The concept of pedagogy is deeply intertwined with power dynamics and social hierarchies, influencing the way language education shapes individuals' identities and subjectivities. Language education acts as a conduit for examining and challenging social structures, offering both constraints and opportunities for self-discovery.
Race, gender, class, and other variables directly or indirectly influence the content and character of classroom input and interaction. Acknowledging and highlighting students’ and teachers’ subject positions—that is, their class, race, gender, and ethnicity encourage students and teachers to question the status quo that keeps them subjugated
Language education provides its participants with challenges and opportunities for a continual quest for subjectivity and self-identity. language is the place where actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely social and political consequences are defined and contested. Yet it is also the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed
Pedagogy, any pedagogy, is implicated in relations of power and dominance, and is implemented to create and sustain social inequalities
The experiences participants bring to the pedagogical setting are shaped not just by the learning/teaching episodes they have encountered in the past but also by the broader social, economic, and political environment in which they have grown up. These experiences have the potential to alter pedagogic practices in ways unintended and unexpected by policy planners, curriculum designers, or textbook producers
A Pedagogy of Particularity
It is at once a goal and a process. One simultaneously works for and through it. It is a progressive advancement of means and ends. That is to say, it is the critical awareness of local exigencies that trigger the exploration and achievement of this pedagogy
It starts with practicing teachers, either individually or collectively, observing their teaching acts, evaluating their outcomes, identifying problems, finding solutions, and trying them out to see once again what works and what does not
It is antithetical to the notion that there can be one set of pedagogic aims and objectives realizable through one set of pedagogic principles and procedures
language pedagogy must be sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching a particular group of learners pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular institutional context embedded in a particular sociocultural milieu
A Pedagogy of Practicality
Professional theories are those that are generated by experts and are generally transmitted from centers of higher learning. Personal theories, on the other hand, are those that teachers develop by interpreting and applying professional theories in practical situations while they are on the job
Sedimented and solidified through prior and ongoing encounters with learning and teaching is the teacher’s unexplained and sometimes unexplainable awareness of what constitutes good teaching
It aims for a teacher-generated theory of practice. This assertion is premised on a rather simple and straightforward proposition: No theory of practice can be useful and usable unless it is generated through practice
It seeks to overcome some of the deficiencies inherent in the theory-versus-practice, theorists’-theory- versus-teachers’-theory dichotomies by encouraging and enabling teachers themselves to theorize from their practice and practice what they theorize
This pedagogy does not pertain merely to the everyday practice of classroom teaching. It pertains to a much larger issue that has a direct impact on the practice of classroom teaching, namely, the relationship between theory and practice
