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9.3. THE MACROSTRATEGIC FRAMEWORK
As I begin to discuss my
macrostrategic framework
, I think it is not out of place
to strike a personal note of professional development, in order to provide
some background information. The first opportunity to have a public dis-
cussion of some of the ideas I had been harboring about a macrostrategic
framework for language teaching came in 1988 when I presented a paper ti-
tled “Creation and Utilization of Learning Opportunities” at the 22nd an-
nual TESOL Convention held in Chicago during March 8–13 of that year.
In the same year, I presented “Macrostrategies for ESL Teacher Education”
at the Southeast Regional TESOL conference held in Orlando, Florida dur-
ing October 29–November 1. The first print version of my thoughts ap-
peared in 1992 when
The Modern Language Journal
published my paper,
“Macrostrategies for the Second/Foreign Language Teacher.”
Initially, I was only looking for effective ways of using the traditional
classroom interaction analysis to see how teacher education can be made
more sensitive to classroom events and activities. Like so many other col-
leagues, I have been, for a long time, skeptical of existing teacher education
programs, which merely transfer a body of professional knowledge to pro-
spective teachers, knowledge that may not even be relevant to their local
needs. My 1992 paper, therefore, was
based on the hypothesis that since second/foreign language (L2) learning/
teaching needs, wants and situations are unpredictably numerous, we cannot
prepare teachers to tackle so many unpredictable needs, wants and situations;
we can only help them develop a capacity to generate varied and situation-
specific ideas within a general framework that makes sense in terms of current
pedagogical and theoretical knowledge. (Kumaravadivelu, 1992, p. 41)
Accordingly, I proposed a framework in that paper consisting of five macro-
strategies (see text to come for definition) supported by authentic class-
room data. With subsequent work, I increased the number to 10.
In the meantime, I was growing more and more disillusioned with the
constraining concept of method which, in my opinion, was also constrain-
ing the development of more useful models of teacher education. Even
POSTMETHOD PEDAGOGY
199
more broadly, I was getting impatient with my chosen field of TESOL that I
thought, was marked by a poverty of intellectual stimulus. I felt that the
field was going round and round within a narrow perimeter, jealously
guarding its own safe zone, and without opening itself up to novel and chal-
lenging ideas from the outside world. For too long, I thought, we pre-
tended (and some of us still pretend) that language teaching operates in a
nonexistent ahistorical, asocial, and apolitical space. Disillusioned with the
field itself, I turned elsewhere for intellectual sustenance.
I turned to cultural studies. I started reading, among other things, about
poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Cultural studies
led me to the exciting but challenging world of European master thinkers
such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, and of
immigrant intellectuals such as Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri
Spivak. I learned from them that the borders between the personal, the
professional, and the political are indeed porous, and that we are all con-
stantly crossing the boundaries whether we know it or not, whether we ac-
knowledge it or not. Incidentally, it is gratifying to note that with some gen-
tle nudging from scholars such as Elsa Auerbach, Sarah Benesch, Suresh
Canagarajah, Ryuko Kubota, Angel Lin, Alastair Pennycook, Robert Phillip-
son, and a growing number of others, the field is ever so cautiously opening
up to “alien” thoughts.
My forays into cultural studies opened up a treasure house of knowledge
for me. Because of my own limitations, I think I have not been able to make
full use of the knowledge or the tools of exploration the field offers, but it
certainly has given me a broader perspective and a better vocabulary to ex-
press it. Equipped with a new-found enthusiasm, I “returned” to my parent
field and to my still developing thoughts on the macrostrategic framework.
The immediate result was my 1994
TESOL Quarterly
paper on “The Post-
method Condition: (E)merging strategies for Second/Foreign Language
teaching” (Kumaravadivelu, 1994b). Notice that the new term I used,
the
postmethod condition,
is a clear echo of the title of Lyotard’s (1989) seminal
book,
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
, although, unlike
Lyotard, I have tried to go beyond the constraints of postmodernism by
bringing in postcolonial perspectives as well.
Further thoughts led me to my 2001
TESOL Quarterly
paper titled “To-
wards a Postmethod Pedagogy” (Kumaravadivelu, 2001) in which I at-
tempted to conceptualize the characteristics of postmethod pedagogy (see
chap. 8, this volume, for details). In between, in 1999, I applied post-
modern and postcolonial thoughts to critique the traditional ways of class-
room interaction analysis, and presented, again in the
TESOL Quarterly
, a
paper called “Critical Classroom Discourse Analysis” (Kumaravadivelu,
1999a). A more developed macrostrategic framework with illustrative sam-
ples, reflective tasks, and classroom-oriented projects appeared in my 2003
200
CHAPTER 9
book,
Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for Language Teaching
(Kumaravadi-
velu, 2003a) published by Yale University Press.
Drawing from the just-mentioned works, I outline below my postmethod
framework in terms of macrostrategies and microstrategies.
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