apcampbell

The text below was presented in a chat at TappedIn on March 20th, 2005,
as part of the weekly Blogstreams Salon, with Barbara Dieu and Graham
Stanley.   The full chat transcript can be found at the
EVonline Using Weblogs in ESL/EFL Classes community.

Blogging Toward Learner Autonomy - by Aaron Campbell

What I’d like to share with you today consists of three short
parts.  First, in order to understand why learner autonomy is
important, I want to list some of the main problems I see with
individuals and contemporary society.  I’d then like to share with
you my idea of what ‘learner autonomy’ is and how it can help to
address these problems.  After that, I’d like to look at ways that
blogging could help learners move toward autonomy, focusing
specifically on some practical ways that we could use weblogs in the
ESL/EFL classroom to aid in such a movement.   I’ll try to be
as short and concise about this as I can.  Here we go….

Generally speaking, there are five problems I see in the individual mind and in society at large:

• A atomistic, egocentric view of self,
• An underdeveloped capacity to think critically, which leads to…
• A crippled individual agency:  no feeling of personal power to change and shape things, which leads to…
• A lack of participation in community and society, and…
• An unhealthy, ‘blind faith’ type dependency on authority and the institutions of society.

The reason I describe these five conditions as problematic is because I
believe that together, they provide the soil in which much of what I
deem to be undesirable grows: the tyranny of a powerful few,
exploitation and injustice, social and economic inequalities, violence
and war.  This leads to a sense of despair and frustration,
especially when the way out of these messes isn’t clear to us and seems
way beyond our power. 

As practitioners in the field of education, what can we do to help
combat these undesirable conditions?  Well, the answer certainly
isn’t simple, but one thing we can try is to create and facilitate
learning environments that aid learners in moving toward a concept
called ‘learner autonomy’. 

Generally speaking, learner autonomy is defined as a capacity to take
charge of one’s learning, and to self-regulate it on the basis of good
reason and awareness.  This capacity involves critical reflection
and analysis, inner direction, and independent action.  Autonomy
implies an inner freedom, not just from direction by others, but also
from inner compulsions, habits, unexamined beliefs, and the
internalized voices of society in our heads. 

However, since learning is a social activity, we cannot view learners
as completely independent from society and culture.  So a
successful realization of this capacity also involves interdependence,
cooperation, and dialogue (conversation).  In this sense, the
exercise of autonomy is a process involving others.  I feel that
the connotation of the word ‘autonomy’ is often associated with
‘independence’, which is misleading.  We need to make special
effort to remember and emphasize its interdependent and cooperative
aspects.

Ultimately, if we can create learning environments that help students
move toward greater learner autonomy, they can carry that autonomous
mind over into other contexts, namely that of life in society, both on
a personal and political level. 

So what does any of this have to do with blogs?

In my opinion, the act of blogging has the potential to offer the following six experiences to a learner:

• Process orientation
• Conversation and Dialogue, especially across borders of language and culture
• Public Engagement and Community Building
• Opportunities for self-directed, student-centered learning approaches
• Opportunities for reflection and critical thinking
• Authentic communicative interaction in the world

All of the above experiences are helpful in the move toward greater
autonomy.  Yet clearly, the realization of such experiences isn’t
as simple as just providing students with blogs and and showing them
how to post and comment.  Nor is it as easy as having them post
and comment on work they would normally be turning into the
teacher.  As educators, we have got to devise strategies to take
advantage of the potential experiences listed above and create.

Here are some of those strategies:

Teacher/Student relationship: 
The teacher must be compassionate and must understand student
perceptions and expectations of learning in the classroom.  
Creative visualization exercises on behalf of the teacher before class
can help in the former, while assessment of the latter should be
addressed at the very beginning of the school year.

Teacher roles:  Teachers
should see themselves as humble facilitators of a natural process, not
as wise, pontificating keepers of knowledge.  If possible, they
should participate equally in the learning activities, so as to serve
as models.  This could involve running a blog alongside student
blogs and doing the same activities. 

Liberating Structure:  The
structure of the learning program should be designed to initially meet
the student need for structure (whatever it may be), yet should change
over time to become more flexible, to encourage greater student
responsibility.  If learners are already pre-disposed to
autonomous approaches, the assignments could be presented as
’suggested’.

Resource support:  Since
students are online, they should be provided with a set of links to
resources to support their ESL/EFL blogging activities.  This
might include links to online dictionaries, reading material, grammar
games and quizzes, listening sites, as well as class-related support
materials.  Remind students of these resources and always look for
opportunities to point them there.  Work them into blogging
activities when appropriate.

Process Orientation: 
Blogging is ideal for encouraging process oriented approaches to
language use.  Celebrate the process of USING the language to
commune-icate and learn over the ‘finished-product for a grade’ type
orientations. 

Learner-Centered Approaches: 
Effort should be made to allow students to write about what is
meaningful to them.  This should involve setting some personal
goals for their blogs, and choosing topics about which to blog and
about which to read.  It could even involve giving learners an
option to share blogs if they so choose.   It could also
cooperative approaches to setting blogging activities.  Give them
as much control as they can handle.

Critical thinking:  Try to
encourage students to take a critical approach when making a blog
posting.  This can involve them asserting an opinion, taking a
stance on an issue, responding to a reading of their choice, etc. 
I got my students to combine responding critically to a news article
with linking to a blog posting from another blogger.

Encouraging Authenticity: 
Teachers should do whatever they can to encourage students to interact
on their blogs with people from outside the classroom.  This is
especially important for EFL classes, as it gives learners the
opportunity to USE the English language with people from abroad. 
One way this can be accomplished by linking classrooms from different
countries.  Another is by students reading other blogs and
responding, either through commenting or by blogging and linking
back.  Another possibility is to use software that has social
networking features.  Livejournal, for example, groups people
according to interests and has a built-in aggregator function, so that
each students can build a unique community of friends and read and
respond to their postings all from one page.  I believe it is very
important for students to engage publicly and to build community beyond
the classroom.
 
Reflective Assessment: this can
take the form of self and peer assessment.  Learners and tutors
can cooperatively arrive at the criteria.  Encourage reflecting on
the whole blogging process: content of blog posts, online social
behavior, language usage and acquisition, linking habits,
etc.   If your institution requires you to give out grades at
the end of the semester, make sure students know that their input will
count significantly in that process.   Reflection is vital if
students are to understand their current learning habits and beliefs,
which is a necessary component in the process of moving toward
autonomy. 

Overall, I feel that educators have got to start taking the learner
movement toward autonomy more seriously if we are to affect society in
positive ways.   Otherwise, we are not doing anything to
address the main problems of mind and society listed above, and are
indirectly contributing to their prolonged existence.  

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