The Exploratory Practice Centre

Dick Allwright

Dick Allwright’s impressions of the Rio teacher and learner conference in June 2003

This was an extraordinary event, quite literally.  So far nobody I have met has been able to tell me of any other conference that has brought teachers and learners together as presenters and colleagues.  So it was a first, and the members of the EP group in Rio have the right to be very proud to have mounted it, and very pleased and proud that it went so exceptionally well.  It always looked like a gamble inviting teenagers to the PUC-RIO campus, both because disruptive elements might have found their way in and spoiled everything for all of us, and because, even more likely, no school learners might have come at all, especially at a weekend.  In the end we had around fifty schoolchildren on the Friday and many fewer on the Saturday, and they were good company for the hundred-and-fifty teachers that turned up over the two days.  Of course we had a definition of ‘learner’ that covered anyone who wanted to attend in that capacity, so we had more than fifty learners really, especially if you include the group of Inés Miller’s Teaching Practice students, who presented some of their course work.  Incidentally, the reports they wrote on the whole event for their course can be found on this website, under Rio Reports. 

I was involved as an outsider in the planning of the event, and was able to be in Rio for the month just before it, so I could see just how high the preparation load was for everyone concerned.  It was extremely hard work, but it all paid off.  And it worked so well that it is now virtually inconceivable that we could try to run a conference that didn’t bring teachers and learners together! 

The posters were particularly impressive, and it was really good to have the learners to talk about their posters.  And the teachers generally let their learners do the presenting work themselves, in whatever English they could put together for the occasion. 

One thing I noticed as I was walking around the poster area was the fact that a good many of the posters were about such general things as the position of English in Brazilian society, rather than about life in the language classroom.  At first I was sad about this, thinking it meant we had missed something somewhere in our development of EP.  But slowly I began to re-think my position, as I reflected that the learners’ attitudes to the position of English in Brazil, for example, could be expected to be part of the background each learner would bring into the classroom, and that would help mould their choices, and their behaviour in class.  I see this extra breadth as a significant step forward in the development of my own thinking, and one that could make a considerable difference to our future development work.  I haven’t got very far with working out the full implications for EP yet, but I’m working on it. 

But the learners also got involved in panel presentations, and one of these provided what was for many the highlight of the conference as an EP event – a learner confessing to having cheated on his independent work, only to realise later that he was only cheating himself really. 

For me, though, the high spot was listening to the three Rapporteurs (again see under Rio Reports, in two versions: the original Portuguese and in English) at the end of the conference.  We had chosen them because they were almost bound to be interested to our basic idea of teacher and learner conference, though not necessarily to agree with the whole drive of EP.  But we had not anticipated they would be so strongly moved by the event.  That really was the icing on an already very handsome cake. 

I had wanted to get involved in some sort of a conference with learners and teachers together ever since I had been, in the mid-80s in Canada, at a teachers conference and been told there was a student one going on next door, but teachers weren’t allowed in!  That seemed sad, but not very surprising, especially if you subscribe to the widespread idea that learners learn essentially in spite of their teachers, in most cases!  So it was great to see how teachers and learners got on so well together at our conference, it really was ‘a dream coming true’. 

So what’s the next part of the dream we need to work on?

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Last Updated March 26,2004

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