De-Use It – A tale of coursebook misuse
Last month I was asked by one of the editors of IATEFL’s TDSIG newsletter to contribute to their Teacher Development Stories series and I came up with the following.
They say you never miss the water till the well runs dry and as is often the case, they were right. For years, the institute where I work had shown keen interest the ongoing development of its teachers. Training sessions were organized throughout the year, the occasional methodology book was acquired and money was even found to help teachers attend conferences around the country. But times are tough here in Spain and while it took some time to finally filter down to this modest, lost corner of the country, last September we found ourselves forced to become apostates to the country’s new religion, Austerity. The new fundamentalist prophets ruled that Teacher Training and CPD was frivolous and non-belief in the new creed would not be tolerated. Deprived of this flow of ideas, the few teachers that remained were forced to go deep underground and hide their activities. The teachers’ room turned from a place where Thornbury’s latest posts were once debated upon to an arid waiting room where nameless transitory teachers would drift through without even saying hello, let alone stop to discuss the best ways to straighten out Spanish syntax problems. The few of us still interested in developing ourselves as professionals were on our own.
As conditions worsened and job insecurity set in, many of us found ourselves auto-censoring our classes, playing it safe in order not to provide any excuses for letting us go. Under the new regime, the teacher’s role in the learning process was minimalized and the coursebook became the new prophets’ holy book. Faced between the unemployment line, in a region with around 30% out of work, and the coursebook, I chose the latter.
After struggling through a few classes where I made a vain attempt to ‘teach to the book’, an epiphany came to me and realized that I could establish my own individualized CPD programme by learning to de-use the very book that had become the de facto syllabus. I purposely use the prefix de- because un- seems too overtly negative for my plan. I wasn’t going to not use the book and thus find myself looking for a job, but was simply going to find as many ways as possible to use it differently and in the process it would become my most used TD book of the year. Unit 3B, with perhaps the most paint-drying boring text possible became my newest teaching challenge. How was I going to not only lift it off the page but make it somehow relevant to my learners? Unit 3B’s challenge led me to dust off my old methodology books and delve deeper into the internet for ideas. In my quest, I involved my learners in my project. How could we make this text more interesting? Could we alter the text in some way or perhaps write something similar together on a subject that actually interested everyone? The book and its de-use became the goal.
As the year progressed and my students became aware of my personal challenge, the challenge itself became a motivational factor for the groups. I found they no longer were asking what they were going to be learning that day but had become interested in the process of how they were going to do it. The process of de-use engaged them and encouraged them to look beyond the mere grammar point on page 87.
There simply is no replacement for active discussion with other teachers on topics that matter to us, but when faced with a dry desert, any drink of inspiration will do.
