Reflections: Third Greater Tokyo Area Local Get-together
a collection of the the participants' voices
Held on Sunday May 13 2007, Waseda University, with Tim Ashwell, Andy Barfield, Kay Irie, Keiko Kawazu, Masuko Miyahara, Mike Nix, Alison Stewart, and Stacey Vye (and many thanks to Jodie Stephenson for arranging the venue)
Kay: This academic year has been busier than even for me partly because I'm involved in advising a group of first-year students and teaching an academic skill seminar course in Japanese. I have been so swamped with day-to-day work that I hadn't had any chance to talk about the course and things I'm learning from the experience/experiment with anybody. So the discussion on Sunday was a good opportunity for me to do that as we went on talking about teaching academic literacy and critical thinking in both Japanese and English, and differences in teaching styles and attitudes towards academic literacy among faculty members at Japanese universities. I felt I needed to work harder to explain to students that academic literacy is something that can be transferred and useful in other classes and in collaborating with other people to construct meaning. The time went by so quickly I didn't even realize we didn't have a break... I wish we had more time because I wanted to continue our dialogue on the differences on writing and other forms expression. I left the meeting feeling uplifted and recharged. Thanks everybody!
Alison: Here are those thoughts. Hope they're not too incoherent. The latest LD-SIG get-together, which took place in Waseda Hoshien Seminar House (thanks to Jodie for arranging the venue!), was a three-hour roundtable discussion about academic literacy. Kay's account of her recent weekend retreat with 100 (!) colleagues in which they were all inducted into a new Japanese literacy program for the 1700 freshman students at her university. Apart from the mind-boggling scope of the initiative, which I cannot even begin to imagine being possible at my own very much smaller university, Kay's experience sparked a shared interest in the challenge of defining academic literacy and teaching it to our students.
For me, the talk reanimated my age-old dilemma of process or product. Much of the discussion centred on process matters – particularly how to get students to 'process' rather than just regurgitate, what they read (and Masuko had a great tip for note-taking). In my own classes, I've shifted recently to more of a concern for the writing product, trying to give students models or examples of the kinds of texts that they need to produce, or that they can compare with texts they have produced. Though I'm finding a more product-oriented approach to be rewarding with students, it does raise all those awkward questions about who students write for and what their purposes are. And that's something I'd like to talk about some more...
Stacey: The greater Toyko LD get-together fell on Mother's Day, so I was inspired by the people that got together, most of whom have children who may have been waiting for their LD-Sig parents to come back home for celebrating mom. A big thanks to Jodie Stephenson for providing the room for our third get-together. Because we were a smaller group, perhaps we were able to share thoughts about learning, teaching, and various processes in academia specific to Japan with the whole group during the entire session. After talking about characteristics of what a "zemi" or university seminar classes are, their relation to autonomy, and the life-long obligation that teachers sometimes have with "zemi" students explained by Keiko Kawazu and Kay Irie, we went on in depth about academic literacy.
On that subject, Mike Nix mentioned that students don't often have the opportunity to build a relationship with texts or even challenge texts; then Alison Stewart mentioned that for the university entrance examinations that students are encouraged to acquire a skill for memorizing a body of facts rather than critically thinking about what was learnt. Those thoughts reminded me that, in the process of learning for tests the real meaning of what the authors convey to some degree gets stripped away in the translation of texts. After Kay Irie mentioned her academic skill seminar course taught in Japanese with 99 other teachers who ask students to summarize texts in a paragraph, Masuko Miyahara asked this amazing question to Kay, "So what are you doing?" Andy Barfield chimed in afterwards, "The same paragraph the whole year?" And we all had a good laugh, and I felt Masuko and Andy's comments guided us in continuing our discussion on academic literacy.
Finally, we talked about the LD-Forum at JALT2007. The consensus from the greater Tokyo LD-Group was that to get our local groups continuing to meet up and/or start meeting, we need to be able to have a larger get-together at the conference and meet in person to see what issues and ideas current LD-SIG members are interested in. When Tim Ashwell mentioned that teachers really like to talk about teaching with other teachers who are into the same thing, and I thought people chimed in with his feedback on ideas for the Forum. It seems especially right this year to provide a Forum where teachers can have a chance to discuss learner issues they feel passionate about.
Tim: Many thanks to everyone who participated in last Sunday's discussion and especially to Kay who started us off and kept us going for three hours on a quest to understand the pluses and minuses (sp?) of an institution wide program to teach "academic literacy". The discussion really made me question the wisdom of having such a program taught in Japanese for first year university students even though I have often thought this would be a great idea to introduce at my own university. As Kay says in her reflections, it is difficult to sell this kind of course to first year students partly because they do not yet see the relevance of what they are learning and partly because they have come straight from high school where the kind of skills they need were not developed. I am now beginning to think that a first year introductory writing course followed by a more "academic" second-year writing course like we have at Komazawa may not be such a bad set-up after all. Mind you, it might be a lot easier if these courses were taught in Japanese rather than in English as at present.
The discussion was also interesting for me from the point of view of selling this kind of program to staff. Kay's descriptions of the stony-faced silence which greeted the course coordinators' presentations at Hakone made me laugh, and our discussion made me wonder how any such initiatives would be greeted in my own department.
Good luck to Kay with the course this year! I'm sure a lot will be learned which will make it an even better experience for teachers and learners next year!
Andy: One of my early surprises in the discussion was not so much that Kay's faculty had decided to try to put into action a coordinated attempt at academic literacy in Japanese, but how and why this had become necessary at this point? Is one interpretation that, for some years, the students at Kay's faculty have been struggling to engage critically with issues in their majors? Or is it that teachers have been struggling to find ways to help students engage critically with issues? Or is it a bit of both? Or something else? It seemed to me that our discussion started from the students' lack of critical interest or engagement, but, as we talked more about this mandated teacher education programme, we were talking more and more about how teachers might also find it difficult to engage critically with their own "faculty" development. I think this is one reason why I enjoyed the discussion so much because we were making lots of different connections about learner and teacher development. We were not satisfied, in other words, with just looking at the issues from the learner's side or the teacher's side.
Another thing that struck me was our desire for coherence in talking about curriculum issues. It seems like we are hopeless romantics longing for the ideal of working with a curriculum that makes sense for everyone concerned (teachers, students, and administrators as the three main parties to the challenge?).This kind of "Alas-coherence-I-knew-thee-well!" view seemed to be there as we moved on to talking about "huge discrepancies between classes" and the effort to "create a uniform curriculum that is fair to students". I remember thinking that it's a while since I've heard the "fairness" argument, and that it seemed to be much more of a common issue a few years ago. In our continuing discussion, the fairness argument linked into coherence, or some kind of coherent curriculum on paper – the kind of documents that you may need at some point for describing what any particular education programme is about, but which are often used to present a particular institution in ideal terms to ourselves and to other parties, such as colleagues, funding bodies, the general public and potential students. While accepting that we do need such documenting of the curriculum as a necessary descriptive stage and basis for discussion, recently I've come to think that we are letting ourselves in for a lot of disappointment, even frustration, in looking for such ideal coherence on paper - particularly if it is driven by market forces, rather than educational needs. What if we were to look at the gaps around the idealized models that we have? To start to question the fissures that we see, and why they might be there – and also whether the fissures that I or you see are the same or different from the fissures that someone else sees? So, that's where I was in some of my own thoughts about academic literacy, learner autonomy and faculty development– questioning the rationale (and the power) of "one-size-fits-all" solutions.
Masuko: Being a bit wary about meetings without any agenda, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by how the discussions evolved at our most recent get-together last week. Kay's comments of her university's recent "innovation" sparked off an interesting exchange on academic literacy and critical thinking (CT). With various input from people working in their respective contexts, I think we got quite involved that we even forgot to take any breaks!!
I could relate to Kay's concerns with the new program since attempts to introduce "critical thinking" (CT) is one of challenges that we face at the beginning of the academic year at our university as well. Students who seem to come from a more passive "learning culture" appear to find this approach quite "alien" and difficult to digest. Lately, I have abandon trying to "talk" about CT, but instead, have concentrated on what's NOT a critical approach. This contrast appears to sink in better with the students in my context.
Our gathering here is a good illustration of how discussions can organically generate into a thought-provoking experience. Although we had started out talking about Kay's situation, using that as a starting point, we ended up exchanging a lot of ideas which covered several topics. By the end of the day, I was pretty exhausted, but stimulated by it all. Hope we can hold discussion sessions like this more often.
I would like to add a note of thanks to all the people who made the special effort to organize this SIG meeting (in particular, Stacey and Jodie, for making the arrangements for the venue). Thank you!!!
Keiko: Thank you, Jodie, for booking the nice room for the 3rd LD get-together meeting. (And thank you, everyone for being so patient with me, too!)
The discussion at Waseda University Hoseiin House was very active and fruitful for me, too. To be honest, I was not so sure what to say in the discussion as everyone else seemed to be a university professor, while I have never taught at a university. However, it turned out to be so meaningful for me to share worthwhile stories with others by participating in the meeting.
I was especially curious about Kay's comments about her situation with the new challenge of teaching academic literacy to her Japanese students using Japanese language. I wondered how academic literacy and its surrounding concepts could be fostered in a solely Japanese setting and using Japanese language. I think the students need to shift their mood from Japanese to western to accept western ideas and cultivate such an attitude toward academic literacy at first. It would require a lot of work to switch and remove their cultural barrier from Japanese to western.
In this regard, I would add that the multiple levels on which language learning operates create diverse emotional demands on students. My question: If students get deeply emotionally involved in the process of learning, will they perform better? In short, the desired outcome is a healthy synthesis of the emotional and analytical that will lead to enhanced learner autonomy.
While there remains a great deal of research and analysis to be done linking these areas of learning theory -- specifically to language acquisition among Japanese students -- there exists sufficient evidence to suggest that a confluence of these emotional connections would precipitate a great leap forward in the field of language instruction....Mmm... I would explore more in my dreams tonight.... Thank you and good night!