How a university course on andragogy (adult leaning) caused the writer to re-think the way we teach children. This article touches on cooperative learning, democratic models, and theories of non-teaching, with respect to teaching English and international understanding within Japanese elementary schools.
Lately, I have been struggling a lot with how to introduce more democracy into my classrooms. I teach English and "international understanding" at three elementary schools in Yamaguchi prefecture in western Japan. First of all, I was impressed that the original Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology guidelines stressed the importance of student-initiated study projects. Secondly, I am more and more convinced that understanding of other cultures, democracy and other big issues like this can best be simplified for elementary school students by demonstrating their application in the classroom.

Andragogy vs. pedagogy

One of my own more challenging "learning" experiences was a course I took in Adult Learning at the University of British Columbia (this is where I first heard of Paolo Freire and bell hooks). We talked a lot about the study of andragogy as opposed to pedagogy, and at the time, I couldn't understand why the same ideas couldn't be applied to child learners. Here, is a summary of the principals of adult learning (Pratt, 1993 and Knowles, 1980):

1. adults come into the classroom with their own concepts of self in relation to the environment. In some ways, teaching, when defined as "trying to elicit a change in behaviour", is a moral act (or immoral as the case may be!) with definite ethical implications.
   
   
2. adults have "prior experience".
   
   
3. adults take courses because they want to learn, and have concrete ideas about what they want or need to learn.
   
   
4. adults see courses as a way to self-improvement.
   
   
5. adults are "autonomous and . . . have the capacity to be self-directed in learning"
   
   
6. "each person is believed to be unique, and individual differences, whether arising from experience, felt needs, or genetic nature, are to be respected and nurtured as individuals move towards self-fulfillment."

How do the above NOT apply to the way that children learn?
So I have always felt something lacking in textbooks for teaching children. Andragogy talks about working with (adult) students to establish classroom rules and to decide what content they would like to cover. This is because most adult students have a purpose in coming back to school, whether it be upgrading their job skills, or finding out more about something of immediate relevance to their lives. I think children should be able to demand the same kind of respect. We need to find where our students are currently at and ask them for input into the kinds of things they would like to learn in English.

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Freedom in education

Another book that has influenced me is Summerhill by A. S. Neill., which is about a free school in England of the same name. The school was established in the 1920's with A.S. Neill as its founder. (The current headmaster is his daughter, Zoe Readhead, who grew up and was educated at the school.) The book was very influential and has spawned many free and democratic schools worldwide, including at least three in Japan. Two main concepts at the school that I feel are very powerful are:

1. students are free to go to class (or not) as they please and study what they want.
   
   
2. school rules are made (and "punishments" for breaking them) are decided at a weekly meeting at which each student (ages 7-18), teacher and staff person has an equal vote.
   

That sounds to me like democracy in action!
The school was under threat recently for having failed an inspection by the UK government's school inspection body OFSTED. The main point of contention was that students don't attend classes regularly and therefore there was a failure to deliver to the children according to the government standards for curriculum. The inspectors' report resulted in a long legal battle which ended in 2000. The court agreement (Independent Schools Tribunal IST/59), that Summerhill won, states, "a) The views of the school as expressed in the Meeting and submitted to the Inspectors at the time of the inspection and the aims of the school will be taken fully into account on that inspection;" and "c) The pupils voice should be fully represented in any evaluation of the quality of education at Summerhill;" both of which are a first for any school in the United Kingdom. (taken from Summerhill's website).
The school currently has about 90 students, including many from Japan. Another good book that tells about life at the school in A Free-Range Childhood: Self-Regulation at Summerhill School by Matthew Appleton. I have participated in an e-group to discuss the school for the last six months which has members from all over the world (savesummerhill@yahoogroups.com). One thing that has started to concern me is the impression that the general public tends to have of free schools as being a place for students who don't fit into the regular school system, rather than as a place to build on children's natural creativity and learning through play.

How do children learn?

This leads me to John Holt and the idea of homeschooling or unschooling. The homeschooling movement in the US has mostly come out of the concept that children are naturally motivated to learn, but that some of that natural learning ability can get shut down by the social pressures involved in a school environment of sitting behind desks in rows listening to a teacher lecture on and on. John Holt's books talk about unschooling, or only teaching when children want to learn. Students, nor teachers for that matter!, are not free in a traditional school environment, where curriculum is decided by the central government's Ministry of Education, and textbooks are created to those standards. In the US, the current emphasis on state-wide testing and standards, and in Japan, the entrance tests that students must write to get into good schools and companies lead to a "teaching toward the test" perspective instead of building on children's natural interests and abilities. There is little room for personalized learning in this context.
How can we develop an un-curriculum for teaching English in Japanese elementary schools?

The rights of the child

Hopefully, they have the right to make the rules that the class will agree to live by. I hope they also have the right to learn at their own pace and in their own way, although this can be difficult when working within the confines of a curriculum. Every class is unique, with unique skills and interests, and going on tangents with my students, or slowing down to really observe their learning, has helped come up with some great ideas for teaching which I may never have thought of myself.
I like the idea of open source as a metaphor to how we can learn both as students and teachers. There is a great article on the web called the Cathedral and the Bazaar about how open source software was created. The author says that in the past most software was created by computer software experts, locked up in their ivory towers, away from the masses who would actually use the software. Then the Linux system came along. What the creator of Linux did that was so revolutionary, was to throw an unfinished product out into the public domain and allow people to work out the bugs and add fixes to make the software serve their own individual needs better. The condition, of course, was that Linux must always be kept open source, or in the public domain. In other words, no one could take the product at any point along the way and try to sell it – it was a product of all of its owners and therefore must remain in the public domain. This has come to be known as a copyleft. Essentially what the creator of Linux did was to trust in the process of creation, even though he had never met the people who were contributing fixes to his software.

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I think this is a great model for how we should see any community working, including the community of our classroom. Rules, conflict resolution and brainstorming solutions to problems in the classroom should only be the start. Why not make curriculum and the way of learning also subject to choice? What gets studied can also be subject to choice. And this can be fluid and subject to where students take us. I think this is particularly appropriate for learning a language.
I try to survey my students at several points during the year to see what things they would like to be able to do in English. This year one of their choices is a cooking class in English where we will make various international foods. They have done plays in English, sung English songs at the school festival, and at one school, we even have a system where they decide on some phrases which they eliminate from their vocabulary in Japanese and are only able to say in English while at the school. I also try to give them a choice of activities, or books that we will read, and even of the vocabulary that we will study. I have also asked their Japanese teachers for input about things they are studying in other subjects that we put into our English curriculum.

Making our own classrooms more democratic

So how do we apply the concepts of freedom and students' voice in our own classrooms, especially, in my own case, within existing state-run schools?
When I first came in contact with Cooperative Learning (Kagan, 1994) at the 2001 JALT Conference, I thought I had finally found part of the answer. Shifting the emphasis away from lecture to group work was one way of allowing students' voices to be heard and to change the focus from the teacher as the "holder of all knowledge and correct answers". Cooperative Learning provides structures that allow students to teach each other with the teacher as an extra resource. In a country where nearly everyone feels badly about how little English they speak despite having studied for several years, the common view of the native speaker as "expert" is a position that we as English teachers must actively be aware of and try to counteract. I think it only serves to make students feel less confident in their own abilities and to see English-speaking ability as unattainable.
I also thought that Cooperative Learning was an ideal venue for encouraging expressions of different opinions while still allowing the group to focus on building its own community. This ability to appreciate differing opinions and to see from other perspectives is a very important basis for starting to think about international understanding. It also places an emphasis on having each student express their opinion and take responsibility for the results of the group. Each of our students comes into the classroom with their own story and experience, from which we can all learn, whether they be students or adults. Our experience shapes our world view, certainly.
This essay is really just a work-in-progress. Any comments, discussion or ideas regarding how you make your classroom democratic are very welcome and can be directed to: mbi *at* joy *dot* ocn *dot* ne *dot* jp (me) and chris *at* wisehat *dot* com (Chris Hunt). I look forward to hearing from you!

References / Suggested Reading

Appleton, M. A. (1960). Free-Range Childhood: Self-Regulation at Summerhill School. (200 Edition). Brandon, VT: The Foundation for Educational Renewal, Inc.

Faber, A. and E. Mazlish. (1980). How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. New York: Avon Books.

Foundation for Educational Renewal. (n.d.) Pathways of Learning Magazine. www.great-ideas.org.

Holt, J. (1989). Learning All the Time. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Knowles, M. S. (1980). The Modern Practice of Adult Education. New York: Cambridge Books.

Neil, A. S. (1936). Summerhill. (1985 Edition). London: Penguin Books.

Pratt, D. D. (1993 Spring). Androgy After Twenty-Five Years. In S. B. Merriam (Ed). An Update on Adult Learning Theory: New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Vol. 57. (pp. 15-24).

Lawton, G. (2002 Feb.) The Great Giveaway. New Scientist, 173 (2328 - 02) (p. 34). [Online]. http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft/copyleftart.jsp. (15 March 2003).

The Journal of Engaged Pedagogy, Vol 1, No. 1, September 2001. Tokyo: Engaged Pedagogy Association.

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