Page 44 - Beyond Methods

32 Understanding postmethod pedagogy
goals, input, activities, roles and settings, and difficulty” (p.2). Dick Allwright investigated and introduced the concept of exploratory teaching that teachers can pursue in their own classroom settings (see, for instance, Allwright and Bailey, 1991). Chiding the profession for its obsession with method, Stern (1992) proposed “teaching strategies” based on intralingual-crosslingual, analytic-experiential, and explicit-implicit dimensions. His comprehensive and coherent approach to language teaching is derived from “flexible sets of con- cepts which embody any useful lessons we can draw from the his- tory of language teaching but which do not perpetuate the rigidities and dogmatic narrowness of the earlier methods concept” (p. 278).
While scholars such as Allwright, Nunan, and Stern pointed out the pedagogic limitations of the concept of method, others focused on its larger, rather insidious, sociocultural and political agenda. Alastair Pennycook (1989) explained how the concept of method introduces and legitimizes “interested knowledge” that plays an important role in preserving and promoting inequities between the participants in the learning, teaching, and teacher education processes. Educationist Donaldo Macedo (1994, p. 8) called for an “anti-methods pedagogy,” declaring that such a pedagogy “should be informed by critical understanding of the sociocultural context that guides our practices so as to free us from the beaten path of methodological certainties and specialisms.”
Emerging gradually over the years, and accelerating during the last decade, are critical thoughts that question the nature and scope of method, and creative ideas that redefine our understanding of method. Having witnessed how methods go through endless cycles of life, death, and rebirth, the language teaching profession seems to have reached a state of heightened awareness—an awareness that, as long as we remain in the web of method, we will continue to get entangled in an unending search for an unavailable solution; that such a search drives us to continually recycle and repackage the same old ideas; and that nothing short of breaking the cycle can salvage the situation. Out of this awareness has emerged what I have called a “postmethod condition” (Kumaravadivelu, 1994a).
Postmethod Condition
The postmethod condition signifies three interrelated attributes. First and foremost, it signifies a search for an alternative to method