Task planning
Planning lessons that include the teaching of ethics and values
Step one: Preliminary considerations
Why ethics and values?
The role and place of values and ethics in education
Making ethics and values explicit through lesson contents and class processes
The teaching of ethics and values in the school does not merit a vast justification. Experience tells me that all what I really learnt at a school is a certain discipline and a set of attitudes towards life in general. Perhaps the title of a couple of books. But teaching values and discipline is, in any case, what Michel Foucault suggests in Discipline and Punish (1977) are la raison d’être of these institutions. Foucault shows that the contemporary emergence of the prison, the school, the clinic, and the barrack is not accidental. On his view, the task these have in common is to make governmentality possible, to create “docile bodies”. Contents are just a way to get them through.
Thought this interpretation may be subject to harsh criticism, it is not sound to deny that the school is anyhow the place par excellence to mend behaviors and induce attitudes. It is necessary to understand discipline and attitude, which are the terms we use here to mention ethics and values, not merely as a coercive power that constraints the individual, but as an essential substance of a culture. A culture is, among other elements, a set of knowledge, and an empirical and mental custom which have an intrinsic value. Reducing more, culture could yet be defined as a set of values that lead to action.
But, given that a culture has as many explicit as implicit elements, the leit motiv of action is not always obvious. Is in this view that one can understand the theory according to which culture is mainly the communion that a group of people has with an unconscious (see Jung 1970). There are elements of it one is taught at by the adults during the childhood (whether they be practical or attitudinal, taught by modeling or by spoken encouragement) and there are others that one just learns by direct experience and are not accompanied by a patent proposition (to know how, in G. Ryle’s terms), namely, an actual instruction to do something in the manner that is said.
Assuming the idea that language is one of the places where a culture reflects itself the finest, or that it is one of the most important features of a culture (Wittgenstein 1958), it can be understood the place that teaching ethics and values has in the FLT classroom. Our case could be stated in the following way: teaching a language is also teaching a culture and, thus, a set of values and judgments that are shown through action or speech (or even, as we will see below, speech acts). We are referring here to some speaker’s values and not precisely to the Kantian categorical imperatives that are read: “act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature” and “treat everyone as an end in themselves and never exploit them as means” (Kant 1980), which constitutes the philosophical roots of modern politics. An ethical speaker ought to be understood following Grice’s (1989) maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner.
In the FLT classroom the teaching of these values is implicit in the language the teacher uses (if he has a good proficiency in the target language) but is also clarified by him when he instructs the learner in the formality of the right use. The right use is not, of course, a rigid category that applies to every statement done as far as a certain word is used. The right use is not the dictionary meaning. Right use, as the sense of words, depends as much on the meaning of words as on the context (see Wittgenstein op. cit.). Words meaning depend on the circumstance. But there is also a matter of politeness, say, that is, I believe, directly related to the problem of ethics: there are words you may use in a place but not in other. An attorney, for instance, can say “fuck” in a meeting with close friends and not being disapproved, but if he pronounces the same word in a formal place will be disdained by the people around him and if he dares to do likewise in an audience before a judge he will surely be ruled out. Of course the word fuck does not help much to illustrate our case, because it is a word not very well seen in most places, except around close people in an informal moment. But one could do the same point with the word “dude”, when used as a synonym for “man” or “gentleman”. Even if an attorney will not be formally penalized because of having used it in court, the effect he could have on the audience and on the jury may be lesser, because this is not the use of language that is expected for the circumstances[1].
The latter case of the use that an attorney does of fuck takes place within an institutionalized space. In the broad use, one understands that language is an institution (convention) because it is born from people’s desire to name things and communicate thoughts. But by institutionalized here I mean something more: a clearly stated set of rules. For the case of the attorney the book prescribes not to use bad words, under pain of forfeiture. But prescription in the field of language use is not always put in terms of what cannot or shouldn’t[2] be said. Prescription is also a way to give instructions on how to say things accurately. If the learner happens to live in the target culture the prescription is not that necessary, because the right ways of stating things are learnt by experience. In an FLT classroom, however, real experience in the target culture is in most cases rather poor, given that the learner has only the teacher to rely upon. Correct ways of linguistic behavior need to be talked out, in both senses, grammatically and in the use. If only the latter is taken into account, correct use of language won’t get to the learner. In brief, the problem of the use of language is certainly an ethic problem: the value of the speech acts that a speaker is to perform depend on the context. A language construction is not "good" or "bad" but "happy" or "unhappy" (Austin 1965). To know this ethics of the discourse is to know the language. The task of the foreign language teacher is then to train the learner in this linguistic ethics.
Planning lessons that include the teaching of ethics and values
Step one: Preliminary considerations
Why ethics and values?
The role and place of values and ethics in education
Making ethics and values explicit through lesson contents and class processes
The teaching of ethics and values in the school does not merit a vast justification. Experience tells me that all what I really learnt at a school is a certain discipline and a set of attitudes towards life in general. Perhaps the title of a couple of books. But teaching values and discipline is, in any case, what Michel Foucault suggests in Discipline and Punish (1977) are la raison d’être of these institutions. Foucault shows that the contemporary emergence of the prison, the school, the clinic, and the barrack is not accidental. On his view, the task these have in common is to make governmentality possible, to create “docile bodies”. Contents are just a way to get them through.
Thought this interpretation may be subject to harsh criticism, it is not sound to deny that the school is anyhow the place par excellence to mend behaviors and induce attitudes. It is necessary to understand discipline and attitude, which are the terms we use here to mention ethics and values, not merely as a coercive power that constraints the individual, but as an essential substance of a culture. A culture is, among other elements, a set of knowledge, and an empirical and mental custom which have an intrinsic value. Reducing more, culture could yet be defined as a set of values that lead to action.
But, given that a culture has as many explicit as implicit elements, the leit motiv of action is not always obvious. Is in this view that one can understand the theory according to which culture is mainly the communion that a group of people has with an unconscious (see Jung 1970). There are elements of it one is taught at by the adults during the childhood (whether they be practical or attitudinal, taught by modeling or by spoken encouragement) and there are others that one just learns by direct experience and are not accompanied by a patent proposition (to know how, in G. Ryle’s terms), namely, an actual instruction to do something in the manner that is said.
Assuming the idea that language is one of the places where a culture reflects itself the finest, or that it is one of the most important features of a culture (Wittgenstein 1958), it can be understood the place that teaching ethics and values has in the FLT classroom. Our case could be stated in the following way: teaching a language is also teaching a culture and, thus, a set of values and judgments that are shown through action or speech (or even, as we will see below, speech acts). We are referring here to some speaker’s values and not precisely to the Kantian categorical imperatives that are read: “act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature” and “treat everyone as an end in themselves and never exploit them as means” (Kant 1980), which constitutes the philosophical roots of modern politics. An ethical speaker ought to be understood following Grice’s (1989) maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner.
In the FLT classroom the teaching of these values is implicit in the language the teacher uses (if he has a good proficiency in the target language) but is also clarified by him when he instructs the learner in the formality of the right use. The right use is not, of course, a rigid category that applies to every statement done as far as a certain word is used. The right use is not the dictionary meaning. Right use, as the sense of words, depends as much on the meaning of words as on the context (see Wittgenstein op. cit.). Words meaning depend on the circumstance. But there is also a matter of politeness, say, that is, I believe, directly related to the problem of ethics: there are words you may use in a place but not in other. An attorney, for instance, can say “fuck” in a meeting with close friends and not being disapproved, but if he pronounces the same word in a formal place will be disdained by the people around him and if he dares to do likewise in an audience before a judge he will surely be ruled out. Of course the word fuck does not help much to illustrate our case, because it is a word not very well seen in most places, except around close people in an informal moment. But one could do the same point with the word “dude”, when used as a synonym for “man” or “gentleman”. Even if an attorney will not be formally penalized because of having used it in court, the effect he could have on the audience and on the jury may be lesser, because this is not the use of language that is expected for the circumstances[1].
The latter case of the use that an attorney does of fuck takes place within an institutionalized space. In the broad use, one understands that language is an institution (convention) because it is born from people’s desire to name things and communicate thoughts. But by institutionalized here I mean something more: a clearly stated set of rules. For the case of the attorney the book prescribes not to use bad words, under pain of forfeiture. But prescription in the field of language use is not always put in terms of what cannot or shouldn’t[2] be said. Prescription is also a way to give instructions on how to say things accurately. If the learner happens to live in the target culture the prescription is not that necessary, because the right ways of stating things are learnt by experience. In an FLT classroom, however, real experience in the target culture is in most cases rather poor, given that the learner has only the teacher to rely upon. Correct ways of linguistic behavior need to be talked out, in both senses, grammatically and in the use. If only the latter is taken into account, correct use of language won’t get to the learner. In brief, the problem of the use of language is certainly an ethic problem: the value of the speech acts that a speaker is to perform depend on the context. A language construction is not "good" or "bad" but "happy" or "unhappy" (Austin 1965). To know this ethics of the discourse is to know the language. The task of the foreign language teacher is then to train the learner in this linguistic ethics.
[1] Here objections could rise about the use of the word “dude”, in a scornful way, from the part of a prosecutor towards an accused with the intended effect of seeking the jury’s favor. We shall not pursuit this case beyond.
[2] We ought to say “should” instead of “can” because is not a matter of capability but of suitability, and then, a matter of ethics.
References
Austin, J. L. (ed. 1975). How to do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Ways of Words. Ed. Harvard University Press, England.
Jung, C. G. (1970). Teoría del psicoanálisis. Plaza y Janes Editores, Barcelona.
Kant, I. (1980). Fundamentación de la metafísica de las costumbres. Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1980.
Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. The University of Chicago, Chicago.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations. Basil Blackwell, London.
