Pruhonice: a model for sharing? 

In March this year, twenty-four teachers and project managers from Central and Eastern Europe met in Pruhonice, near Prague, in the Czech Republic, to review British Studies materials for secondary schools. This three-day event, organised by the British Council in London and Prague, is the first major comparison of British Studies secondary school materials to date. Stephen Elder, a teacher at the British Council in Prague, explains what it was like to join the network.

The conference brought together participants from ten countries in the Central and East European region, as well as the UK and Germany, with the aim of reviewing the wide variety of materials produced over the past twelve months. Of equal importance, of course, was sharing experiences of designing and teaching cultural studies materials and identifying key issues involved.

As I had had no previous contact with a network of British Studies teachers and lecturers I was immediately impressed by the depth and variety of projects represented. The majority were secondary school syllabuses and included projects from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany and Romania which, with funding from the British Council, have created British Studies courses for their region or entire national curriculum. The materials range from textbooks with a student feedback questionnaire, magazine format, loose-leaf folders where teachers can develop the materials themselves, to banks of authentic materials and interactive web sites.

The projects in the Baltic states and Russia were in the earliest stages and their course participants were able to use the experience and expertise available to arm themselves with an array of strategies for setting-up, designing and indeed funding their own courses. This was also the main benefit of the conference for Prague where I have been teaching British Studies over the past year.

The Prague course was devised and taught last year by Simon Francis, whose intention was to run a course bridging the gap between the fact-based secondary school Czech curriculum and the analytical skills needed at university - a gap noted at the conference by lecturers from Czech and Slovak universities. The conference then has given us support for the validity of our course, reinforced a theoretical basis for British Studies that we had been groping towards (a case of reinventing the wheel caused by not networking sooner!), provided us with a mass of materials and design principles transferable to our teaching centres and, perhaps most interestingly of all, suggested ways in which issues of cultural and language awareness and interaction can be incorporated into the broad range of teaching centre courses; general English, young learners, business and ESP as well as the specifically British cultural studies classroom.

Some reflections on materials design for British Cultural Studies

Alan Pulverness

Context is relevant to the study of almost anything. (Clark & Ivaniи 1997)

Transferability or adaptability?

Clearly the notion of transferability of materials has great appeal at all levels, from institutional administrators to hard-pressed teachers. Why re-invent a wheel that someone else has invested a great deal of time and effort in developing? One of the key questions addressed by the Pruhonice workshop was the feasibility of transferring materials produced in culturally specific educational contexts. On the one hand, the materials themselves (for example, those already produced in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Romania) may appear to be highly transferable; on the other hand, the context that has produced those materials may be subject to all kinds of culturally specific constraints. The education system and its institutions, the curriculum (especially the backwash effect of examinations), the age and language level of the target learners, and not least, the cultural context, will all affect the design of materials, in terms of salience, selection and treatment. Adaptation, therefore, seemed a much more likely objective than transfer.

However, the diverse narratives of materials development recounted in Pruhonice had one common leitmotif – the importance of the writing processes that had produced the materials. And perhaps this is where there is scope for transfer. While it may be impossible (and indeed undesirable) to generalise cultural salience, transfer at the level of process and principle may be extremely fruitful. A vivid example was provided at the workshop by Ewa Komorowska from Poland, who illustrated a simple but very effective activity, using a selection of photographs she had taken in Britain of particular things that had puzzled or fascinated her (e.g. a ‘caged’ tomb in an Edinburgh churchyard, memorial plaques on park benches) as a basis for speculation, inference and discussion. This activity was driven by salience that was partly cultural and partly idiosyncratic, and while the materials as they stood might not be directly transferable to a non-Polish context, the design principle of the activity almost certainly is. The lesson seems to be that principles and processes are transferable, and only then are materials susceptible to adaptation.

What do we mean by ‘materials’?

It became increasingly apparent throughout the Pruhonice meeting that the term ‘materials’ actually covered a rich diversity of approaches – from the fixity of printed, bound textbooks at one extreme to teachers’ own texts and lesson plans at the other, with various degrees of completedness or open-endedness in between. To avoid conveying the impression that materials were definitive and immutable, different groups of materials designers had devised ways of incorporating flexibility or suggesting teacher autonomy, e.g. magazine-format supplements (Czech Republic), loose-leaf folders (Germany and Bulgaria), packages of authentic texts as ‘raw materials’ (Latvia) and a potentially interactive web page (Poland). In those cases (Bulgaria and Romania) where the materials included some discussion of principles and/or guidelines for classroom methodology, the writers emphasised the importance of developing analytical and interpretative skills, and the Romanian textbook included a feedback questionnaire to be completed by students, which it is hoped will inform a subsequent revised edition.

One striking common factor across a highly diverse range of materials was the use of media texts and the methodology of media studies. Although other genres were also represented, this would seem to indicate an extensive re-orientation away from earlier models based on traditional ‘life and institutions’ or literary approaches.

"Where do ideas come from?"

This question, posed routinely by journalists to writers, reveals some significant influences on the development of materials for the teaching of British Cultural Studies:

training – ranging from long-term courses provided by academic institutions to occasional INSETT sessions and more informal teachers’ groups

shared understanding of common principles – materials design driven by a strong sense of educational objectives and intended outcomes

teachers’ personal experience – whether first-hand or textual ‘ethnography at a distance’

classroom practice – including oppositional strategies developed by teachers working ‘against the grain’ of coursebooks

authentic materials – not simply as a source of information, but interrogated, problematised, contrasted or set in dialogic juxtaposition

critical perspectives on factual information – being suspicious of and prepared to question all texts

teachers’ desire for professional development – a creative impulse to find a way of transcending the often narrow limits of language teaching (Maley 1993)

students’ needs/interests/preferences – the motivational power of stimulating content, as well as the security of materials

"productive uncertainty" – a deliberately paradoxical term coined by the Hungarian team to describe the exploratory nature of the writing process

Ownership

All the reports presented in Pruhonice emphasised the centrality of writing and editorial processes, together with a profound sense of the writers’ personal engagement in their projects. For example, the Bulgarian group acknowledged the crucial role played by the ‘team spirit’, ‘mutual trust’ and ‘sense of identity’ amongst their group of 60 syllabus writers; the Hungarian group spoke of the importance of ‘bottom-up development’; the Lithuanian group declared their determination to resist a "They say – we do" model of curriculum renewal.

This sense of ownership was clearly a major factor, but groups had also benefited from different forms of editorial partnership with both internal and external collaborators: consultants (in Bulgaria) whose role was partly to provide fresh stimuli and partly to help writers realise their own objectives; interaction between a British writer and a local reading team (in the Czech Republic); a writing team (in Romania) whose British member also had an advisory role; and (everywhere) mutual editorial responsibility amongst the members of writing teams.

What are teachers doing in their classes?

In order to draw any general conclusions from the current initiatives in materials design for British Cultural Studies, we need to look beyond the materials themselves at the characteristic features of the classroom practices that are implied or represented. The list that follows is not intended to be exhaustive, but captures some key themes that emerged from the Pruhonice meeting.

expanding the notion of ‘text’ – to include the widest possible variety of forms: statistics, leaflets, photographs, advertisements, jokes, cartoons, postcards, posters, works of art, literary texts, films, radio and television programmes etc. etc.

ethnography – whether through fieldwork or ethnographically oriented classroom procedures, training students to notice, to be alert to whatever is noteworthy

counteracting stereotypes – a recurrent theme from almost every group, with the aim of "appreciating alterity" or "understanding of and respect for others" (formulations that are perhaps preferable to the implicitly superior notion of "tolerance")

encouraging students to resist texts and respond critically to ‘factual information’ – acquiring sensitivity to ways in which texts position their ‘readers’; realising that readers can develop strategies to enable different readings/re-writings of texts; training students to be suspicious of texts

integrating language learning and cultural learning – not differentiating between two discrete sets of aims, but seeing ‘language-and-culture’ as a pedagogic entity

developing cultural reflexivity – procedures that promote consideration of students’ own environment and cultural identity as a consequence of examining another cultural reality

developing cognitive skills and affective responses – awareness of broad educational benefits and of the value of personal engagement in cultural learning

evolving new methodologies – challenging preconceived attitudes to the roles of teachers and learners; engaging students in interactive ways of acquiring information

Conclusions

As the Hungarian group reminded us, materials production is "slow, messy and unpredictable", but at its best can empower teachers and students through a sense of "depth, ownership and local relevance". These virtues were manifest in materials that offered teachers a variety of ‘openings’ which allowed them to adapt, incorporate or supplement; which in some cases invited them physically to interpolate or substitute their own materials; which even suggested that they could ignore or replace the methodology employed.

In one sense, the weekend was inconclusive – no all-purpose guidelines were negotiated; no universal template was devised. But behind all the apparent diversity, there was a high degree of commonality at the levels of principles, processes and policies:

principles – materials presented or described pursuing the same kinds of objectives and the same kinds of outcomes

processes – the use of authentic resources and the acquisition of skills rather than the accumulation of information

policies – student-centredness, open-ended methodologies, iterative cycles of preparation-trialling-revision

References

Clark R. & Ivaniи R. (1997) The Politics of Writing London: Routledge

Maley A. (1993) in Tomalin B & Stempleski S. Cultural Awareness Oxford: Oxford University Press