Teaching Without Textbooks: Dogme
By: Varun Bhargava
Tags: Language Learning, Textbooks, Education, Teaching And Learning

In my school years, I had access to pretty much every textbook that I had heard of in class. I was particularly fond of math and English textbooks; Math because I loved solving problems, and could go on for hours finding solutions to the most complicated questions that a textbook could ask, and English because I found new pieces of literature in each book, and I loved reading those. Growing up made me realize that the grass was green on my side, and there are many who cannot afford a textbook. In a few cases, the schools aren’t equipped enough to provide reasonable resources to their students; each school has a budget to work with and we can always expect compromises in subjects that the school might consider less important than others. (The Moral Education textbook in my school was the size of a slim A5 notebook; the English textbook was a bit thicker, and the math textbook was the heaviest of all).

This realization made me search for minimalist teaching strategies; those which require little or no resources and which can help and support learners as much as those which require teaching and learning materials. One of them is Dogme, and it’s an approach for language teaching.

Dogme was developed by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings to teach language to students by focusing on conversational communication between teachers and students (learners) so that a language is ‘revealed’ through the same, rather than textbooks and materials.

Principles

The only question asked in school should be by the pupils.

- A.S. Neill, Founder of Summerhill School

When a teacher finds the interests of a student, language is a barrier that’s necessary to be crossed to cater to those interests. Dogme cultivates the idea that student engagement can be improved through conversation. A teacher may ask a student about their favorite food, which a student may respond to in the same language but without an accurate subject verb agreement and with a limited vocabulary. The response is important though, as the teacher drives frequent use of the language through the interest. It’s also possible that other students in the class may relate to this broken conversation, and engage with the first student as a consequence. The more the students in a class converse in the language, the more they mold it in their own ways to maintain interaction. The teacher has to be a catalyst and a moderator. S/he has to make sure that students create their own materials instead of relying on conventional texts, and learn from each other through these materials.

Thornbury’s idea evolved into a discussion list where more and more educators and teachers joined in to provide their two cents to suggest how Dogme can work. Several principles emerged from the discussion, which were collected by Thornbury (2005). They are as follows:

Materials and Interactivity: As described above, materials should be created by teachers and learners, and should focus on interactivity amongst them rather than opting for the conventional method of having ‘third-party’ materials. Engagement: Materials created in the classroom will improve student engagement, allowing everyone to take part in the conversations and prove to be an initiator for various learning processes. Dialogue: Knowledge is to be produced through conversations. Language is not going to be a one-way lane, where teachers simply dictate and students listen, resulting in a transfer of knowledge instead of production of the same. Talk: Development of the language can be supported and moderated by the teacher, who can direct students and their discussions along certain learning routes. They can also encourage the use of the language in the classroom as much as possible. Emergence: Language emerges from discussions instead of being acquired. This means that grammar and words lie in the hands of students. What they find comfortable to use among themselves is the foundation for development and understanding of the language among them. Growth of the language would cover the essential parts of it without the need for the teacher to specifically teach them to the students. Voice: Each learner’s beliefs, experiences and desires must be respected and accepted in the classroom.

Evolution

Dogme is almost a two-decade old concept, when technology wasn’t advancing as fast as it is in the 21st century. Educational technology is more relevant than ever in classrooms, moving away from CDs and cassettes that were used in class for listening and speech sessions, to personalized tools that can guide students at pronunciation and speech and improve fluency. There are apps like Duolingo which operate on the basis of semi-static (fixed lesson plan) and semi-dynamic (a large variety of questions asked within each topic, depending on learning of the student) teaching methods, allowing even the novice learner belonging to any age group to at least make some progress in the basics of any language they want to learn.

Does Dogme make less sense with the availability of such tools?

Dogme was never developed to replace books. It was (and still is) supposed to be a tool available for teachers alongside books that aid real life interaction and conversation (Thornbury, 2005, p. 2). Since educational technology comes as a replacement to such books, there’s hardly any doubt that Dogme can be adapted for use in classrooms alongside the tech of today.

Kriti Khare discussed in her recent article on Teaching History as an Archival Project how an app called Silent History can be used as an exploration project for learning more about local history and the places which the students might visit in the future. Sharing experiences follows exploration, and the same can happen effectively in a classroom if the students are encouraged to discuss topics of common interest in a simplified manner, instead of learning about the same from a book that uses complex language and unknown terms to describe such information. Dogme would prove to be a beautiful strategy to inspire meaningful exchange of ideas in convenient ways.

Thornbury (2005) described ‘Dogway’, a coursebook that uses Dogme and its principles as its foundation. Such a coursebook would include ‘plenty of white space’ for notes, comments and artwork, prepared by students for the purposes of review, assessment or simply, personalized learning. This ‘white space’ could in fact, be a precursor to development of suitable Interactive Student Notebooks, elaborated upon by Andrew Mills in his article. Thus, Dogme can evolve to accommodate this novel concept that does not require any special resource and may align with the minimalism that Dogme thrives to achieve.

Advantages

Earlier this year, I was moved by the efforts of a Ghanaian teacher who teaches Information and Communication Technology (ICT), without using a computer.

Image taken from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/01/africa/ghana-teacher-blackboard-intl/index.html

The teacher took it in his own hands to teach students what a computer screen would look like when specific software are shown on the same. He wanted to make the experience as realistic as possible for his students, and I haven’t seen a teacher working so hard for it.

Information and knowledge that is useful for students in the real world is more valuable than textual facts. Unfortunately, textbooks are a norm in most schools and are prescribed for almost every subject taught in a school. As I mentioned in the introduction to this article, textbooks may or may not be affordable for everyone which can result in a lack of motivation to study and learn. Having better resources in schools which are freely available for everyone to peruse seems to be a reasonable idea, but what would you have done if you were in the place of this Ghanaian teacher? Schools and students are equally incapable of affording a computer in this case, and if it were me, I would have simply given up.

This is partly the reason why Dogme is more beneficial in countries where education runs on a tight budget. Since it requires little or no material for the purposes of teaching, students don’t need to carry a textbook and schools don’t need to have several references and texts that might help in the teaching process. Such form of teaching feels more spontaneous and as described before, students create and carry their own study materials in their minds, growing as they communicate, deliberate upon topics and analyze them within the confines of the classroom.

But that doesn’t mean Dogme doesn’t prove to be practical in countries where education is amply funded. Dogme eliminates reading in a classroom but stimulates reading outside of it, so that students can visit the classroom each day with more information to share and talk about. Talking about it ensures that each student has something new to learn each day, and each topic adds to an already growing list of interests (which they can read about later) that students may be in the process of cultivating.

Students may also find themselves having a better relationship with their peers and their teacher. Since teachers are a part of the conversation, they get to learn more about a student’s life outside of school. Such kind of learning is important so that teachers can build rapport among the students and become a source of solutions and advice for those in need.