TE 812, Language in Literature, three hours a week for five weeks, six students, Fridays from 1 til 4, my first time teaching in Thailand. Buddhism is infectious in this country, wats are everywhere, and I must admit that as I prepared for this course, I was reading two paperbacks, Karma for Today's Traveler, by Phra Bhasakorn Bhavilai, with David Freyer, and The Heart of the Buddha, by Chogyam Trungpa. Both affected me deeply as I thought about teaching.
Karma is written by a Buddhist monk from Thailand who was a physics major in college, then a professional photographer, and then someone who attempted, successfully I think, to bring his own inner world together with the outer world, both based on order, cause and effect. By not starting with a belief in a God who shapes the universe, Buddhism asks us to use reason to work out an orderly system of belief and behavior. Along with The Heart of the Buddha, a more scholarly introduction to Buddhism, Karma got me thinking about how Buddhism and successful teaching / learning are connected. Here's the course purpose as I gave it to my students five weeks ago:
"Imaginative literature is language made into art and experience. We write and read literary art for delight and utility. The delight of literature is the joy of a good story, in whatever form the literature, seen as story, takes. Literature’s utility is the way it instructs us about life and enlarges our linguistic and personal fluency,our imagination and our reason. When literature works for us, it invites us to be compassionate beings open to our world.
The course will introduce us to the powers of imaginative literature (poems, stories and essays) as we apply those powers in a TESOL setting. There is no reason students learning a language cannot partake in the joys and wonders of literature, and every reason they should. I’ve seen students focus solely on ESL instruction in grammar, phonetics and vocabulary building, losing the larger picture of communication that language opens to us.
Since your instructor has never taught this course in this particular form before, it will be a growth and learning experience for all of us. Throughout the course, we will be open to self-reflection and course readjustment. The course, while very short, will succeed when it asks us to stretch our imaginations and reason, and when it reaches the highest goals of delight and enlightenment. With an equal emphasis on theory and practice, the course will empower us to be better ESL and English teachers.
Since I just mentioned enlightenment, permit me to borrow and adapt a few thoughts from the great Buddhist scholar Chogyam Trungpa. Enlightenment is the goal not only of Buddhism, but of most forms of human growth and education. Good teachers and students remove our own psychological and emotional barriers, and our obsessional attachment to habits and the things of the culture, so that we can ask the great questions of life and literature, questions that are already inside us and struggling to get out. Good teachers permit us to be open to our essential being, and to see with our fullest attention directed at the subject of study.
At its best, literature, intense feeling and thought shaped into art, invites us to combine the intellectual and rational with the intuitive and imaginative to see and experience the world clearly. When we can respond with our whole being to literature, as well as when we can create literature ourselves, we begin to open ourselves with curiosity, confidence, strength, vulnerability and a will to grow. We learn to take a chance, a risk. We learn that life is chance and risk.
By reading literature carefully and completely, we identify with what we see in the literature, and soon can become the words and images, the characters and metaphors. Such identification is a form of compassion. We discover soon that the knowledge and vicarious experience we gain from literature becomes wisdom through the compassion that guides our reading and living strategies."
No comments:
Post a Comment