Regarding learner autonomy and the role of Business English teachers: fascinating post by Stephen Powell about a workshop he attended on Communities of Practice led by Etienne Wenger. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with gaps in the “teacher as facilitator” concept so I’m intrigued by Wenger’s amplified role of “Trajectory Manager”.

I asked Etienne about the tension between an individual’s motivation to do something and their being told to do something as one might experience in a school setting in terms of empowerment of individuals to make choices. The answer that came back was framed around the notion of a ‘trajectory manager’ who is someone tasked to help individuals make decisions by helping them to understand the consequences of their choices. This is more than a facilitator of learning in that there is a notion of the need for outside intervention to enable us to grasp the information we require to make informed decisions. Empowerment is more than the ability to chose course x rather than y, but requires us to understand the implications of choices through social interaction with our ‘trajectory manager’.

I’d always thought of the BE Community of Practice (CoP) as consisting primarily of teachers. Instead, we can look at the BE CoP as consisting of everyone involved: teachers, learners, schools, HR managers, and line managers, each with specific but overlapping roles in the community. Teachers then would occupy the position of “expert” in Wenger’s schema, which has the benefit of being a difference of degree, not of kind, with learners.

So if teachers are experts, what are they expert in? Not language skill, not language teaching, but language learning. Teachers help guide learners towards greater autonomy by understanding the consequences of their learning decisions (Wenger’s “trajectory manager”). Of course teachers have many other roles (model, resource, feedback, etc.). But the primary role is supporting active, autonomous, accountable learners (the A3 principle).

Now I think my epiphany this morning is largely an epiphany of the obvious. It’s all over the literature, both in education in general (e.g. anything by James Farmer) and in language teaching blogs, Aaron Campbell and AJ Hoge have posted on this recently. But Wenger’s concept of “trajectory manager” fills in a couple of gaps for me.

First, here at English360 we’ve always pushed learner accountability in the corporate BE programs we design and run. Wenger’s notion of trajectory manager differs from that of a pure facilitator by emphasizing this focus on consequences (call it learning karma). By helping learners understand and internalize the future effects of learning decisions (e.g. “Hmmm, should I go to class today?”), we can help them make better decisions that contribute to reaching their goals (and in corporate BE, sometimes the correct decision is not to go to class).

Second, this transition - that teachers are different in degree not kind - helps break down the wall that seperates teacher and learner in the traditional classroom. In the traditional schema, teachers hold an authoritarian position that places them in front of the classroom as the unique source and arbiter of language, with students as passive, dependent receptacles. If instead we look at teachers as experts in the same community, we can then close this breach between teacher and student: we’re all learners. As “teachers” we’re just further along.