The Language Teacher

Teacher and Learner Development: A Curriculum of Change

Edited by Cheiron McMahill with Andrew Barfield,
based on an interview with Amy D. Yamashiro and Jennifer Sakano

For this third installment in the teacher education series, Cheiron McMahill interviewed two global issues teachers to find out how teacher development proceeds hand in hand with learner development as the basis for sustainable curriculum change.

Amy D. Yamashiro and Jennifer Sakano are English instructors at Keio Shonan Fujisawa Campus Junior and Senior High School (Keio SFC). Their students may be some of the most academically gifted and privileged high school students in Japan. In terms of English, about 35% of these students are returnees from abroad, and many of them speak English as their native language.

This background does not necessarily make these students easier to teach. In fact, they offer enormous challenges precisely because of their high level of ability and confidence. Sakano notes, "The first year I had to revise my plans so often because they could do so much more than I'd dreamed of. I ended up teaching a survey literature course complete with Shakespeare and James Joyce to sixth-year returnees because they wanted it."

Sakano and Yamashiro quickly realized the risks they would have to take if they were to meet the challenge of teaching such students. The limitations of strictly grammatical and functional approaches soon became apparent, especially in classes containing returnees. But Keio SFC instructors seek to motivate all their students to apply their reading and translation studies to real communication. Accordingly, to develop students' critical thinking and communication skills in English, they focus either individually or in cooperation on content themes like the environment, problems facing teenagers, and so forth.

International Month and the Model United Nations

During the school's first year, instructors decided to organize an annual International Month for which all English instructors would develop an integrated curriculum centered on the study of various countries. This event proved to be a stepping stone to integrating global issues across the entire curriculum.

In International Month, Sakano says:

. . . we present authentic material that we've gathered on the countries, such as videos, folktales, mini-biographies of famous citizens, and information about various issues such as the International Whaling Federation and Norway's role, or female infanticide and dowry burnings in India, or the history of the IRA and Ireland. Students participate in discussions, research and do speeches and reports about topics of their choice, and finally get to ask questions to a citizen of the country who comes to our school.

When Yamashiro was hired at Keio SFC, she had just completed her master's thesis on the Model United Nations (MUN), and had been using it for a year at Osaka YMCA International High School. Yamashiro quickly grasped how International Month and the MUN could be linked -- International Month "provides students with a manageable introduction to country research that will help them when they are responsible for research for the Model United Nations." Timing also favored the adoption of the MUN at Keio SFC, a new school with no English curriculum yet in place for the soon-to-graduate seniors. The MUN seemed an appropriate rite of passage.

As Yamashiro describes it, students in the MUN ideally spend up to 100 coordinated class hours learning and practicing the UN rules of procedure, researching world issues from an individual country's perspective and then representing that country's policy in a group of 70 to 100 students. (Keio SFC instructors only had 25 hours to prep students the first year.) The students are totally in control of the meeting, the agenda, and the outcome -- the resolutions with amendments. Among the language and communication skills they learn are debate, reading, university survival, and public speaking. It is a huge project: on the days of the actual debates, there are 300 second- and third-year students participating in three simultaneous debates, with about 150 first-year students acting as pages. Three lecture halls must be reserved from the university, AV equipment set up and run, posters made, brochures folded, and so forth. All these tasks have to be delegated and supervised, if not performed, by the instructors.

From teaching global issues through International Month, the MUN, and in other theme-based classes, Sakano and Yamashiro have discerned important differences between teaching English through global issues and other approaches, including other content-based EFL courses -- differences in the goals of instruction, the roles of teachers and students, evaluation, and peer mentorship.

Questions of Process: Learners and Curriculum Development

First of all, instruction aims simultaneously at the acquisition of language and content. Student errors and questions related to grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, writing skills, and so on are treated, not as a syllabus determines beforehand, but as the need occurs, within the content context of the class. The main benefit of integrating language and content is increased motivation on the part of the students. The themes are up-to-date and relevant to the headlines of the day. Sakano says that teaching feels "more immediate -- more burning." Students are engaged with such gripping, emotional topics as discrimination against homosexuals, racial minorities, AIDS, and war.

A class based on deep engagement with global issues must face the risk of unduly influencing students' opinions. Yamashiro describes this dilemma:

The main concern for me as a teacher of global issues . . . is to maintain a value-free environment . . . . While many of the other subject areas are also loaded with opinion, it is easier to discuss these opinions in their respective socio-historical contexts, such as in attributing theories to their authors, or maintaining that this is simply one of many perspectives on this event or piece. However, since many global issues educators teach these issues because they believe there is a right or a wrong way to approach these topics, such as in preventing war or in reducing environmental destruction, I think there is considerable danger for some of these same educators to simply replace one indoctrinated belief with another.

To guard against undue influence, Yamashiro sets an instructional goal for "students to question their belief systems, so that they at least understand why they believe something, rather than just believing something because they think it's 'right.'" Sakano explains in a similar vein:

About some issues . . . it's obviously okay to clearly state my opinion . . . but when it comes to other issues like abortion, for example, I have to be careful to keep my personal feelings in tow. I'm sure the students know which way I lean on these issues, but I'm more interested in them making a decision after viewing all the issues. So this goes back to my goal of helping create caring, informed citizens.

These instructional goals have lead both Yamashiro and Sakano to redefine their roles and those of their students. Yamashiro refuses to "play the expert," describing herself as a "language consultant," and encouraging students to call her by her first name or "Ms. Yamashiro" rather than "sensei." She approaches students as equals with opinions and ideas to express. Sakano likewise feels her role is rather that of "an information gatherer and a discussion leader," and "just another person with an opinion." She also focuses on each student "as a thinking individual and a citizen, and less just as a learner."

To fit the exigencies of the global issues EFL class, Yamashiro and Sakano supplement traditional evaluation methods with an intricate process of feedback, negotiation, and reflection that benefits instructors as much as students. Students give feedback to instructors on their teaching and the classes and reflect on themselves in journals, speeches, and oral diaries. They give more formal comments on questionnaires and other instruments throughout the year and after any major projects. This feedback is often shared and discussed among instructors, especially when it concerns a program-wide event such as International Month or the MUN. Students also give each other feedback on their presentations.

On the other hand, students at Keio SFC still receive traditional grades, and instructors accordingly base grades on quizzes, tests, presentations, and classroom participation, including attitude. In this sense, Sakano stresses the importance of making sure that students know what the particular instructor's criteria are at the beginning of the term, especially for difficult-to-rate factors like attitude and effort. But even here students are encouraged to negotiate with the instructor or devise their own criteria for evaluating an activity such as a speech. Yamashiro noted that encouraging students to negotiate quiz dates would help prepare them for MUN discussions, and teaching students to "use notes for open book quizzes . . . would help them prepare for the referencing they would need to do during the MUN conference."

Although both Sakano and Yamashiro feel confident that their students are improving their general English ability more than they would with other approaches, they regret the absence of an objective measure of comparison with competing curricula. Such an instrument could further strengthen the argument for formalizing the inclusion of global issues in English classes, especially in the eyes of administrators. In addition to developing their own instrument, Sakano and Yamashiro are considering standardized, commercially available English tests which contain a speaking component. One caution they make in the meantime, however, is that any in-house exit or progress tests be revised to test students on the listening, speaking, and reasoning skills they are learning in global issues classes. Too often innovation ends with the class or curriculum, without extending to school-wide testing, so the benefits of innovation may be indeterminate or misconstrued through the results of an obsolete test.

Questions of Process: Teacher Development

Teaching global issues in the language classroom requires extra time and peer mentorship that not every instructor is willing or able to offer. Creating original materials and a syllabus for a single class is demanding, but even more is creating an entire integrated curriculum. In addition to her full-time duties as an instructor, Yamashiro had to create a curriculum with other instructors, walk them through it day by day, and coordinate both the practice and the actual debates. Yamashiro testifies, "I was like a visionary who could see the future clearly in my mind, and had the responsibility for leading my colleagues as well as our students to reach that goal." She admits that "with all the setbacks, I was ready to die. John, my husband, was the MUN widower."

Her example and those of other committed instructors like Sakano, however, inspired others, including part-timers, to put in extra time in meetings, preparation, and peer mentorship. Still, Sakano maintains that there is never enough time, and that lack of institutional support creates an undeniable drag:

In retrospect, I wish I had more peer mentoring or any type of discussion about what I did in my global-issues classes. The other teachers at my school are doing really interesting things in their classes, and we do try to talk about them, but time is so precious to everyone. Occasionally we get the chance to teach a unit with another teacher (such as International Month or the MUN) and then I'm always amazed at the potential we have to support each other in developing material. But I feel there's rarely enough reflection in a group, and I often wonder if the other teachers agree that what I'm teaching is important for our students . . . . I just don't feel the support from our administration in terms of the time it takes to develop a curriculum of the sort we seem to be working toward.

After talking with Sakano and Yamashiro, however, it becomes clear why they go the extra distance to teach global issues in their English classes and work to establish them across their school. Both instructors and students are pushing themselves to their limits, and each success builds upon the one before, so that nothing less than engaging the world in the classroom is ever satisfying again. English becomes a medium through which instructors and students can feel that their individual opinions and actions matter in making the world better. The life-and-death nature of global problems gives them the extra push, the urgency to do so. As one student at Keio SFC commented, "English isn't a thing that is taught but a way to learn this year."

Cheiron McMahill is the 1996 Teacher Education N-SIG publicity coordinator.