Classrooms as Coral Gardens

One of the  inspirations for this blog is an article written in 1985 by Mike Breen entitled ” The Social Context for Language Learning – A neglected situation”. It first appeared here:   Breen, M. (1985b). The social context for language learning – a neglected situation? Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 7, 135-158. coralgardens

In it was a central question addressed to the teacher: ” In what ways might I exploit the social reality of the classroom as a “resource” for teaching the language.”

It is, I think, a very different starting point from looking at classrooms than from the role of the coursebook and materials in general , the behaviour of the teacher, the teacher’s personality, or any prepared input that the teacher brings in for the learners to work on. It potentially challenges the way in which we usually prepare for lessons and it also challenges simplisitc relationships between what we might want to teach and what we hope gets learned.

Metaphors are of course very powerful tools in teacher education and I have spent many a teacher development session getting students to conceptualise how they see classrooms and people have come up with trees, ships, plants, swimming pools, race tracks, mountains, roads and many others.

Scott Thornbury had this to say about metaphors back in 1991.

“Images – and the metaphors that help identify them – far from trivialising the search for alternative approaches, offer teacher educators a valuable tool: they are a powerful – perhaps the most powerful – force for change and should be of critical interest to those whose business is educational change.”

(Thornbury, S. (1991) Metaphors we work by: ELT and its metaphors. ELT Journal, 45 (3).)

The coral gardens metaphor is one which has followed me around since 1991 when I was first introduced to it in Lancaster on my MA and one I continue to use. It resonates in the work of Rose Senior, Leo Van Lier and Dick Allwright and has a central role to play in an “Exploratory Practice” model for teacher development.  It comes from the anthropologist  Malinowski’s work in the Trobriand Islands where he spent time with the islands and realised that you cannot understand a culture by just learning the language. Similarly, you can’t understand a language classroom by just looking at the surface classroom discourse.

malinowski2I think the reason I like the coral gardens metaphor so much is not only to do with how much I enjoy swimming underwater, although that may be a part of it, but because it invites us to explore the depth, complexity and underlying meanings of the classroom much more fully than just looking at what is on the surface.

I’m also interested in the way in which this metaphor might be useful for busy, overworked, underpaid teachers, mostly women, to take a fresh look at their classrooms, to step out of the usual routines and to look at what goes on in classrooms in the same way that somebody from another planet might arrive on earth and explore what we do. The important thing with this is that it’s not about teachers becoming academic researchers with rigorous academic tools, it’s just about developing a way of trying to explore understanding what happens in classrooms with our students which may lead to more engagement and involvement on the part of the learners and in the long run better language learning. What do you think?

This is an extract from Mike Breen’s article, I hope you like it and can identify with it:

“A proposal that the classroom could be perceived as coral gardens may be initially reacted to as rather odd.  The metaphor derives from Malinowski’s classical studies of Trobriand island cultures, in particular those investigations he described in Coral Gardens and Their Magic. I offer the metaphor because it entails three requirements for research devoted to classroom learning. First, in order to understand the process of learning within a human group, our investigations are necessarily an anthropological endeavour. Second, the researcher should approach the classroom with a kind of anthropological humility. We should explore classroom life initially as if we knew nothing about it. And third, it is more important to discover what people invest in a social situation than it is to rely on what might be observed as inherent in that social situation. Just as gardens of coral were granted magical realities by the Trobriand islanders, a language class – outwardly a gathering of people with an assumed common purpose – is an arena of subjective and intersubjective realities which are worked out, changed and maintained. And these realities are not trivial background to the tasks of teaching and learning a language. They locate and define the new language itself as if it never existed before, and they continually specify and mould the activities of teaching and learning. In essence, the metaphor of classroom as coral gardens insists that we perceive the language class as a genuine culture and worth investigating as such.”

I was reminded of these things again last September in an IATEFL Teacher Development  SIG discussion group on technology,  when Nik Peachey was writing about not being “a fan of the classroom” and saying that the classroom is “totally artificial”.

This is what Nik said when commenting on one of  the original dogme principles as developed by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury.

“I’ve never been a great fan of the classroom and that’s one of the things I’ve often found puzzling about Dogma and it’s translation to teaching……The classroom is totally artificial and constructed rather like the film studio set and certainly isn’t the ‘on location’ where genuine communication takes place for genuine purposes.”  (Nik Peachey http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ttedsig/message/3690)

In the context of the coral gardens metaphor, I actually think that seeing the classroom as a real place with a real culture of its own is likely to help us to draw on its richness and complexity  as a valuable resource for  learning to take place and not just language learning . If we don’t believe in the classroom as a place where interesting and useful things happen, is it likely that our students will?