If you get a chance to see Julian Rosefeldt’s movie Manifesto, starring Cate Blanchett, do – if for no other reason than to see Blanchett at the top of her form, playing 13 different roles and as many accents, to often hilarious effect. (You can see the trailer here).
Originally conceived as an art gallery video installation, it has now been spliced together as an art-house movie. Each of its thirteen segments has Blanchett reciting and/or enacting a manifesto, or a cluster of related manifestos, that launched various 20th century art movements: Dadaism, Futurism, the Situationists, Surrealism, etc. The Pop Art manifesto, for example takes the form of Blanchett, with a broad Southern accent, saying grace in advance of a turkey dinner, while her long-suffering family roll their eyes at each successively outrageous pronouncement, taken verbatim from Claes Oldenberg’s 1961 text ‘I am for an art…’: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum….I am for the art of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of kids’ smells. I am for the art of mama-babble…’ and so on. And on.
But my favorite sequence has to be the one near the end, about film, in which Blanchett plays a primary school teacher with a pitch-perfect ‘teacherly’ voice, talking her class through the Dogme 1995 manifesto. Hovering over the kids as they complete an assignment, she gently corrects one of them: “Shooting must be done on location.” And another: “The camera must be handheld.”
The Dogme 1995 film manifesto, apparently drafted over a bottle of red wine by Lars Von Trier and a handful of his Scandinavian film-making buddies, was, of course, the stimulus for the Dogme ELT manifesto. The scene in Manifesto prompted me to revisit both. Here, for the record, are four of the 10 ‘vows’ that adherents to the Dogme film movement were expected to comply with:
1.Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2.The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot). […]
7.Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.) […]
10. The director must not be credited.
Motivated by a similar desire to ‘rescue’ teaching from the clutches of the grammar syllabus, as enshrined in coursebooks, and all the associated pedagogical paraphernalia that goes with it, I drafted an (intentionally provocative) Dogme ELT manifesto which clearly echoes both the style and spirit of the van Trier one, and takes the form of ten ‘vows’ (Thornbury 2001):
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Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students bring to the classroom – i.e. themselves – and whatever happens to be in the classroom. If a particular piece of material is necessary for the lesson, a location must be chosen where that material is to be found (e.g. library, resource centre, bar, students’ club?)
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No recorded listening material should be introduced into the classroom: the source of all “listening” activities should be the students and teacher themselves. The only recorded material that is used should be that made in the classroom itself, e.g. recording students in pair or group work for later re-play and analysis.
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The teacher must sit down at all times that the students are seated, except when monitoring group or pair work (and even then it may be best to pull up a chair). In small classes, teaching should take place around a single table.
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All the teacher’s questions must be “real” questions (such as “Do you like oysters?” Or “What did you do on Saturday?”), not “display” questions (such as “What’s the past of the verb to go?” or “Is there a clock on the wall?”)
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Slavish adherence to a method (such as audiolingualism, Silent Way, TPR, task-based learning, suggestopedia) is unacceptable.
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A pre-planned syllabus of pre-selected and graded grammar items is forbidden. Any grammar that is the focus of instruction should emerge from the lesson content, not dictate it.
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Topics that are generated by the students themselves must be given priority over any other input.
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Grading of students into different levels is disallowed: students should be free to join the class that they feel most comfortable in, whether for social reasons, or for reasons of mutual intelligibility, or both. As in other forms of human social interaction, diversity should be accommodated, even welcomed, but not proscribed.
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The criteria and administration of any testing procedures must be negotiated with the learners.
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Teachers themselves will be evaluated according to only one criterion: that they are not boring.
Re-reading it now, I realise how it was influenced (a) by the specific training context in which I was working, where elicitation sequences and the playing of barely audible cassette recordings were the order of the day, and (b) by my reading of Postman and Weingartner’s radical treatise, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1967) which similarly called for a moratorium on mandated curricula and formal testing. I still hold by that, but the final vow (about not being boring) is just plain silly.
The key vow is, of course, the first one, and its proscription on ‘imported’ materials. While the idea of taking students to the bar or library is clearly impractical, technology now allows us to bring the bar or library into the classroom, thereby realising Peter Strevens’ (1956) injunction that:
“Language is not a sterile subject to be confined to the classroom. One of two things must be done: either life must be brought to the classroom or the class must be taken to life.”
Does anything else in the Dogme ELT manifesto strike you as worth retaining?
References
Postman, N. & Weingartner, C. (1967) Teaching as a subversive activity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Strevens, P. (1956) Spoken language: an introduction for teachers and students in Africa. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Thornbury, S. (2001) ‘Teaching Unplugged (Or That’s Dogme with an E)’. IT’s for Teachers, Issue 1 (February), 10-14.
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