My experience includes teaching at both the university and community-college level in the US, Armenia, Japan, and Palau. I am currently trying to apply the principles of liberatory educators Paulo Freire and Ira Shor in my junior college classrooms in Japan. Japan is a quite strange place for the practice of Liberatory Education, but my wife and I have recently been experimenting with Ira Shor's "Extraordinarily Re-experiencing the Ordinary," which is explained in detail in a number of Shor's books, particularly "When Students Have Power" and "Empowering Education." This important concept, I am learning, is as important when working with a population of very wealthy Japanese girls as it is when working with groups of poor students.
In Palau, my students were akin to "at-risk" US community college students; the Palauan students are conversant in English, but they had serious difficulties with "Academic" writing. The challenge was to open these students to critical thinking without "domesticating" them by using the current traditional model of US teaching methodology. If you are interested in opening students' minds without slamming the door to their souls, I can highly recommend Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a starting point. If you want to support both my page and research, visit the Liberatory Education Book Shoppe by following the link below. Our book shoppe is associated with Amazon.com, and I've recently posted some reviews of titles that should be considered required reading for those who want to learn about the practice of liberatory education.
EFL & ESL teachers have an especially difficult task when we try to respect the "native" culture while simutaneously inculcating our students with Western culture. Just by virtue of the fact that we are literally teaching students to rename their world--and we are teaching them the names which are most readily accepted are those of the first world economic powerhouses, we are making implied value judgements on the relative worth of both native language and culture. I love to work as an expatriate, and teaching ESL/EFL is a great way to see the world, but I have real problems with the political and social ramifications of my chosen vocation. I hope that language teachers will read my self critique here and post something in our new ESL Discussion Forum.
