The Postmodern Language Teacher.pptVIP

The Postmodern Language Teacher The future of task-based teaching A postmodern self-reflexive, self-contradictory, self-undermining joke … What do you get when you cross a mafia Godfather with a postmodernist? The answer of course is “someone who will make you an offer you can’t understand.” Claire O’Farrell, 1999 Headings Introduction Changing definitions Changing sciences Changing worlds Changing educations Changing Englishes Conclusion Introduction “We live in an environment that is continually changing. It seems that rapid change is our only constant. We are faced with an entirely new situation in which the goal of education, if we are to survive, is the facilitation of change and learning. The only person who is educated is the person who has learned how to learn; the person who has learned how to adapt and change.” Rogers, 1969, p. 151-153 Introduction Education “is itself going through profound change in terms of purposes, content and methods” Education “is both a symptom of and a contributor to the socio-cultural condition of postmodernity” Edwards Usher, 1994, p. 3 . This paper aims to identify postmodern features of contemporary TEFL theory and practice, so that they might be understood and validated in terms of their relation to the postmodern societies in which they are employed. Changing Definitions “Postmodernism is a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory as well as unavoidably political.” Hutcheon, 1989, p. 1 Postmodernism “resists being conveniently summarized in easy ‘soundbites’ and refuses to lend itself to any single cut and dried definition” Ward, 2003, p. 1 . Changing Definitions “The postmodern’s initial concern is to de-naturalize our way of life; to point out that those entities that we experience as ‘natural’ they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism , are in fact ‘cultural’; made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn’t grow on trees.” Hutcheon, 198