Angel or devil? The strange case of Sugata Mitra

Last Saturday Sugata Mitra gave a plenary at an international teachers’ conference. When it was over a proportion of the audience gave him a standing ovation, but an equal number refused to get to their feet and a proportion of the ‘remaining seated’ crowd expressed outrage and fury at what they had heard and seen. He was an angel. He was a devil. You can watch the plenary in question here, and you can read Graham Stanley’s careful response here.

I have blogged about Sugata Mitra before in reference to his TED talk – and his plenary at the IATEFL 2014 conference over a year later was not significantly different from his TED appearance. And back then, like most speakers at TED conferences, Mitra was encouraged speak passionately and idealistically about something he believes in – and something which promotes technology’s ability to answer all problems – and to be sure of a rapturous reception. TED audiences only have to listen to 20 minutes or so and are primed to accept all visionaries as, well, visionaries. It’s like being at an advertiser’s pitch where everything sells and there are no problems with what is being said.

A group of practicing teachers (all of whom wrestle daily with issues about education, educational restrictions and how people learn) presented him, I suspect, with something more of a challenge.

Briefly (because you can find out what he thinks in many places). Mitra advocates SOLEs (self organized learning environments) where children group round computer terminals to find answers to big questions such as ‘why do men and not women have moustaches?’ or ‘Did dinosaurs really exist?’ He reminds us that children are capable of learning a lot by themselves in this way – much more, perhaps, than in a traditional transmission-based classroom. And in situations of educational deprivation, especially, if we can make that information available online the sky is, literally, the limit. Mitra promotes schools ‘in the cloud’ where children who have no (or unenthusiastic) teachers can learn and develop in an internet-rich utopia. Thus he has set up computer centres in rural Indian villages and UK schools, and these centres can be visited virtually by ‘grannies in the cloud’ (an unfortunate nomenclature in my opinion) by which he means older adults with time on their hands who can probe the children’s knowledge, interact with them, enccourage them, show them things etc. In his post-plenary interview in Harrogate he says that one of the roles of such cloud grannies is to say well done etc.

My description doesn’t do justice to the heady excitement of what he has to say. I am not immune to it. The idea that if you prime children properly and give them the right tools there is no limit to what they can do is tantalisingly enticing. Such child-driven learning is, according to the SOLE toolkit ‘self-organised, curious, engaged, social, collaborative, motivated by peer interest, fueled by adult encouragement and admiration’. Not only that, but the dream of bringing such education benefits to disadvantaged communities is intoxicating. No wonder he has won prizes and is garlanded with flowers.

And yet there are three problems I have with this over-superficial (it seems to me) account. I write about teaching methodology, after all. They are these:

1 Any teacher with experience knows that it is one thing to put educational temptation in a child’s way (or an adult’s); quite another for that student to actually be tempted.  Mitra’s claim is that this always works, a kind of learner autonomy nirvana. Yet we know this is just not true. Some students try to be autonomous and some don’t. Some succeed and some don’t. In any group different roles are played; not all learners learn equally. There is nothing wrong (and everything right) with discovery-based experiential learning. It just doesn’t work some of the time. Yet Mitra’s discourse includes no doubts or caveats. His well-rehearsed and extremely effective ‘show’ exists in TED-land, not in a discussion of teaching reality.

2 What good teachers know is that the precise nature of teacher intervention is crucial. Our job is to keep students on task, help them to focus, help them when they are having problems, find different solutions as problems emerge, be a resource and a prompter, a motivator – and much more. I hear little about this from Sugata Mitra except for the general role of cloud grannies to use their apparent ignorance to get kids talking, and their encouragement. Yet the pedagogy of what he claims to be (remember, this claim is important) revolutionary needs to be considerably more fleshed out than this. What interventions are successful and which are not? What precisely is the role of a cloud granny and how can she (or perhaps he) make the whole experience more productive.

3 Sugata Mitra claims, perhaps jokingly, that we don’t need to know things any more because it is all available online. This goes hand-in-hand with his belief that the education system is ‘outdated. We don’t need it any more’ (in his TED talk). Yet without our accumulated knowledge and memories what are we? Our knowledge is, on the contrary, the seat of our intuition and our creativity. Furthermore, the gathering of that knowledge from our peers and, crucially, our elders and more experienced mentors is part of the process of socialization. Humanity has thought this to be self-evident for at least 2000 years and though it is the responsibility, perhaps, for younger people to constantly challenge the status quo, still that social interaction between experience and inexperience, age and youth etc is the way society grows and how children become socialized. Grannies in the cloud? To give Sugata Mitra deserved credit, that’s a lot better than nothing. As an alternative to decent schooling? I don’t think so.

I am a paid-up technophile and love what technology allows me to do and experience in our present reality. But as Gavin Dudeney has said (again!) it’s not the issue, especially when it is being used to promote dodgy pedagogic practices. I do not accuse Sugata Mitra of that. But I do accuse him of oversimplifying complex issues of pedagogy to offer an over-idealistic technology-fuelled solution to everything.

Angel? Devil? Almost certainly neither of the above, but what do YOU think?

A Christmas message! Critical pedagogy and Taoist philosopy

It’s one of those days when everything seems to be telling me to think about the same thing. It’s nearly Christmas. Time for one of the greatest songs ever (River by Joni Mitchell). But that’s not all…

In a radio programme I was listening to while I had lunch they were discussing whether it is OK – or even a good thing – to say “I don’t know”. Professor Kathy Sykes told of how she only had success with her Zimbabwe maths and physics students when she admitted that she didn’t know and so “let’s try and find out together.” It made me think back to last Sunday when I was listening to a commercial presentation about a new series of books called Q which are apparently based on the premise that critical thinking is at the heart of successful language learning and teaching. And then this evening another radio programme, as I work, is talking about Taoist philosophy in which Yin and Yang are major features. In the words of a Wikpedia entry “Yin and Yang complement each other: like an undertow in the ocean, every advance is complemented by a retreat”.

What am I talking about? Critical pedagogy, that’s what. The constant battle between knowledge (I know) and the questioning of knowledge (I don’t know but I want to know). Should teachers impart knowledge or provoke knowledge enquiry? Should they offer certainties or uncertainties? Should they teach things or provoke things?

It’s easy to answer, right? We all believe in critical thinking as the way to understanding. Questioning brings understanding; transmission teaching stifles it. Yet, as I said, it is Christmas and it is around this time of year that somehow my own critical questioning goes quiet. I forget my challenge to the myths that inform Christian religious belief and find myself accepting, unquestioning, an experience (though in my case not the belief) that is encompassed in the seasonal music that I love.

I mean (in case I am not being clear) that my critical faculties take a holiday. I wallow (It’ll be different in January!)

Should I be embarrassed about this? Or – to bring this post round towards teaching and learning– should we object when students want certainties rather than provocation? For example, should we (in a very western way) feel uncomfortable about the rote learning that helps Chinese and Japanese students to learn X number of characters a week or should we question our own belief in learner autonomy?

This issue came up in my last post about Dogme – the difference between acquisition vs participation. You might say that some things need to be taught (acquired knowledge) and some things need to be discovered through critical thinking (participation). That’s a Yin and Yang kind of argument. But in the era of Google does it make sense? If we believe in the democratisation of education can we be happy with this?

What do you think?

No Dogma for EFL – away from a pedagogy of essential bareness

It’s ten years now, since Scott Thornbury wrote his brilliant, funny, and provocative ‘Dogma’ piece in IATEFL Issues, as it then was. And it WAS a brilliant piece, only one page long, capturing a little slice of the zeitgeist and encapsulating, at the same time, an issue about a depressing over-reliance on materials and grammar teaching.

I have it here in front of me. In case you haven’t actually read it, Scott describes how the Dogme film makers in Scandinavia have signed a ‘vow of chastity’ in which they eschew the use of special effects, lighting, music – indeed anything which constitutes the ‘artifice’ (= technologically-mediated pretence) of filmaking. Everything has to take place in natural light, in natural time. Along the way they (the filmmakers) also take time off to rail against genre films – westerns, thrillers etc.

Who then, Scott asks, will join me and sign a similar Vow of ‘EFL chastity’?

Lots of people as it turned out.

But not me. Count me out. Not my style at all! And here in my own little short blog post is why not.

First, be careful who you choose to use for your analogies! The Scandivanian filmmakers kept their vows for, oh, well about two or three films. And then they suddenly realised (duh) that music, lighting, tricksy editing, precisely all the artifice of film-making REALLY WORKS. Think of the immaculate and moving scene in one of my most favourite recent films (El Secreto de sus ojos) where the train pulls out of the station leaving the heartbroken woman behind on the platform; it is tear-jerking and genuinely artistic and relies on different cameras, re-takes, lighting, music, editing and re-editing. What about the amazing single-tracking shot in Atonement where all the artifice of film-making (and an incredible score) makes the scenes at Dunkirk beach totally and horrifyingly compelling. I could on forever, but this is just to say that for every Avatar (which turns even me a bit Dogme) there is a Death In Venice, City of God or Slumdog Millionaire!

(And don’t start me on the apparent restrictive malignity of genres – follow that route and out goes the sonnet…see my earlier post)

One of Scott’s claims in his article is that ‘learning takes place in the here-and-now’. And the thing is that I am not sure this is true. Learning takes place in a learner’s brain and there is no guarantee that this happens ‘here and now’, and that it happens because of and during dialogic interaction. Not all students’ brains process what they are doing in the same way. Some of them take time to process things, and that time might be then, not now! Dialogue – and the relentless pressure on students to speak RIGHT NOW when the teacher asks them to (a basic pillar of communicative methodology) – disadvantages some students enormously, it seems to me, and he idea that all learning comes through interaction just doesn’t stack up in my mind. Some of us are thinkers, some of us are doers, in other words. Most of us, of course, are a bit of each. But (and this is my point) for every student whose language emerges through relevant and meaningful dialogue there is at least one other who benefits from an internal struggle when lectured to or when reading prescribed texts.

To suggest that unplugged teaching is necessarily superior in some way is to claim a direct understanding of (and route into) all students’ brains – and none of us have that. Let’s go further; of course I get a lot of my knowledge and understanding through conversation and contact with others in true dogme style. My life and my learning would be  barren without it. But I also get a lot of my knowledge from reading books, listening to things, watching movies, going to lectures, finding things on the internet, playing with apps and artifice-driven software and doing it all on my own! The dialogue (probably not a very elevated one I will admit) is with myself and happens in my own brain!

It is of course easy to make fun of coursebooks and ‘grammar mcnuggets’ (another of Scott’s fantastic and thought-provoking analogies), but I think it is also possible to view them in a more benign light. Something like this: if we believe in equal opportunity then we might argue (the emphasis there is on might!!) that offering pre-digested grammar actually meets that claim far better than a methodology which advantages the more extrovert, communicative and emotionally intelligent of our students. With grammar mcnuggets everyone at least has equal access. Can we be sure that that this is the case in some more student-driven pedagogy? Which students in a group are we talking about, by the way? In a class of 60? Hmm.

So I’m not going to throw away my coursebooks or my technology. I am not going to throw away the artifice of teaching. Not unless I am a lot more confident of my own wisdom than, in fact, I am.

So what do I believe in? I believe in the richness of techniques, approaches, materials and artefacts available to the modern teacher. I believe that an over-reliance on any of these to the exclusion of others is unattractive and unlikely to be in the best interests of all. I believe that everything – in a classroom – has to be grounded in the expertise of a teacher being able to find the best way of doing things for the benefit of (and with the help and guidance of) the greatest number of students. And often that may be unplugged, but there is no guarantee (or moral reason) why it should be. And sometimes that might be coursebook-mediated but there is no guarantee (or moral reason) why it should be.

In his article Scott writes “The point is to restore teaching to its pre-method “state of grace” – where all there was was a room with a few chairs, a blackboard, a teacher and some students, and where learning was jointly constructed out of the talk that evolved in that simplest and most prototypical of situations”

He has got to be kidding!

But then, of course, he was!