Maintaining Control: Autonomy and Language Learning

12. Autonomy and control in curriculum development: ‘Are you teaching what we all agreed?’

Autonomy and control in curriculum development 217 Perhaps, then, the most significant insight for us is that, in its most fundamental form, the curriculum is the working relationships between the people party to it. The quality of the curriculum is very much the quality of the critically engaged dialogues around it — with adjunct faculty, administrators, students, full-time colleagues, and between ourselves. It is also the forms of discourse in which the development of that curriculum is textualised, in messages, information packs, and guidelines, as well as in face-to-face exchanges (cf. Palfreyman 2003). Finally, the quality of the curriculum is also embedded in recognition of the political and economic relationships that structure the interactions between all the people involved. (From the 2004 draft of this chapter1 ) Introduction The purpose of curriculum development is usually to achieve greater coordination and integration between people, resources and practices. Even when such reforms are not explicitly directed at the promotion of learner autonomy, many challenging issues about autonomy and control at the curricular level are still raised: Who takes control? Who maintains control? In whose interests? And why is control of these different people, resources and practices being attempted here and now? For whose benefit? For several years we have been involved in developing an academic literacy-focused English curriculum in the Law Faculty at Chuo University in Japan, where we have tried to secure the 12 Autonomy and control in curriculum development: ‘Are you teaching what we all agreed?’ Mike Nix and Andy Barfield 218 Mike Nix and Andy Barfield participation of colleagues in the English Department, other members of the Law Faculty, administrative staff and students, in its design and implementation. In particular, we have been concerned with including our part-time English teachers — who teach about 75% of all the English classes but previously had almost no input into curriculum decisionmaking — in a sustained process of collaborative curriculum and teacher development. In 2004, in an earlier version of this chapter, we argued that the ‘liberal-humanist’ approach to curriculum development that we had adopted had helped (and would continue to) foster the development of interdependent autonomy among teachers. It also implied an interdependence between teacher autonomy and learner autonomy (Little 1995, 2001b; Barfield et al. 2002; Vieira & Marques 2002; Vieira 2007) in that we assumed that the very diversity of approaches to teaching and learning that we and our colleagues shared would become, through continued dialogue and collaboration, a resource for common learner, teacher and curriculum development. Yet we faced an enduring paradox: in order to encourage a curriculum development process that might ultimately promote autonomy for both students and teachers, we decided to disavow learner autonomy as an explicitly mandated aim of the curriculum. Rather, we saw a critical engagement with academic literacy by teachers and students as the appropriate vehicle for promoting teacher and learner autonomy across the curriculum. Now, in 2007, we can point to tangible benefits from this liberalhumanist approach, such as a vibrant sense of involvement for many part-time teachers in the curriculum development process. However, we have also been witness to new strains and tensions emerging, as different, even conflicting, views of academic literacy, learning and teaching have come to light. We have become more and more aware of how pressure to talk about teaching can actually produce groundswells of insecurity and resistance. Understanding the contradictions and limitations of the liberal-humanist approach has therefore become an important part of sustaining the participatory and democratic quality of the curriculum development process. In this chapter, we rethink the value of cooperative development (Edge 1992, 2002) and open dialogue (Fenwick 2001: 83–4) approaches to curriculum development, and we explore what a critique of liberal-humanism implies for a situated reinterpretation of teacher and learner autonomy. Autonomy and control in curriculum development 219 The economic and institutional context From an economic (and educational) perspective, the Faculty of Law at Chuo University is not unusual in its use of part-time academic staff.2 The faculty has a total of 6,100 students in its four-year undergraduate programme, and 442 teaching staff altogether. Fully 327 teachers are employed on a part-time basis. Roughly the same proportions apply for the whole of the English programme, with 63 part-time teachers and 19 full-time staff under the remit of the English Department (see Table 12.1 for details). Table 12.1 The...