The Exploratory Practice Centre

A CONFERENCE

OF TEACHERS AND LEARNERS,

FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNERS:

AN EXPLORATORY PRACTICE DREAM COMING TRUE

Friday and Saturday, 27-28 June 2003

PUC-Rio, Brazil

EDITED TRANSCRIPTION OF

FINAL PLENARY DISCUSSION WITH RAPPORTEURS

Professor Maria Antonieta Alba Celani

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP)

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to participate in an event such as this. I have learned a lot and am very happy to get to know such relevant work, especially because it involves people who work within the public education sector, since I am myself involved and interested in this kind of work. I came to know more about EP, which I had already heard about.

I enjoyed a lot to see:

• the joint work of the University, its researchers, students and the school, its researchers and their students. From my point of view, this is perhaps the major merit of this event.

• the good organization, leaving everyone very relaxed.

• the quality of the work presented.

If someone asks me when I return home (PUC-SP) what impressed me most about this meeting, I am sure it was to hear students from 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grades talking very calmly and without embarrassment about their work, revealing their involvement with the research. I consider this confidence and pride fundamental for the formation of people, of youths. I noticed this both in the posters and in the workshops.

Regarding the activities, I would like to give special attention to the variety of topics linked to language schools, social issues (perhaps too critical for my taste!), and discussions about the classroom, syllabus and evaluation. I was very impressed with the students working on the syllabus. It is fundamental to give responsibility to students in order to foster their development and formation as human beings.

With regard to the discussions, I was impressed to see that the same emphasis on the importance of the role of the student was the main theme of the event. The work in the classroom and the sensitivity regarding reports on what went right and what went wrong. The statement of the students regarding a work done incorrectly was especially important. It was a great lesson for researchers who sometimes are in doubt about how to work with data.

The workshops also showed a great variety of themes and revealed the richness and the scope of the type of the work being done. Some represented an expansion of what was shown in the posters, which is very good especially taking into account that these are children not only presenting their work but also explaining how they reached a certain point.

The performance of Hamlet we saw yesterday was very touching and rich from the educational point of view.

Regarding the workshop, I was a little selfish – I chose to stay in only one and took a look at those which interested me most. On Friday, I took part in the workshop run by Teaching Practice students and coordinated by Inés, because I am very interested in teacher education. This is a great issue. I learned a lot, including about the dynamics of workshops. It was very interesting. On Saturday, I took part in Dick Allwright’s workshop because I wanted to learn more about E.P. Both were very useful and interesting.

In conclusion, for me, this event is filled with meaning, especially because I could be near to people who share the same concerns as I do, although sometimes approaching them in a different way, as in the case of teacher training. It is obvious that the English teacher does not work alone, but with colleagues. So, we cannot look at English teacher training in isolation.

I wish that events like this could be repeated and that I have the opportunity to take part in them!

Professor Luiz Paulo da Moita Lopes

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

I want to start by thanking Inés and the organizers for inviting me to an event that constitutes a great learning opportunity. Perhaps my biggest criticism of the university is that it is the place of those who know and not the place of those who want to learn. In my point of view, the university should be a place for people who do not know and want to learn. And what I have seen here was a meeting of people who are clearly involved in rethinking their work, involved in learning. I would like to thank Inés once more and congratulate all of you.

I think this event is very interesting because of its wide scope, including work done by the people from public schools (where my main interest lies), from private schools, with teachers and students performing at different levels, which is very rare!

Another important characteristic is the quality of the work presented and, above all, the unexpected questions that arose.

The last general point is the innovative nature of the event in the international and the Brazilian scene. I had already taken part in Action Research events, but I never before had been in an event that gathered teachers who work at various levels while focusing on the issues of learning.

So, congratulations! To myself also, for having taken part! It was a very important moment indeed!

I am going to focus my speech on the three modes of presentations, according to my understanding of what I saw. I see five themes:

1. the issue of the educational role of learning a language in school;

2. the definition of what is unruly behaviour in the classroom;

3. the role of the English language in the contemporary world;

4. the belief that school is boring;

5. self-esteem, affect. And connected with this, the issue of identity and the differences among people.

Before talking about this, I would like to talk about the posters. I want to pick out five that attracted my attention.

“Why do Brazilians speak English all the time?” It is amazing that a school or teacher brought up this question because this is such a crucial issue in a country like Brazil, which is always being guided by meanings coming into the country through this language, throughout Brazilian history, our dependent economy and, now, in the world because of the globalization. I think it is very important that this theme arose in the mind of a student and then became a theme for research.

I saw a very beautiful abridged version of Hamlet. The presentation was also outstanding.

I would like also to emphasize the syllabus made by the students who went to talk to the director of the school and told her “Why can’t we suggest what we want to study?” and the answer was: “Because you have no culture”.  And then they proposed a syllabus.

The question of the labor market. It is funny because this feeling that “school is boring” is linked to the question of work. It seems that there is an interest in further discussing “Why is school boring?” Is the school addressing the question of why school is boring? Or why is the English language boring? These are typical issues of life in contemporary society that seem to need discussion.

The question “Why does the world speak different languages?” grew into a discussion about the origin of languages.

In the roundtable discussion “The role of foreign languages”, the issue of boring classes appeared a lot. It seems that some interventions supported the idea that unruly students were good students. I have the impression that the theme is related to a different understanding about what constitutes a classroom in present days. In research I conducted 15 years ago, I was amazed with the contrast with my experience as a student, when students had to be quiet and organized. This is no longer true. If we study their interaction we can see that all students speak at once and this gives the impression that the students who are not unruly are the weak ones. This is not the case. It is a new definition of the events happening in the classroom. What we call “unruliness” is not that. They are different ways of understanding the classroom.

Another theme that attracted my attention is “the learning of a language as education”.

Another interesting poster is the one that discusses the Aldo Rebelo Law. I would like to point out that the aim of this law is to prevent the penetration of the English language. A different point of view could be a factor inherent to languages. Would such a law have any effect? How do languages develop? This has to do with questions of an economic nature. These could be themes for further research, if you think they are relevant.

With regard to the roundtable discussion that discussed “Affect”, I wonder if the meaning of affect is different for each person? For example, what about students or teachers who do not show affect? Affect is very different. What motivates one person may not motivate another. Another question linked to affect that also appears is the fear of making mistakes. Why do people have this fear?

With regard to the workshops, I attended two because I was forced to make a choice. The first one was about teachers’ narratives. I myself told a narrative of a significant professional experience. The workshop attracted me because of my interest in studying narratives. It worked in a very interesting way. There was a narrator, an interviewer and a person who retold the story. Then, there was a discussion that raised the question of whether it is true that we are the stories we tell and how this relates to what we learn professionally.

The workshop on multiculturalism gave me an opportunity to listen to a primary school teacher who told a very interesting experience of dealing with a problem, devoid of academic discourse, and finding very rich solutions. She expressed a very clear relationship between issues that are being studied by contemporary thinkers.

Professor Solange Coelho Vereza

Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF)

I would like to thank Inés for inviting me to take part in this event. I am not an expert in Exploratory Pratice. I think I became acquainted with the subject when Inés was flirting with EP – dating, engagement and marriage and, based on what I have seen in this event, for several generations of EP.

What marked me most in this event was the “lack of ideology” and the democratization of knowledge. This is what Luiz Paulo was talking about when he mentioned the false Olympus where the university places itself.

This meeting shows that it makes no difference, it does not matter whether one is a student of languages, of school, graduation, specialization, post-graduate, teacher trainer, mentor. I have great difficulty with a hierarchy of knowledge, with the hierarchical institutionalization of knowledge. This event went beyond an attitude, a posture in relation to the student, but to conduct research with the student, to observe, learn and understand with the student. This is a great novelty.

Yesterday, in Dick’s speech, he told us that we are always on the same side, teachers and learners, we have the same objective. We must keep this always in mind because the academic world makes us very vain. This vanity is not only encouraged by ourselves, but also by the environment. And, being with students, we remind ourselves how much we have to learn. Now, one thing is to think this – I have always believed this – and all of a sudden to see an event built around and developed on this basis. It is not just an event but also a theme for research and this is very interesting and motivating.

I wrote a paper two years ago on the Aldo Rebelo Law. In order to write it, I studied the law a lot, I researched linguistic borrowing, aspects of the philosophy of language and the question of critical pedagogy. I am saying this not to characterize a good article but a genre as any other. Suddenly, I saw a poster made by the students and their questions and conclusions were very similar to mine. I was so gratified by this and I was soon exchanging ideas with the students and inviting them to go to the university to present their work. I can’t be so naïve as to think that I can stop writing papers because my university attributes points, part of my salary depends on this. I have to put this on one level and not think that my knowledge is more important, and accept different genres and not rank them. Coming across this poster was very nice.

Looking at the posters and workshops, the profusion of “whys” marked me strongly. There are so many teachers who come with questions starting with “how” and these questions are exactly the same we used to pose 30 years ago: How to motivate your students? I am sure that Socrates, the Greek philosophers and the teachers had the same questions, everybody wants to know how to teach a more interesting class. If there were clear answers to these questions, they would already have been answered since many intelligent people work with teaching. It is impossible that they wouldn’t yet have found an answer. Now, if you start to ask “why” the questions are very different. The “why” brings with it the denaturalization of the obvious. And to pose this question, with the students, is even more interesting. For example, a poster on an arid subject, difficult and almost as eternal as it is motivating –

How to teach the present perfect tense to Brazilian students? And one of the students, in this topic, asked: Why we do need to learn English? Why is this so slow? Why we aren’t we born speaking English? The “whys” of the student touch us deep inside. If we look carefully, they pose the same questions we do. Sharing the “whys” with the students is very interesting, while we can only share the “hows” with the teachers, because it is the teachers who command the techniques. The “how” is the technique. The “why” takes us to the students and the students bring us back to ourselves. All of this I learned today. It was very interesting.

Regarding the workshop, the one I chose – run by Inés – took me back to the “why”, the praise of the question. We may not have a “because” but this will force us to question our beliefs, premises, ideologies, affects and many other things. Each “why” has a story behind it, always made with students.

With regard to the concept raised by Dick of quality of life, I remembered the last time, 10 years ago when I taught English here at PUC with Inés. We had a challenge which was to teach English to a class composed of despairing PUC employees, who felt blocked and who thought they would never learn English. That experience was extremely successful because it arose from the quality of life within that classroom. In the Christmas card we received from them, among other things, we could read: “Solange, my sweetheart, you are the most smashing teacher. What was it we learnt in that course? English, maybe… I can only remember that I enjoyed myself a lot. Thank you for the motivation and for having given me the opportunity to feel absolutely at home.”

I read yesterday in the Yellow Pages about a course that declares itself to use a proven scientific method. In that course at PUC, we did not have any scientifically proven method but we had a strong desire to be with the students and not to be their mentors. This had to do with quality of life. This is a puzzle. How can we reproduce this? It is very difficult. Certainly, this has nothing to do with method. If EP emphasizes the issue of quality of life, without the traces of the classic humanism of the 70s, with a new force, it is very welcome. It is quality of life, the return of the student to the center of our research – to look with them and not only at them – and the opportunity to be here with the students, teachers and all of you, like New Year’s Eve on Copacabana beach, a democratic space. If we can bring a little bit of this to our profession, better still.

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Last Updated March 26,2004

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