AGAINST DOGMA: A PLEA FOR MODERATION

by Simon Gill
I enjoyed Scott Thornbury's call (IATEFL Issues 153) for volunteers to come
forward and join him in his quest "to restore teaching to its pre-method "state of
grace"". I concur with many of his observations; I too worry about zealots
promoting their methodological approach as the one true path and the threats
presented by the deluge of materials dangled in front of teachers and learners these
days - the image of Tantalus in the underworld with his unattainable grapes and
water was one that sprang to mind while reading the piece - but I don't think I'll be
joining the crusade. I'm writing this because I'd like to say why.
One reason for my shrinking back is a matter of the language used. Neither 'dogma'
nor 'chastity', the twin metaphors in which he couches his argument, holds a great
deal of appeal for me, whether used metaphorically or otherwise - too many of the
wrong sort of overtones for me. I associate dogma with an agenda imposed from
outside (above?), rigidity, unquestioning acceptance and nightmare consequences
of nonconformity, and chastity with a sense of not just deliberately cutting oneself
off from a source of great pleasure but also going on to stigmatize and devalue this
source for others. (NOTE: although the body of Scott's article referred several times
to dogme with an 'e', the headline spelt it dogma; on reflection, it was this latter I
was reacting to in this paragraph, a reaction that time has tempered somewhat.)
But there's more to it than just an instinctive reaction to terminology. Let me briefly
describe four teaching situations I've been in:
In 1982-3, with little previous experience, I taught at a secondary school in Sudan.
There was no electricity, no technology, and only a handful of copies of the set
textbooks, which neither I nor my students (who were young men in their late
teens, fifty or more per class, some highly motivated, many totally uninterested)
liked. On paper, then, a situation much like Scott's ELT Eden, and, if I'd had a solid
set of "Dogme-like prescriptions" in my head at that time it would undoubtedly
have made me a far more effective teacher in that particular situation. As it was, we
muddled through with the resources available, a lot of talk and chalk for me, a lot
of pair and group work for them, and a lot of laborious explanation and translation
for the strong ones in the group, who acted as intermediaries.
Two years later I found myself in almost the opposite situation, in a private
language school in Turkey whose technology-driven approach was even reflected
in its name, 'Video English'. Each classroom was equipped with TV, video, and
cassette machines, and the teachers' room boasted a handsome supply of
supplementary materials. The school prescribed a textbook that was accompanied
by video material (quite rare in those days) and it was school policy that the video,
which was, after all, a major selling point in a competitive market, should be used

in almost every lesson. Most of my adult students came as zero beginners and the
style of work I developed was both highly structured, with lots of pattern practice
and grammar work, and involved the use of quite a lot of materials. "Materials
overload"? "OGS"? Most probably guilty on both counts, but it worked. The school
was happy because attendance stayed high, the students enjoyed their lessons and
learned, I enjoyed teaching them, and we spent a great deal of pleasurable free time
together both in and outside the classes.
Now I teach at a university in the Czech Republic. We have pretty much the full
spectrum of material resources: the Web; OHPs; a library, and so on. However, a
lot of the lessons my colleagues and I teach do not draw on these at all. There are
no queues for the photocopier and the mouse on the computer in the computerized
classroom is allowed to slumber undisturbed most of the time. But, and this is
important to us, they are there if we want them, and if anyone came and tried to
take them away from us there would, I am sure, be spirited resistance.
Also in the Czech Republic, once a week I teach a group of junior school teachers.
For the first few weeks of the course I took in no materials at all, preferring to set
up a series of personalized communicative activities that were aimed at stimulating
"the talk that evolved in that simplest and most prototypical of situations". But the
talk didn't evolve, for a variety of reasons, the chief one being because that wasn't
what they wanted. Therefore, after a few weeks of desultory and stilted 'talk' that
only began to approach animation when we switched to Czech I took in a textbook,
a cassette machine, a pile of structured practice activities, and things worked far
more satisfactorily, certainly from my point of view and seemingly from that of all
concerned, from then on.
I would not imagine that most readers would find any of these four different
experiences in any way extraordinary. At least, I hope not, as I think there are a
number of general truths that can be extrapolated from them:
1. The fact that there is no one perfect approach to teaching has been a recurrent
theme in recent years, with notions such as 'the post-methodological era' and
'appropriate methodology' often being used. If we accept that these contain some
truth, then the 'vow of chastity' approach takes on an air of narrow Luddite
prescriptivism. The 'no-tech' approach may work in many cases, but to suggest it is
suitable for all strikes me as extreme. Shouldn't we instead be looking at a flexible
'horses for courses' approach both to teaching and the resources we deploy to help
us in that?
2. It seems to me that it's one thing to deliberately opt for a 'chaste' approach when
it's one of a wide range of alternatives on offer, but quite another in the situation
many teachers and students find themselves in, of being compelled to struggle by
with minimal resources. In my situation in Sudan, for instance, there simply was no
"library, resource centre, bar, students' club" that we could go to, and both I and

my students would, I am sure, have been delighted to be able to enrich our

classroom experience with some of the goodies that Scott's article suggests we
should turn our backs on;
3. In Turkey, on the other hand, I would soon have been in trouble with my
students, colleagues and boss, if not actually out of a job, had I adopted the
approach being suggested here. In most, if not all, real world situations there are
expectations of teachers and I believe that it is the responsibility of a teacher to go
some way towards meeting those; successful classrooms, experience suggests, are
places of compromise rather than confrontation. All students come to their classes,
whether they attend these voluntarily and out of their own pockets or, as in the vast
majority of cases, because they have to, with what Mike Wallace calls 'existing
schemata'. Even with the most subversive agenda it is necessary to engage before
you can begin to subvert!
4. I also think it's much easier to adopt a 'chaste' classroom policy if you've actually
had a chance to use, assess, and then decide to reject the sort of resources Scott is
concerned about. Such a rejection needs to be an informed choice, based on
experience; now, with twenty years' teaching behind me, I'm quite happy to go, as
it were, naked into the classroom when my professional judgement tells me it is
appropriate for the situation, but for the less experienced teacher, who is still
seeking to establish their repertoire of styles, a process of experimentation, of trial
and error, is surely a key element of the process of learning to be a good teacher;
5. I am unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between the use of material
resources and distance between teachers and learners. This week I have taught
lessons to which I took nothing physical at all; I have taught others, to the same
classes, in some cases, which depended on piles of photographs, handouts, OHTs
and recordings. The key question was what the situation necessitated. I am all in
favour of honest and open classroom relationships - indeed, I have come to regard
these, along with other elements, as essential parts of the teacher personality which
is, whatever material resources one may carry into the classroom, the sine qua
non of good teaching - but I strongly suspect that banning the use of all materials is
more likely to turn bad teachers into even worse ones than it is to improve alreadygood ones;
6. As a teacher, I've nothing against imposing on myself and my students the kind
of 'chastity' Scott advocates, subject to the above caveats, but as a teacher trainer I
feel distinctly uncomfortable about imposing blanket bans on the likes of
photocopies and the OHT, for the same reason advanced in my points 2 and 3
above. I believe that all the tools we use, from the humblest piece of chalk to the
mightiest multimedia centre, have the potential to be valuable if used in a
principled way, and that my duty to trainees is to introduce them to as wide a range
of tools as possible and to guide them in developing their own principles for the

assessment and use (or otherwise) of these tools. To simply ringfence large areas
off as forbidden territory is to do them a great disservice.
To conclude, then, I would like to thank Scott for his provocative piece. I share
several of his concerns, but I beg to differ from him in terms of how these are to be
addressed. Rather than consigning all the wonderful tools our profession has at its
disposal to the scrapheap, shouldn't we instead be performing the tightrope act of
not losing sight of the fact that at the core of good classroom teaching and learning
there lie human relationships while at the same time shaping to our purposes
whatever comes along that can enhance those? As I once read in the front pages of
a book whose title unfortunately escapes me now, "don't be prescriptive!"
POSTSCRIPT: Rereading this fourteen months after I first wrote it (March 2000),
there are bits I'd probably rewrite now. Having had time to reflect, having been to
the Brighton presentation, and having read a lot of the message archive at the
Yahoo site, I'm better informed than I was then. However, a lot of the reservations I
expressed in this article are still with me now. There are some truly inspiring and
beautiful ideas associated with Dogme, but I still have my doubts as to the extent of
its applicability; you might say that I espouse a 'weak' rather than a 'strong' Dogme
approach. Scott's original article provoked a strong and immediate reaction in me in
much the same way as the Dogme presentation at Brighton in April 2001 provoked
strong and immediate reactions from the audience; to be honest, that's one of the
things I like about Dogme; anything that rattles so many people and forces them to
think about and perhaps re-evaluate things they may not have given much thought
to before must have something going for it. In the same spirit I offer my riposte to
Scott here, warts and all.
Simon Gill, PdFUP, Olomouc, Czech Republic
https://web.archive.org/web/20111007205324/http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/gill.htm
[Retrieved 13 October 2014]