| Body | By Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director
Relevance promotes learning. This statement, though simple and perhaps even obvious given the plethora of educational frameworks and resources that exist to promote relevance for students (e.g., Understanding by Design, Project-Based Learning, the International Baccalaureate, Games2Teach, authentic assessment (Wiggins, 1989 and 2011), LinguaFolio, and career academies) can be difficult to systematize in a classroom. After all, the fact that there is an implicit hierarchy in the teacher-student relationship serves to undermine the centrality of the learner in most formal educational spaces. However, this difficulty is not insurmountable. To promote learner relevance, consider these three factors when designing your class.
- Context: Context is as critical for decoding language as it is for promoting learning. Consider, for example, a lesson on describing one’s self to others. If learners are taught about how to say “to be” and how to make adjectives agree, they can engage in the task, but it is unlikely that they will find it relevant or personally authenticate their learning. However, if they dissect a variety of scenarios in order to learn the language function (e.g., describing one’s self when meeting for the first time, describing one’s self with someone with whom trust has been built, and describing one’s self at a job interview), the act of describing one’s self is likely to be personally salient.
- Inquiry: Provide learners with space to inquire and to create knowledge in the classroom. Consider the aforementioned lesson about describing one’s self. In a class discussion, learners could compare and contrast a short videos in the target language of a person describing him- or herself to a peer and a person describing him- or herself to an interviewer. This comparison would require learners to note observations about language, power dynamics, and social cues, propelling the learner beyond mere grammar and vocabulary acquisition. Additionally, since learners could potentially lead the discussion with their observations of the language at hand (with the teacher filling in and explaining what they are unable to dissect), knowledge creation in such a scenario is likely much more agentive than it is passive.
- Empathy: Humans oftentimes have diverse reactions to observed objects. An awareness of and appreciation for these diverse reactions is critical for learners to find relevance in the work that they are doing, particularly in language coursework in which they are exposed to a variety of cultural norms, practices, and expectations. Otherwise, any content that is potentially political (e.g., climate change, gender identity, and racial identity), content that should be embraced and explored, will likely alienate some learners from full participation in the classroom. Teachers should avoid this potential pitfall by using simulations such as those embedded in many video games or role playing activities in which learners are exposed to and experience diverse perspectives.
Establishing personal relevance for learners throughout a school year is not accomplished by considering any one of these factors once, but rather with their thoughtful integration throughout a course of study. As they are considered and implemented in the classroom, learners are likely to take ownership of their learning and feel empowered to use the content of a language classroom in the manners that they find most meaningful, manners that are certainly as diverse as the learners themselves.
References
Wiggins, G. (1989). A true test: Toward more authentic and equitable assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan. 70 (9). 703-713.
Wiggins, G. (2011). Moving to modern assessments. The Phi Delta Kappan. 92 (7). 63.
|
|---|
