
(1997) has described, students have been rigidly controlled:
A
set of power relationships between teachers and students is a result of
different roles and statuses, which teachers and school administrators have more
power. Nowadays in many parts of the world, capital punishment has been adopted
as a means to control people. In educational institutions, corporal punishment
is still being implemented. In many places teachers can physically harm the
students if they disobey e.g. they do not do homework or do not answer
correctly. Moreover they can verbally or psychologically punish the students,
for instance, when they misbehave in class or simply happen to be noisy. In
short, despite today societal development, teachers subtly can influence the
students’ attitudes and behaviour.
What
legitimises such power? I think it is unavoidable to look at the issue beyond
teacher-student spheres. I refer to, of course, the society which directly and
indirectly governs the schooling system as its sub-set, including teachers and
students. Unlike the past, today’s teachers find it harder to impose power
upon students, and in many places corporal punishment is no longer accepted.
Teachers who physically punish students will be sanctioned by the society. Old
agreement is not valid; the new power relationship has been agreed upon. J-J
Rousseau has put it in Chapter IV of his Social
Contract that, ‘ Since no man has natural authority over his fellows, and
since ‘Might’ can produce no right, the only foundation left for legitimate
authority in human societies is Agreement.’ Nevertheless, teachers still hold
two forms of power: to reward or punish by means of grading and to influence
students’ opinions by means of lecturing. Such power has almost always been
legitimised by the society, and it can be imposed in subtly manners, which
relies on teachers’ benevolence (see, for example, Rousseau’s Emile).
After
briefly exploring the development of new teacher-student relationships, one will
come to realize that teachers still have more power than students, though its
degree has been shifted. Several forces have contributed to this change such as
democratic and humanistic movements. Technology in general and information
technology in particular has influenced ways people do things and think and talk
about them, and the field of ELT is no exception. In my next discussion I point
out some salient features of the
IT-based learning that influence teacher-student relationships.
Let’s
look at WebCT, a collection of WWW based course tools which facilitates teaching
and learning on the Internet, which has been used as the main online learning
environment at the University of Canberra. Generally, WebCT has features and
functions that enable students to:
- access lecture notes and subject content;
-
communicate
with their lecture, tutor, and other students enrolled in the subject by email,
discussion and chat;
-
complete
online quizzes and self-assessment activities;
-
submit
assignments;
-
prepare
individual and group online presentation;
-
conduct
searches and use glossaries; and
-
view
scheduled events using a subject calendar.
WebCT,
one of the world's leading providers of e-Learning solutions for higher
education, offers teachers and students both synchronous and asynchronous modes of
communication (see http://www.webct.com). It allows them to communicate in real time via chat-rooms as well
as to communicate in a delayed fashion via email or bulletin board discussion.
It also allows users to communicate in different ways: one-to-one, one-to-many,
and many-to-many, in text-based, graphic-based, audio, and video modes. With
designed support system, students who have questions on their assignments can
ask for help from their teachers or others. Students can click on links to other
web sites to enhance their learning. They can read on-line documents, listen to
news, view programs on-line, etc. Many course providers record their lectures
and broadcast them via the WWW. A good example is the Intellectual Channel
created in the WebCT environment by Ania Lian, which give students and
interested individuals access to previous lectures as well as interesting
presentations by guest speakers. See WebCT.com for more information.
The
above features of the Internet bring about widespread distant education online.
Many institutions offer courses, including English, online, for example, the
University of Southern Queensland (www.usq.edu.au). Visit http://www.gradschools.com/,
one will find hundreds of courses offered online. More and more virtual
universities have emerged, e.g. www. california.edu, http://www.vu.org/,
etc. As English is presumably the language of the Internet, the more students
use the more they encounter authentic material that provide comprehensible
input, which according to Krashen (1982), “ …more comprehensible
input….more second language acquisition (p.
28).” By engaging in web-based activities, students, “ can gradually become
members of the community of English language speakers, in the same way that they
might through other forms of immersion in a culture (Zhao, 1996, cited in
Warschauer, 2001, p. 208).” Students can find their conversation partners, be
they native or non-native speakers, and their interactions are real and
meaningful. On the Internet, students feel they are empowered because they can
control their learning and have more opportunities to practice English (Warschauer,
1993). As the main language of the Internet is English, students, upon carrying
out the task, can either explicitly or implicitly learn
English on the Internet.
If
imparting knowledge of grammar and vocabulary to students were the main task of
English teachers, and if what students were to do is to memorize such things in
order to do well in exams, then the Internet via its web-based activities could,
easily and radically, mediate the power relationship between the two parties. As
early as 1977, Bandura predicted that the media e.g. television and newspapers,
through symbolic models, would play greater roles in shaping our behaviour and
perceptions. Today the vastness and accessibility of the World Wide Web and the knowledge it
provides has questioned the validity of compulsory education in general and
teachers’ roles as knowledge providers in particular, and it has profoundly
done so. The trend, as Naisbitt (1984) predicts, is the shift from institutional
help to self-help: learning at home. Computer, coupled with democratic/
humanistic movements and social problems, is undeniably, one salient factor
effecting teachers’ role and status. In general, teacher prestige and status
have been reported to be lower than any period in history (McCreary Juhasz,
1990, cited in Robinson, 1994, p. 1). TESOL teachers, in particular, have been
reported as those with 'lower status' (Medgyes and Matei, 2001). Maybe it is high
time that TESOL teachers rethink and redesign their enterprise and roles.
I
have claimed that IT-based learning has mediated the teacher-learner power
relationship, reasoning it gives students access to vast knowledge worldwide.
English teachers nowadays find themselves in situations where knowledge as they
know can easily be found everywhere. Knowledge as the main source of their
legitimate power has been questioned. In the next part I discuss
features of IT-based learning that empower students’ learning of English,
and ways in which it can be designed to empower them.
What
do we mean when we say students have been empowered? Does it mean that they can
do things as they wish? The notions of empowerment can be varied: ‘
Empowerment is individual and collective; it is power and freedom; it is
external and internal, political and personal, a means to an end or its own
reward’ (Robinson, 1994, p. 12). Robinson (Ibid) has listed nine implicit
meanings of empowerment as follows:
1.
a
route to enhancing the teaching profession: the ‘ authority to teach with the
professional standards that pertain to their work’ (Mertens and Yarger, 1988:
35);
2.
a
more active and critical approach towards teaching (Goodman, 1987);
3.
the
right to make decisions and to have a voice: ‘ There is a narrow line between
empowerment and adopting a laissez-faire leadership style’ (Foster, 1990:19;
see also Sickler, 1988; Kampol, 1990; Gitlin and Price, 1992);
4.
‘
a positive force and literacy is the medium’ --- almost a synonym for
learning, or for the practical real-world benefits of schooling, which teachers
must help children to obtain (Fagan, 1989: 572);
5.
letting
go of feelings of victimization and recalcitrancy (Swart, 1990);
6.
when
teachers ‘ begin to perceive themselves as the experts --- intellectuals
capable of shaping their professional lives and the profession itself’
(Houser, 1990: 58);
7.
internal
control and individually divergent practices, solving problems independently (Glickman,
1989);
8.
releasing
positive reciprocal processes (Cochran, 1988);
9.
a
process of supporting people to construct new meanings and exercise their
freedom to choose (Weissglass, 1990).
(Robinson,
1994, pp. 11-12)
According
to A. Lian (pers comm, November 30, 2001), empowerment is “ a function of the
conditions around you reinforcing in you that you can contribute.” For her,
empowering students means more than simply giving them access to computer or the
Internet, but it means to provide them means in which they can use in solving
their problems in learning. Empowerment in this sense has a direction, which
means teachers, as those with more power, can either withhold or let go that
power.
Empowering
students is easier to say than to do, for teachers, like politicians, love
power, as Russel has warned, “ …the man who can be trusted in education must
care for his pupils on their own account, not merely as potential soldiers in an
army of propagandists for a cause (p. 206).” If one narrowly looks at
empowerment, one will see that it requires both sides: teachers and students. It
seems that to genuinely empower students, the teachers first must be empowered,
at least, by institutions. It is interesting to note here that the term
‘teacher-centred’ has two meanings. Its usual meaning refers to a
traditional teaching model where teachers do most of the talking and students
listen and follow instruction passively. Another meaning refers to situations
where teachers need to have more power to regulate their teaching and
administration, and it also refers to teachers’ academic freedom. This latter
notion is similar to what Houser has opined (1990, cited in Robinson, 1994) that
empowerment occurs, “ when teachers ‘ begin to perceive themselves as the
experts --- intellectuals capable of shaping their professional lives and the
profession itself (p. 58)”. Up to this point, it appears that empowerment has
many notions and requires certain prerequisites. Unless teachers themselves have
more control over their own career and prudent in transforming such power to
students, empowerment is perhaps only real in the saying.
It
can be derived from the above discussion that empowered students are those who
have more control over their
learning, which implies that such students are of autonomous learners who are
can take charge of their own learning (Holec, 1981). It also implies that such
students know how to learn (Crawford, 1985, cited in Lian, 1993). In order to
achieve that, students need to be in a position of “ making the best use of
their own personal resources as well as the resources provided by their own
learning institution, and proceeding with their learning in an independent
fashion (Ibid, p. 4).” At this stage it can be said that autonomous students
are those who have been empowered. They are those who are allowed to have more
freedom in their learning process and outcomes i.e. of what, how, when, and
where to learn, as well as those who have/have been given tools and know how to
use them.
In
order to check whether what they are doing is valid, students need to be able to
self-access their own learning. Such ability can be developed. They need to
regularly check it against reality. By reality I refer to reality as they see it
as A. Lian (2001) has put it, “ Real is what we experience as real. We enter
the world and the world is to us as real as our presence in it.” Such reality
checking is crucial because it enables them to properly function in the world.
During the course of reality engagement, they will come to realize that
responsibility is important in social interaction, so they cannot do whatever
they want, for reality has given them feedback they there are certain things
they are not supposed to do.
Institutions
have to cooperate and be more liberal. Structurally, it is important that they
remove unnecessary restrictions from traditional educational practices. They
need to accept the notions that students could spend time learning as long as
they wish, take a test when they are ready and retake the course without penalty
(Lian, 1993). Unless testing and evaluation is still rigid and is controlling
learning process and content, successful empowerment is hard to achieve. In
addition, institutions need to support by developing a large resource
infrastructure and creating ‘learning atmosphere.’ Installing hundreds of
computers in the self-access centre is of little help unless learning atmosphere
has been created, which is something intangible, but has its psychological
reality. The International learning and Teaching Centre of the University of
Canberra, for instance, have resources which the students can use the Internet,
email, type stories or essays on the computer, read books/newspapers/magazines,
read talking books, watch TV or videos, and listen to tapes or to the radio.
Empowerment
has many notions. In fact it has been mentioned in other fields e.g. in
business, which has been differently interpreted. I have suggested that
empowerment and autonomy are two highly correlated constructs. Empowerment
involves at least three levels: institutions, teachers, and students. Next I
look at some salient features of the Internet that exist out there empowering
its users and I suggest ways of creating conditions allowing empowerment in
students.
Web-based
learning has features enhancing students’ language learning autonomy. It
allows them to be more independent. Below are some salient features that the
Internet can offer so that students can learn in such a manner. On the Internet,
they can:
- learn whenever they prefer i.e. study at night or on weekends
- learn wherever they prefer i.e. at home
-
learn
at their own pace i.e. view delivered lessons as often as they wish
- keep track of their progress i.e. monitor their own progress by taking progressive tests
-
seek
help online from the support systems provided or from other online communities
- access websites i.e. to different kinds of information
-
download
and edit printed material
-
create
their own web pages so as to communicate with the rest
of the world.
The
possibilities suggest that both students and teachers have plenty of room to
play. On the Internet, they can do things which, previously, used to be very
difficult to do. For example, they can individually or collaboratively publish a
magazine or a newspaper online via free Internet providers such as http://geocities.yahoo.com/.
Or they can broadcast radio programs online, or even operate an online TV
station. And the audience is
actually the world. However, such macro-activities, to empower students, need to
be
carried out in ways which teachers not imposing on students of what to do and
how to go about doing it. A research has revealed that students’ feeling of
empowerment influences their attitudes to wards computers (Warschauer, 1996.)
Students’ needs, interests, and motivation need to be taken into account. In
addition, their needs and motivation that may arise as they engage in reality have to be considered.
It
is important bearing in mind that, the Internet, like other technologies, is a
means available, which teachers need to create conditions that would allow
students to utilize its existing features and potentialities. Again, such
interventions
must take into account students’ needs and preferences. This, however, does
not to say that teachers know what students’ needs or motivation or interests
are, for students are of individual learners who carry with them loads of
stories which have effects on them, including their self-perception, worldview,
including learning (Bourdieu, 1993). Hence, regarding students as individuals
means recognizing both of their ideologies and idiosyncrasies, and the notion
that learning occurs individually. Thus, students need to have more freedom of
deciding their learning ends and means. This implies that pre-selected textbooks
or the like be rethought. Are there any alternative models? What is needed is,
as Lian (1997) has suggested, “ sets of organized resources ”, and on-line
databases of authentic materials is a viable option. During the course of
engaging reality, new needs and problems will emerge, which are unpredictable
and require different means to tackle.
Language
acquisition is a by product of doing something, so what teachers should do to
empower students is to create conditions i.e. tasks, without imposing them and
their own makings such as their beliefs on students. By tasks, I refer to the
notion advocated by Ania Lian (A. Lian, 2001, Lectures in Applied Linguistics),
which is, “ anything that arises in response to reality in order to affect
reality.” Having put it like that what students can do is engaging in reality and
assessing ways in which they affect reality, and what teachers can do is helping
students in the process of such assessment without, “ reducing the categories
of assessment to the categories of their own making (Ibid).” Take the radio
project at the School
of languages and International Communication, the university of Canberra, for
example. The aim is to broadcast English programs on one of the local radio
stations. Students are mixed: undergraduates and graduates, from many different
counties in Asia, and each student has his or her aim and objectives. The
students decide their own programs, including the content and the structure. As
they are non-native speakers, during the preparation stage, and as the audiences
are native speakers, they realize they need to improve their pronunciation and
learn how to advertise their programs. On the Internet, they can look at the
transcripts of the programs broadcast such as those at http://www.abc.au/
or http://www.bbc.co.uk/. It is worth noting
here that the task is complex enough to enable the students to recognize their
weaknesses e.g. their accent and pronunciation need to be improved. Moreover,
they realize that they can also broadcast their programs on the Internet if the
station is not available.
So far I have pointed out some features of the Internet that appear to enhance students empowerment, and proposed ways to create conditions allowing them learn by engage reality, bearing in mind that computer is simply a tool that need to be utilized appropriately. Without doubt, I recognize that there are many factors effecting students use of computer e.g. computer literacy and technicality of teachers and students, technological equity, and its negative effects such as short attention span, illicit material etc.
I have discussed that new power relationships between teachers and students, among other factors, have been mediated by the rapid emergence of the Internet. Many features of such learning have offered students not only accesses to sources of information worldwide anytime anywhere, but also the build-in support system and other online communities so that they can take charge of their own learning. Students’ empowerment requires that teachers rethink their ways of looking and going about doing things. In particular, they need to realize that language acquisition occurs in learners mainly as a result of their active participation in reality. Here, teachers’ roles, like facilitators, are to guide and support, not to order or to tell them ‘what, when, how, and why.’ Institutions, too, need to lift unnecessary restraints and be supportive by providing resources as well as creating healthy learning atmosphere.
More
importantly, students
themselves need to question their motivation and be more accountable for not
only their learning but also their teachers’ roles in particular, and those of
the institutions in general. They need to be active rather than passive. To the
extreme, Thoreau has said it best in On
the Duty of Civil disobedience:
" I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world.”
This
does not mean students be rebellious. I simply urge that today students need to be
more critical in their learning, active, and persistent. Rather than sitting still and waiting under the tree
for the fallen fruit or someone up there to pick and drop it down for them,
learners should clime up and get it for themselves.
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