Daily Excerpt: The Invisible Foreign Language Classroom (Dabbs and Leaver) - Artisans


 

Excerpt from The Invisible Foreign Language Classroom by Laura Dabbs and Betty Lou Leaver.

Defining and Recognizing the Invisible Classroom

Artisans

General Orientation

The SP seeks freedom and action.  Artisans would rather not have rules to follow but go where the impulse takes them.  To them, work is essentially play.  They have no real desire for closure or completion of a task or assignment—to the Artisan, the doing is the learning independent of any conclusion.  

As Learners

SPs are often the most misunderstood learner in the average classroom.  The SP craves action and hands-on learning;sitting in a regimented row, day after day, can seem like the ultimate torture.  Giving the SP freedom to be creative and to experience hands-on learning can be the key to reaching the SP learner.  SPs are often misunderstood in the classroom and seen as discipline problems because they can’t sit still daily and routinely perform as does the SJ.  The SP wants and needs choices and independence in approaching learning—and the ability and time to be physically active.One of the best analogies of comparing and contrasting the SJ and the SP comes from Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”  The Ant (SJ) worked all summer and fall plowing the fields, caring for the crops and reaping the harvest storing up food for the winter.  The Grasshopper (SP) loved to play.  He would run around, playing games and tempting the Ant to have fun, to live for today without worrying about tomorrow.  Where the SJ saves, the SP spends; where the SJ works, the SP plays.  From an educational perspective, neither is necessarily wrong, it is simply the way these different personality types approach life and learning.

In the classroom, then, Artisans thrive where, especially in elementary school, there is hands-on work: manipulation of materials, building models, painting, and the like. Language classrooms can emulate the elementary classroom in many ways: after all, many first-time language learners compare their experience to returning to childhood and grade school (because they know so little initially of what they will need to know ultimately). Workbooks, textbooks, and other traditional methods (listen and learn, read and learn) do not work well in either exciting the Artisan or in teaching the Artisan. Filling out a visa form, buiding a monopoly game in the target language, conducting a field trip to a zoo and talking about the animals in the target language—now you have the attention of the Artisan! And the Artisan will learn.

As Teachers

Artisans rarely choose to become teachers, and only about 4% end up in classrooms. Most of those choose elementary school programs. The number of Artisans among the language teacher population has not been surveyed as far as we know, but clearly that percentage is quite low. Nonetheless, those who do take up teaching, given their inclination for freedom, including freedom from rules, can appear larger than life to their students, especially to the SJ student, whose self-regulation means that they “would never do what my teacher does”—and that makes the teacher look exciting and powerful. While mesmerized by the SP teacher, though, SJ students can flounder unless the teacher deliberately works at setting limits on the freedom that he or she so values, provides more rules and deadlines than comes naturally, and pays attention not only to the SJ need for tradition but also the NF need for nurturing (not a natural inclination of the Artisan) and the NT’s intellectual curiosity (which can be off-putting and disconcerting to the Aristan who works more actively in the physical world, not the mental one.

In Life

Since SPs like handson work, many often become performers, firefighters, builders, athletes, foresters, and other professionals working in physical fields. As noted, they rarely become teacxhers, but when they do, in our experience, generally, they are beloved.


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