I was at the BALEAP annual meeting last week and was given a copy of the ‘competency framework for teachers of English for academic purposes’. This is a very useful document to help teacher trainers and preservice/inservice teachers receiving tuition or mentoring to identify and plan training needs and to monitor progress. The framework is available here: http://www.baleap.org.uk/teap/index.aspx – I hope you will find it helpful for your own personal development or for your teacher education courses and workshops.
The one aspect that I was less than fully convinced by was section 4 of the framework which deals with ‘personal learning, development and autonomy’. These are reflected in the follwing knowledge and understanding of:
• the importance of
continuing professional
development
• appropriate professional
terminology
• current issues in teaching
and researching EAP
• the role of ambiguity in
academic enquiry
• the importance of critical
refection on own practice
the ability to:
take appropriate decisions
based on own knowledge and
understanding
write and speak clearly,
coherently and appropriately
engage with academic research
and literature to inform own
practice and communicate thes
ideas to colleagues
and possible indicators are listed as:
relate personal approach to
teaching to a specifc EAP
teaching context
review an article/book/teachi
journal or provide evidence o
• action research
• conference presentation
• published paper
These are not actually at all directly related to autonomy; although professional development and research etcetera may foster autonomy, they are not indicators of autonomy themselves. This rather imprecise use of the term autonomy is very common in general documents and literature. Autonomy is in fact one of only three terms in the framework that are glossed (the others being academic discourse and competency), as ‘both independence and interdependence (Little, 1991; 1994 cited in Blin, 2004). Independence entails taking responsibility for one’s own learning, setting objectives,
and making informed pedagogical decisions based on some form of self-evaluation. The
development of learner autonomy can be seen not only as the development of ‘individual’
autonomy but also as the development of a social, and even political autonomy through
which a group of learners will collectively take responsibility for and control their learning.
(Blin, 2004).
Apart from the fact that it defines autonomy as independence (which I don’t agree with) and interdependence without explaining what the latter means, it does not actually allow an easy operationalisation – surely crucial in a framework for teaching competencies. How do we masure ‘political autonomy’, for example? (It is also odd that it references secondary sources cited in an article specifically on the relationship between autonomy and technology).
I guess this is a problem that is inherent to the term autonomy – in the general (language education) domain perhaps the term is just not clear enough to be terribly helpful?