Once or twice in the past year, I’ve found myself getting overwhelmed in one of my classes. Usually, it’s not the workload but the subject matter that gets to me. More specifically, it’s the prospect of seamlessly incorporating all of the theories, methods and content we discuss into each of my lessons that feels overwhelming. I think it’s a combination of the broadness of course materials (in some cases quite unrelated from one class to another), my relative inexperience and my perfectionist tendencies. Also, the fact that I’m not currently working with an ELL population complicates things, as class discussions seem more abstract and less applicable. This familiar feeling popped up just last week when I started wondering how the heck am I going to teach students about web tools and their many uses without letting the focus drift completely away from language content? This time, though, I was feeling more overwhelmed than ever.
Reading Scott McLeod’s If we were really serious… list got me thinking more about integration. In terms of digital learning and teaching tools, he suggests that we integrate them into “subject-specific pre-service methods courses rather than marginalizing instructional technology as a separate course.” This makes sense and seems totally appropriate, but I certainly haven’t experienced this in my PSU courses. Yes, we talk about useful TESOL websites where we can find or create handy teaching resources, or where students can play interactive language-based games. And, sure, one professor even introduced a website specifically geared towards language learners, which allows students to write their own personal comic strips…so there’s some of that creation of new and interesting things that we’ve been discussing. For the most part, though, it seems as if there’s an underlying assumption that everything we need to know related to technology and web tools will come from the Computer Ed requirement. As a result, there’s no need to incorporate any digital learning/teaching content into TESOL-specific courses…apparently.
Is it a case of nonchalant chuckling, as McLeod puts it? I’m at the end of my Master’s, but this is the first time I’m really being introduced to web 2.0 technology and tools. In TESOL, we talk constantly about the importance of incorporating specific content areas into our language classes, to give students the kinds of linguistic tools that they need in order to understand certain subject matter while they’re studying that material instead of pre-teaching lists of meaningless vocabulary and context-less grammar. So what’s going on here? If web 2.0 has changed how we define authority and how information and knowledge is distributed, then why is technology instruction (for TESOL students, at least) still being left exclusively to the experts in the Computer Education department?
