5. Implement new pedagogies
In their manifesto, A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning, Fullan and Langworthy (2014), call for new pedagogies to address the changes that globalization and technology have brought to the way people interact and learn. They characterize new pedagogies as practices that combine three characteristics:
- Learning partnerships between and among students and teachers
- Deep learning tasks that restructure the learning process toward knowledge creation and purposeful use
- Digital tools and resources that enable and accelerate the process of deep learning (p. 10)
Essentially, in place of the teacher-as-gatekeeper model wherein students are viewed as passive consumers, Fullan and Langworthy envision a digitally augmented learning environment in which students and teachers are collaborators in the construction of knowledge. This calls for a repertoire of strategies (which we will address in the next section, on the eclectic approach) that can combine grammar translation, drill-and-kill, communicative teaching, project-based learning, and any other practice that enables students and teachers to achieve mutually agreed upon goals and that allows for the creation of something novel with real-world applications.
In a nutshell, new pedagogies offer language students the opportunity to alternate between teacher-facilitated and autonomous learning – a best-of-both-worlds approach – rather than having to choose either classroom or autonomous learning as did the participants in Cole and Vanderplank’s (2016) study.
Cole and Vanderplank’s findings with regard to autonomous learners may be discouraging for language teachers but they also point to new opportunities. Teachers of an additional language need to embrace all facets of 21st-century learning ecologies (online, out-of-class, in-class, in-person, instructed, autonomous, etc.) and find their role within them as mediators rather than gatekeepers. They need to recognize that students can and do learn without the teacher’s help, but that students also perform better when teachers know how to help effectively, by acknowledging the affordances and limitations of each context, by helping to set and manage goals, by directing students to resources, and by guiding students from scaffolded classroom learning to out-of-class autonomous contexts and opportunities to be co-creators of knowledge rather than passive consumers.