As for you last question – is this something we grow into? Well, perhaps. But some teachers report growing OUT of it. I.e. they started untrained and unknowledgeable, happily doing private lessons until the day they decided to get trained. Then all the spontaneity went out of it. For those teachers, Dogme is a return to the “lost paradise” of Robinson Crusoe’s island (pace Phillipson!)

What are the affordances in a materials free zone that can enable us to move from the ‘here and now’ to the more interesting ‘not here and not now’?

I also liked Luz’s comment about the “here and nowness” of the method, as indeed this would be true about any mother teaching her child to speak as mothers/parents/caretakers naturally do.

But for education, literacy and numeracy to take place, the child has to go to school and learn facts and use books and materials. Or not?

How does dogme take the learner into the advanced level; how are advanced reading skills introduced without materials, are questions many teachers may be asking.

If materials is equal to coursebooks in this equation, how many readers believe that it is possible for a novice teacher with few resources to go the dogme way…

Good teachers are not made overnight – some people say 3 some 4 or 5 years… opinions vary.

Does dogme possibly place more demands on a teacher? Does it make it a utopia for many ELT practitioners in the field who are badly paid and overworked?

And what about the level of linguistic confidence required? Does this make it the exclusive domain of some but not other teachers? These are questions, not answers…though it just dawned on me they do look like answers.

My own very basic tendency and instinct drives me away from coursebooks.

Despite what my questions may suggest, I have never really seen any single coursebook that I have ever wanted to commit to.

But my young trainees do and so do many of their students.

So to my final question: Is the dogme way something we develop or graduate into as teachers?

And yes, there is always more to methods than methodology. Again, to cite Pennycook, methods are never “disinterested”, but serve the dominant power structures in society. If Dogme is an attempt to subvert these power structures, perhaps the analogy with Robinson Crusoe is not apt, even inept!

Thanks for your post.

I get your point, but am a little disturbed by the metaphor of Crusoe/Friday being used without any reference to its deeply problematic nature in terms of relationship between “Teacher” and “Student” here which is also in terms of colonizer and colonized. I wonder why you haven’t mentioned this at all in your blog other than putting the word “savages” in speech marks presumably to demarcate your disagreement with it as a term.

It has been well documented in ELT that this motif is something a sensitised practitioner needs to aware of as so much of our contemporary field has been constructed around historical patterns that were born into that era of colonialism where it was normal practice for the Crusoe figure to define the very humanness of the Friday figure which is clearly seen in the quotation you use from the novel. Am I the only person who feels disturbed (and thinks it worth a mention) by the matter of fact way that Crusoe (Defoe) sees it as his role to ‘teach’ Friday how to be a efficient and “diligent”? Language teaching here is a representation of much more sinister power exchanges as well as assumptions about superior systems of thought.

You allude to quite a few philosophical developments in your blog which were key during this period – this demonstrates a commitment to thought beyond language teaching and language teaching as a historical process, but what is missing are those voices which then and now see the fault in the method as laying as much in the inequality in the position of the subjects as it did in the practical approach.For more on this see Pennycook 1998 who argues “it is perhaps always worth asking ourselves as English T’s to what extent we are following in Crusoe’s footsteps?” – you have done this above, but only at a methodological level. There is always more to teaching than methods right? For a rounded view of Crusoe, I can’t see how that can be an absence in the analysis. You have made your DOGME point, but I can’t help but wonder at what cost and what has been passed over in the process? You may say that wasn’t the point of your blog. But what illustrative material we use is a choice, as is the way in which we interpret it. I felt it important to share this view with you and I wonder what you think about it?