Pennycook

To start Pennycook describes the critical approaches to tesol and the questions that go along with that. According to Pennycook there are 3:

1.the domain or area of interest. to what extent do particular domains define a critical approach?
2.a transformative pedagogy. how does the particular approach to education hope to change things?
3.a self-reflexive stance on critical theory. to what extent does the work constantly question common assumptions, including it's own?

In this particular article there is a lot of discussion on how to connect the classroom, students, and teachers to the outside world; to social, political, and racial issues which also include sexuality and ethnicity. This is what Pennycook calls critical domain.

Penneycook notes that it not only has to do with political and social aspects but how these aspects affect power relations in the life of the teachers, students, parents, and community. All these factors play a role in how a student learns in the classroom.

A quote that stood out to me is as follows:
"It is not enough to connect TESOL to the world - it must connect to struggles of power, inequality, discrimination, resistance, and struggle." (5)


Generally I think these ideas of connecting, not only to the students, but to the power struggles they endure everyday, has been discussed many times in our TESOL classes and in the articles we've read, what Pennycook brought up which came across as somewhat new to me, is the idea of violence towards 'otherness' and how this violence affects the learning environment. We see, everyday, in the media and on the streets the outcome of hatred towards 'otherness' and how it affects the world but, as a future teacher, I had yet to consider how such factors, how such violence and struggle in the world, may change the way a classroom environment is created and used. Students may find themselves uncomfortable or afraid to speak out due to outside sources of what they see and hear everyday which changes the way they learn in the class, if they are able to learn at all.


This plays into the idea of English and how the language itself is a global power and can have a profoundly negative affect on how students view their own native language on top of how they may learn English in the classroom and how they use it in a public context. All of these issues have a profound affect on the students ability to learn and our own theories on teaching and teaching methods cannot always accommodate such a wide diversity in a classroom.

This leaves us with the question, once again nagging, is there a point to finding a 'one method fits all' ideal when there is such diversity that it may not be possible?

Either way there is an importance to our theorizing TESOL because it can open our eyes to new issues which come up in the world outside of the classroom, giving us a chance, as teachers, to address them with our students in the best method possible for each class or each student.

peace & grace