Page 154 - Beyond Methods

142 Promoting learner autonomy
accustomed, he argues, “to think of politics in terms of elections, parties, revolutions, and so on while neglecting the political content of everyday language and language learning practices. In proposing a political orientation for learner autonomy, therefore, we need a considerably expanded notion of the political which would embrace issues such as the societal context in which learning takes place, roles and relationships in the classroom and outside, kinds of learn- ing tasks, and the content of the language that is learned” (p. 32).
In a similar vein, Pennycook (1997) calls for a version of auton- omy that relates to the social, cultural, and political contexts of ed- ucation. To become an autonomous language learner and user, he reckons, “is not so much a question of learning how to learn as it is a question of learning how to struggle for cultural alternatives” (p. 45). Accordingly, he advocates the notion of a pedagogy of cul- tural alternatives, an educational project that seeks to create au- tonomous learners by providing them with alternative ways of thinking and being in the world, a project that seeks “to open up spaces for those learners to deal differently with the world, to be- come authors of their own worlds” (p. 53).
What the learning-to-liberate approach to learner autonomy emphasizes is that if we are seriously committed to helping learn- ers become autonomous individuals, then we need to take into ac- count the sociopolitical factors that shape the culture of the L2 classroom. More than any other educational arena, the L2 class- room, where almost any and all topics can constitute the content of instructional activity, offers ample opportunities for experimenting with liberatory autonomy. Meaningful liberatory autonomy can be promoted in the language classroom by:
• encouraging learners to assume, with the help of their teachers, the role of mini-ethnographers so that they can investigate and understand how language rules and language use are socially structured, and also explore whose vested interests these rules serve;
• making them write diaries or journal entries about issues that di- rectly engage their sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world, and continually reflect on their observations and the observations made by their peers;
• helping them in the formation of learning communities where learners develop into unified, socially cohesive, mutually sup- portive groups seeking self-awareness and self-improvement;