Method’s Sense—The Starkest Madness: Seeing Methods as the Distance Between Teacher and Student

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Pushing Methodological Boundaries

Abstract

This paper questions the widespread obsession with methods in English Education. We argue that the many distances educators are trying to overcome with methods actually get (re)produced by the desire for a strategy that is already organized, or that is conceived of before the class (temporally) and away from the class (spatially). These conditions ignore the actual context of the classroom, foreclosing the qualities necessary for e/affective teaching: response-ability, flexibility, and attentiveness. Relocating the formality implied by methods onto the teacher’s studentship might reinstate these qualities—a gesture that potentially repositions the teacher from the one-who-knows to the one-who-learns. Through a focus on poetics, we move away from a reliance on “methods” towards a theory of attentive composition.

Authors

• Maya R. Pindyck, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Patrick James Scanlon, Teachers College, Columbia University