The teacher as facilitator and guide

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 466.

The new media and the culture of learning

The new media not only facilitate a changed culture of learning in institutional contexts, they also demand such changes. They provide new opportunities and challenges by:

• offering a wider range of teaching contents (especially teaching methods);

• enabling more self-directed learning, offering a range of choices, individual learning pathways and freer forms of learning;

• offering teachers and learners the chance to plan and organize courses together (empowering learners to influence the choice of teaching contents);

• freeing learning and teaching from the limitations and constraints of the traditional classroom by opening up and using spaces outside the school/teaching institution;

• facilitating communication between learners and between learners and the teacher via the Internet.

As facilitators, teachers must in many ways know more than they would as directive providers of information. Facilitators must be aware of a variety of materials available for improving students' language skills. In contexts such as these, where bottom-up processes are adopted, this focus on choice and independent use of materials by students under the teacher's guidance has been identified in terms of a pedagogy of resources, in parallel with other pedagogies like the pedagogy of time, the pedagogy of choice, and the pedagogy of cooperation by Rita Balbi (1993) As facilitators, teachers have to be flexible, responding to the needs that students have, and not merely dependent on what has been set up ahead of time by curriculum developers and their idea of who will be in the classroom. Teacher education is a key element to success in this more flexible language classroom, where teachers will have the ability to use and to recommend multimedia and other resources effectively. Teachers must not only know about and understand the functions of different media available in a media-rich environment, they must also know when best to deploy them. In the joint construction of projects with their learners (a pedagogy of cooperation between learners, and of teachers with learners), teachers need to guide learners in the use of word-processing, graphics, and presentation programmes. The integration of audio-visual elements will bring home to learners the fact that the foreign language environment of the target language is as vibrant and multi-faceted as the society in which they live. The presentation of material in a creative manner also aids the development of cognitive processes (Camilleri,2000) In order to help learners to extend and develop their mental and social abilities, to learn how to learn, the teacher himself/herself is a key figure in guiding learners and at the same time practicing skills alongside them, skills like hypothetical thinking, analysis of points of view, and the application of different symbol systems including the graphical, the musical, and even the mathematical as is now possible through the integration of multimedia environments in the language learning process (cf. Camilleri,1998).