Democratic Classrooms: Teacher-Student Collaboration for Active Language Learning

Abstract

The dawn of a knowledge based, technology driven culture in Bangladesh has introduced the

need for communicative learning and eventually the realization that language classrooms need to

empower students with language skills that will help them negotiate better with the world around

them. However, Bangladeshi classrooms are heterogeneous where there is a cultural imbalance

between Bangla medium students from rural/suburban areas and Bangla and English medium

students from urban areas. This, coupled with undemocratic curricula, has left the present-day

teacher, especially one teaching in a private university, struggling to cultivate collaboration and

interaction in her students. In this paper, I have addressed this issue by emphasizing how sharing

personal stories in the classroom can reduce the cultural gap between students thereby creating a

democratic environment where students interact and collaborate more effectively in English.

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Introduction

It was in January 2008 as I1 had just entered my first Listening and Speaking class at

Independent University, Bangladesh, with new ideas and a hopeful lesson plan, when I realized

that my expectations (and my smile) were falling flat because my students were hardly

responding to my teaching. As a foreign-educated teacher new in Bangladesh, I had started with

an ice breaker activity where students had to form pairs with the person sitting next to them and

each student had to interview her/his pair partner who they were to later introduce in front of the

whole class, ending with a sketch of that person on the whiteboard. The interviews were to

consist of finding out about each person’s favorites – people, things, food, etc., plus a special

characteristic/skill/quality/talent that the person possessed. I had not only stated the instructions

verbally but had also written them down in one corner of the whiteboard. I had falsely assumed

that my students were going to have fun and that the class would go on smoothly, filled with

laughter, with a bonding that would be created that would last the rest of the three-month long

semester. However, I was shocked to learn that this was not even nearer to what actually

happened on that day. The majority of the students too were dazed.

Ever since, I have taught many such foundation level courses and I have begun to

understand the reaction of my students of 2008. Firstly, they had never had a class like that

1In this paper I have avoided using the third person pronoun and the phrase “the author” to refer to myself but have used the personal pronoun “I” instead to avoid sounding distanced from the reader. Thus, the intended tone of this paper is conversational rather than the usual pedantic found most academic papers.

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earlier in their lives. Moreover, it was the first day of their freshman year and they were scared,

shy and lost. To top it all, when they were met with a teacher who not only did not give them a

concrete lecture on grammar that they had expected in English class but instead confused them

by trying to have fun, they were, to be honest, dissatisfied. It was, as I realize now, a cultural

chaos.

Over the years, I have met other English teachers who have echoed my experience and

my thoughts. The research for this paper began in December 2009 as I started casually

interviewing such teachers in private universities in the country. Among them, three teachers

were from IUB (Independent University, Bangladesh) (Andaleeb Choudhury, Shaiful Islam and

Shaila Shams), two were from ULAB (University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh) (ATM Sajedul

Huq and Shaheen Ara), one from BRAC University (Khairul Basher) and one was from NSU

(North South University) (Mousume Akhter Flora). I asked them questions on the following:

- whether there was any significant different difference between responses to questions from

urban/suburban and rural students or from Bangla and English medium students,

- if their students responded well to collaborative tasks the only way to complete which is to

interact with both the teacher and peers,

- which students on an average asked questions to the teacher frequently,

- whether these teachers designed the courses based on students’ cultural and affective needs or

not,

- students’ seating preferences, and

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- how much Bangla the teacher needed to use in the classroom in order for students to feel at

ease.

All the seven teachers that I spoke to expressed the same frustration regarding the

heterogeneity in their classrooms, observing that the Bangla medium students especially those

from rural/suburban background were intensely dependent on their teacher for completing

language tasks. Students, especially those who had attended the mainstream Bangla medium

schools, responded poorly or even negatively to non-traditional, collaborative tasks. And almost

every student from this category got nervous when faced with activities like role-plays, debates

and presentations that required them to think outside the box. The teachers reported that

rural/suburban students generally avoided voluntary groupings with urban/English medium ones,

and performed poorer when forcefully grouped with the latter. These rural/suburban/Bangla

medium students, as Mr. Sajedul Huq, Assistant Professor at ULAB, states, “are mostly silent,

waiting for someone else to say something, so that they can either simply nod in agreement or

remain silent in disagreement. They don’t even ask questions! So it’s terribly difficult to figure

out whether or not they’re following your teaching.”

Another concern that all the teachers unanimously voiced was these students’ lack of

creativity – they favored handouts, notes and dictations that they could memorize or copy – but

hated using own ideas and own research.

Considering these challenges that private university English language teachers and

students face in Bangladesh, in the following sections of this paper I have attempted to explain

why students from rural/suburban Bangla medium backgrounds face difficulty in interacting and

collaborating with their English medium peers. I will end the paper with a discussion on how

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story-telling in the English language classrooms can create a more democratic environment

which can turn around the performance of these students.

1. The socio-cultural-historical foundation of English education in Bangladesh

Before we can begin to understand the state of our English classrooms, we need to revisit

certain theoretical studies based on the history and culture of Asia. Since antiquity, the prominent

mode of instruction is Asia has been the much celebrated “guru-shisshya” form (guru – teacher;

shissya – student, or more specifically, disciple), where the teacher’s status is equated with that

of a divine being. The teacher’s instructions are the final words and the perception is that s/he

must be obeyed without question because s/he is the ultimate and infallible authority on

knowledge and learning. However, this is not to misunderstand the ancient guru-shisshya form of

teaching as autocratic because if we look at the teaching practices in some of the major religions

of the region – Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism, we will be able to observe that even though

teachers in these religions were considered as possessing divine powers, their students/disciples

actually gained knowledge through dialogues with the teacher. The Sahabas of Prophet

Muhammad, the shissyas of Buddha and those of Dronacharya of Mahabharat have created

examples of such dialogues where students questioned and challenged the teacher to learn, and

the teacher in turn challenged the students to rise above him in knowledge, i.e., create knowledge

that is more advanced that that contained in the teacher. This is why knowledge in these religions

has been attributed divinity as a gesture of reverence with the simple understanding that it

justifies one’s being. Hence, the teacher is the epitome of divine knowledge.

As the historical film rolled, it introduced of new forms of servitude for people, including

the discriminations in the right to learn and become “educated” and “modern”, and this tradition

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of pedagogy has taken on a monstrous turn in our times where our learning environments have

become regimented and forced, and the teacher autocratic. This pedagogical form has become

common in all areas of learning, including that of English language. This can be largely

attributed to what Edward T. Hall in his pioneering book Beyond Culture describes as a “high

context culture” that is now typical of most countries in Asia, including Bangladesh. In short,

people in high context cultures communicate through fewer words, sometimes even through

silence, and regard the individual assertiveness and constructivist attitude of the West as

disrespectful and almost a sacrilege committed against authority. In fact in most of these cultures

it is believed that questioning the authority or establishing priority of the individual over the

collective may result in causing the authority severe dissatisfaction whereby, considering the

instance of the student, s/he may end up being denied divine knowledge or may even have to

serve penance for such acts. This type of cultural practice has been further explored by Geert

Hofstede in his article "Cultural Differences in Teaching and Learning" where he discusses the

concept of “power distance” (301-320). This can be understood as the way in which people in a

culture anticipate and nurture power differences and the privileges or disadvantages that arise

from such differences. Thus in cultures such as that in Bangladesh where large power distances

prevail within organizations, authority is not shared but is rather very strictly centralized and it is

considered favorable to practice collective obedience to power, both out of fear and reverence

and because such obedience makes the authority happy and charitable.

The introduction of English education during the British colonial rule changed nothing as

far as traditional pedagogy was concerned, and students were, as they are still in most cases,

expected to learn rules and texts by rote through repetitive drills. Teachers in Bangladesh have

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always developed curricula and designed syllabi according to what they have believed are fit for

the students to learn.

Further, very little attention has been paid to account for changes in syllabi according to

changes in the country’s socio-economic-political scenario. After the Bangla Language Act was

passed in 1971 in Bangladesh, the status of English became that of a foreign language that is

meant to be used sparsely for very limited communicative purposes, mostly for limited clerical

purposes or in higher education (Banu and Sussex 125-129). However, although at present the

Bangladesh government has outlined in its National Curriculum the overall aims for English

language learning as human resources skills-oriented (Development of Education; Ainy 113),

based on which English teaching at the tertiary level in the country is struggling to take a more

critical, creative and career-oriented turn, neither teachers nor students are able to practically

perceive the language as anything but just another subject that students need to pass in to be

promoted to the next level of education. Our syllabi have still not adjusted to our growing

exposure to the high-tech neo-liberal market economy and year after year, students are offered

the same language courses with the same contents and taught through the same approaches.

And thus the legacy of this non-contextualized, closed, teacher-centered, non-

constructivist form of teaching is largely responsible for the shock that modern teachers get when

they try to employ more communicative, student-centered classroom practices. However, I

believe that it is only a matter of converting challenges into opportunities for a language teacher

in Bangladesh and it is possible, as many of my classes have successfully and repeatedly

displayed, that if a teacher takes steps to involve her students in the entire dynamics of the course

– from course design to evaluation, and is able to foster critical learning skills using collaborative

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cultural practice as an aide instead of considering it a disadvantage, the result will be a

democratic, student-centered classroom where students are no longer afraid, or shy, or anxious

but are willing and able to use their analytical skills in learning a language that will equip them

with communicative abilities necessary for them to negotiate with the world around them.

In the next section, I have therefore discussed certain values and issues that both teachers

and learners must mutually cultivate while designing and participating in a language class. These

are accompanied or followed by strategies/techniques that have helped me accomplish a more

interactive, democratic and a more intellectually satisfying English class than the one I had to

face in December 2008.

2. Setting up an interactive and democratic classroom

Teaching English in Bangladesh is fraught with multi-faceted contradictions. On one

hand are students who are culturally conditioned to passively absorb traditional style rule-

governed lectures. On the other hand are teachers who after witnessing the fall of grammar-

translation and audio-lingual methods recognize the importance of innovative classroom

techniques. Dealing with these contradictions requires accepting that our classrooms need a

complete makeover.

Contrary to what many of us language teachers believe – that students can be motivated

to become active, self-sufficient learners without the outside world (by this I mean the world

outside the classroom) creating any impact on this learning process, the dominant political and

cultural discourses are simulated in the classroom without us even realizing it. Starting from the

teaching materials to the expectations and prejudices of both teacher and students to the interplay

of communicative dos and don’ts, language teaching is fundamental to understanding and

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propagating a culture. Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human

Nature has long ago criticized the once popular deterministic view that students come to the

language classroom with a mind like a blank slate, or tabula rasa. So the moment language

teachers accept that learning is not an isolated process but is in fact a negotiation and re-

negotiation of new and established values, norms and beliefs that help us understand and choose

what to learn and how, it becomes easy to identify the processes and discourse strategies that act

as barriers to learning. Thus, in this way, it also becomes easier to make changes.

This is where the notion of democratic classroom becomes due. Here, I unavoidably turn

to Paolo Freire who has led the way to building democratic classrooms through “dialogues”

between students and teachers. Freire has, to my opinion, advanced the most comprehensive

research on the notion of democracy within the classroom by proposing modifications in the role

of both the teacher and her students. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he re-defines and

revolutionizes the teacher-student relationship.

Through dialogue, the teacher of the students and the students of the teacher cease to

exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers…. [T]he teacher is

no longer merely the one who teachers, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with

the students, who in their turn while being taught also teach (67).

For Freire, a democratic classroom is essential for both teachers and students to be able to

co-create new knowledge; knowledge that “emerges only through invention and re-invention,

through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopefully inquiry men [sic] pursue in the world, with

the world, and with each other” (58). According to him, “progressive education” must take into

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account the knowledge that students bring into the class and through interaction with the teacher,

which in turn can spin out a better understanding of the world. Thus, it is the teacher’s duty to:

know that his or her ‘here’ and ‘now’ are nearly always the educands’ ‘there’ and ‘then.’

Even though the educator’s dream is not only to render his or her ‘here-and-now’ with

them, or to understand and rejoice that educands have gotten beyond their ‘here’ so that

this dream is realized, she or he must begin with the educands’ ‘here’ and not with her or

his own. At the very least, the educator must keep account of the existence of his or her

educands’ ‘here’ and respect it. Let me put it this way: you never get there by starting

from there, you get there by starting from some here. This means, ultimately, that the

educator must not be ignorant of, underestimate, or reject any of the ‘knowledge of living

experience’ with which educands come to school (“Pedagogy of Hope” 58).

Freire’s conviction of “knowledge of living experience” is rooted in Paiget’s views on

constructivism, where “learning is a developmental process that involves change, self-

generation, and construction, each building on prior learning experiences” (qtd. in Kauffman,

304).

Jay McTighe and Ken O’Connor in their article “Seven Practices for Effective Learning”

describe this process as “diagnostic assessment” that teachers need to employ at the beginning of

teaching any course “to check students’ prior knowledge and skill levels, identify student

misconceptions, profile learners’ interests, and reveal learning-style preferences…pre-

assessments serve diagnostic purposes…” (10).

Thus, from the moment I felt the urge to turn my passive and traditional students into

interactive and critical learners, I have been experimenting with various democratic forms of

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classrooms for my speaking and listening courses. I say “forms” because each classroom has its

own dynamics. And one form of management may not necessarily suit two classrooms.

Sometimes, a mix of different management practices has worked well. Inspired by Freire, I

always begin my classes by getting to know my students.

Unfortunately, most English teachers in private universities in the country do not conduct

needs analyses to design the syllabi of their language courses. They are in the habit of preparing

a standardized syllabus that all teachers teaching the same course attempt to complete in a

particular semester. The syllabi are thus blind to its students, i.e., they are based on teachers’

assumptions, biases, and expectations. So, for instance, students who enroll in a course to, let us

say, improve their speaking and listening proficiency end up being forced to learn the same

rubber stamped material, without having any say in whether it suits their aspirations and learning

styles or not.

Right in the first class of the course, I have made it a practice to begin by asking

questions about the students and goading each of them to tell me why they have enrolled into the

course and about what they expect from it. They are shy at first, or nervous, but when I explain

why I ask such questions, they are visibly comforted. So from day one, I make my students my

co-learners, as I call them from then onwards. This gives them a sense of being in charge and

although many of them take time to stop expecting a pedantic control freak who delivers long

lectures to a silent class, once they start having fun, there is no turning back to the traditional

classroom.

Teachers therefore must run a needs analysis with the students being fully aware of why

and how the course will be taught to them. Goals need to be set early on in language classrooms,

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through dialogues and negotiations between the teacher and student. Teachers need to identify

within the first few classes the background, beliefs and aspirations of the students in their classes

so as to be able to personalize classroom discourses as much as possible.

As a more democratic measure, many universities around the world have recently started

offering open syllabi, i.e., syllabi that are not standardized but are modeled and remodeled by

teachers and students together to fulfill their specific co-learning goals. It would be utopist to

even consider such a radical change in teaching in Bangladesh because another crucial challenge

for the English teacher in the country is facing a classroom of students from diverse

backgrounds. I use the term “multiliteracies” coined by the New London Group2 in 1996 and

later explained in detail in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures

(Cope and Kalantzis) to describe such students. The extent to which English education in the

country is poorly managed can be observed simply by looking at English classrooms where

students from different educational and proficiency backgrounds are amassed at random, that too

in huge numbers. An average English language classroom in private universities contains

between 30 to 50 students. There are no guidelines as to how the students are grouped in a class.

There is usually an uneven and arbitrary distribution of students from Bangla and English

medium schools, as well as a hodgepodge of students from different disciplines of study. Among

all the private universities in the country, BRAC University is the only one that categorizes

2Courtney Cazden (Harvard, USA); Bill Cope (University of Technology, Sydney); Norman Fairclough (Lancaste University, UK); Jim Gee (Clark University, USA); Mary Kalantzis (James Cook University of North Queensland); Gunther Kress (University of London, UK); Allan Luke (University of Queensland); Carmen Luke (University of Queensland); Sarah Michaels (Clark University, USA); Martin Nakata (James Cook University of North Queensland).

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students according to proficiency levels or “modules”, and each module is then offered a course

that fits the average proficiency of the students contained in it.

Considering this, a practical democratic approach by a language teacher threatened by

multiliteracies is to talk to her students and list the common, achievable goals of the course. If

for example, a class has more number of English medium students, the teacher may skip teaching

the basics of present simple tense and conduct separate tutorials for the minority Bangla medium

students outside class hours. However, this the teacher may practice only when she is assured

that her English medium students do not display the need to learn such basics. Summarily, a

language teacher needs to keep in mind that there is no one English that can and has to be taught

to all her students. And a successfully democratic language class encapsulates the differences in

the needs and aspirations of different students.

3. The collaborative classroom

Interaction in the classroom remains limited if the students and teacher do not engage in

controlled collaboration. As an example, let me cite the happenings in one of my speaking-

listening classes. In this course, students are expected to watch some prescribed English films

without subtitles to improve their comprehension of different intonation and pronunciation

styles, not to learn to emulate those styles but to be able to understand foreign English. After

every film viewing session I make it a point to discuss the film in detail with my students. One

day we watched James Cameron’s Avatar together. Initially during the discussion, as it is always

the case, students were silent. When I pointed to one male student and asked how he liked the

film, he responded, “Good”. I then asked the same question to another male student and received

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the response: “Same to him” (meaning the second student also found the film “good”). I could

understand from his hesitant reply that he too had realized that his utterance was grammatically

unacceptable. However, he also seemed to know that it was a communicable utterance and so did

not attempt to rephrase the sentence as I paused with the expectation that he would. So I first

asked him to explain what he had said in Bangla and he immediately lighted up and responded:

“Amaro bhalo lagse, Miss” (I also liked it, Miss). I exclaimed, “Great!” and repeated what he

had said in correct English: “I also liked the film”. To my surprise, without my asking him to

repeat this sentence, he did so a few times and seemed to make a mental note of what I had said

so that it does not get lost to him in the future. I then launched on how I felt about the film,

describing in detail my favorite scenes and dialogues in the film, what some scenes/characters

reminded me of, how I felt the movie had racist undertones and how some parts of the film

confused me and how it did not end as I had expected it to. I could not even finish talking when

the entire class burst into a shower of comments about how they agreed or disagreed with me. I

then decided on the spot to tell the class to take five minutes of reflection time and jot down

some of the things about Avatar that each wanted to share with the rest of the class. After five

minutes, my students had a lot more to say about Avatar than in the beginning. Some of them

went to the extent of defending the film against my allegation of it being racist. It was a noisy,

smiling class that I left that day that was looking forward to watching more films together.

“Man is a social animal” may be a cliché, but it surely is the foundation of a language

classroom. Since language is never used in isolation, building togetherness and the practice of

sharing works wonders in making students respond to language instructions. It gives them a

sense of support and harnesses the practice of groupthink in the Bangladeshi cultural sense. The

idea of collaborative, interactive classrooms has been commended by Donald Freeman in his

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article Collaboration: Constructing shared understandings in a second language classroom by

invoking J. Lemke who emphasizes that learning in a classroom

…to a very large degree is talk: it is the social use of language to enact regular activity

structures and to share systems of meaning among teachers and students….The

questions…concern the ways in which teachers and students make meanings together

with language, what they…do to one another through language, and how language is

integrated into the activity routines of the classroom (Nunan 56).

Through collaboration, students also understand the importance of their individual roles

in creating knowledge, because then each student is conscious of adding to the pool of language

inputs. Their sentence structures may not be always correct but their fluency increases in the

process of classroom practices that demand spontaneity.

4. Democracy and feedback

According to Wiggins in Assessment as Feedback, feedback is goal-setting tool that helps

teachers decide what need to be accomplished in a particular course. Perhaps the largest chunk of

a language curriculum involves feedback. Most teachers in Bangladesh understand feedback as a

rigid, unidirectional and corrective process whereby students make mistakes and teachers correct

them, either verbally or in writing (popularly with a red pen). And many a times, teachers

complain of their students not following their feedback. On deeper inspection, many do finally

acknowledge that their students actually fail to comprehend teacher feedback. In any case, both

students and teachers are frustrated and the course goals are never met successfully. I have seen

many teachers write comments like “Do this assignment again!” and “Bad handwriting. What did

you mean?” on writing assignments of students. Oral feedback in Bangladesh is also mostly

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corrective in nature where teachers correct the students’ grammar as soon as the students utter an

unacceptable sentence, even if it may be in the middle of a dialogue. So it is small wonder that

students fail to respond to comments as desired by the teacher, because such feedback frightens

the students and lowers their self-esteem.

A primary assumption of a democratic classroom is that there is no fixed feedback

strategy for language learning. Right at the beginning of the course a teacher must discuss

feedback strategies with her class and find out what kind of feedback processes their students

prefer and how such feedback will help achieve the course goals.

Not only that, a language teacher wishing to teach effectively must also illustrate the

possible outcomes of each type of feedback style that she discusses with her students in order to

finalize on certain styles for a particular classroom. In Differing perceptions in the feedback

process, David Carless’ research shows that unlike students who cannot even conceive that

teacher feedback is supposed to help them improve, their teachers believe that effective feedback

has been delivered (224). And this is exactly why students should participate in understanding

and setting the goals and styles of feedback, a process Carless calls “assessment dialogues”

(230).

Since feedback is a lot about error correction, modern teachers face the dilemma of

whether to correct their students on the spot or wait for the right time to correct mistakes.

Kathleen Bailey, as cited by Douglas H. Brown in Principles of Language Learning and

Teaching acknowledges:

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“…language teachers have a number of ‘basic options’ when confronted with a student

error, including to treat or ignore, to treat now or later, to stimulate other learners to

initiate treatment, and to test for the effectiveness of the treatment.” (275)

This dilemma is easier resolved in a democratic classroom. Feedback in my speaking-

listening classes involves a multi-dimensional relationship: feedback from teacher to individual

student; from teacher to a group or the entire class; from students to teacher; and from student to

student. These feedback relationships are agreed upon and established within the first week of

classes. The forms of feedback are also agreed upon, i.e., it is established that feedback may take

the form of comments, corrections or questions. It is also agreed that throughout the course I and

my students will engage in learning to give and receive feedback as a crucial step in learning to

communicate in English. Thus, feedback in my classes is a process of continuous learning –

everyone learns not only to give and get feedback but also to ensure that feedback is constructive

and can be followed up on.

A helpful move toward effective feedback for Bangladeshi language teachers would be to

provide form-focused instruction (FFI), defined succinctly by Nina Spada as “any pedagogical

effort which is used to draw the learners’ attention to language form either implicitly or

explicitly.” (qtd. in Brown 276). Further, Spada along with Lightbown record two ways in

which FFI may be implemented in the classroom: “isolated” and “integrated” (Lightbown and

Spada 181-207). They define isolated FFIs as instructions that involve teaching acceptable

linguistic “forms” (grammar, pronunciation, etc.) without the specific aim of raising

communicative competence in students. On the other hand, integrated FFIs do the just the

opposite. Spada and Lightbown also suggest teachers to create a balance between the two forms

of addressing error correction in the classroom. For teachers wishing to create a democratic

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atmosphere in the classroom, J. Williams makes us aware that it not only the teachers’ duty to

identify and correct errors but students must also be guided to learn to take the responsibility of

doing the same (Hinkel 675). This is a practice that teachers in democratic classrooms need to

instill in their students so as to create empowered and active learners.

For me to incorporate FFI in my class, firstly, it is important for me to play around with

student groupings in the classroom. Bangladeshi students, as many colleagues would agree, tend

to join classes in groups. Although some are loners or are more individual than others, the

majority of students either enroll into the same course as their friends, or form peer groups after

the course has begun to which they tend to stick to throughout the course. Also, English medium

students tend to group with other English medium students, just like female students tend to

group together. This is again a culturally collaborative practice that they perceive as a safeguard

in a language course they have no passion or interest in. Group work is an important criterion for

establishing democratic and collaborative norms in a language classroom. Lockhart and Richards

confirm this by emphasizing that group work “increases the amount of student participation in

the class” and that it “can give learners a more active role in learning” (153). As I negotiate with

students about possible grouping strategies that will be effective for a particular course, I enforce

the idea that there are to be no static groups in the class, and that students will have to work with

different peers/peer groups for different activities. I declare that forming and re-forming

groups/pairs is also to be a matter that has to be mutually decided by the students and myself.

Once this is established and tried out (with initial starting problems of course), each student

becomes more open to sharing ideas with every other peer in the class, and the shyness or

hesitation that used to previously arise during interactions vanishes into thin air. Thus, when in

the second class of a speaking-listening course, a student who nodded doubtfully at her classmate

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who spoke a grammatically unacceptable sentence – “There have big canteen on IUB” by the

twelfth class raised her hand and politely remarked: “Excuse me. I think you mean ‘There is a

big canteen in IUB’. Am I right?” and smiled, while the other student smiled back and said

“Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, I tried mean that”.

Thus, unlike traditional teachers, modern ones should not be afraid to allow peer

interaction and feedback. However, it needs to be teacher-regulated. In peer interaction,

according to Lockhart and Richards who allude to Hatch, “one learns how to do conversation,

one learns how to interact verbally, out of this interaction syntactic structures are developed”

(152).

Critical, empowered learners do not hesitate to give feedback to their teachers. In fact,

teachers should ensure that they discuss teacher evaluation with the class at the beginning of the

course by stressing that the more students learn to comment or question the teacher, the better

they will learn, i.e., they will learn to learn on one’s own. So explaining the benefits of teacher

evaluation to students is therefore a must in a democratic classroom. Ronald Boyd in his article

Improving Teacher Evaluations refers to a goal-oriented teacher evaluation as one that should

“relate to important teaching skills” and is “as objective as possible”, pointers that Bangladeshi

teachers need to remind their students as they discuss teacher evaluation policy in the classroom.

Of course, the aim to empower students in a congenial atmosphere may completely

misfire and some students may abuse the open environment and be lazy or rude to teacher/peer.

At this point what come handy are the course goals and policies that the teacher and peers had

decided upon when the course began. Despite this, some students may disrupt a congenial

atmosphere in many ways. Gerald Amada in Coping with Misconduct in the College Classroom

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lists, among others, two categories of misconduct commonly found in Bangladeshi classes:

“plagiarism or lying” and “disrespectful behavior”. Now first of all, teachers and students must

agree upon in the beginning of the course that any behavior identified by the teacher or any

student as misbehavior is not to be tolerated in the classroom. The teacher must also make her

students aware of the institutional policy regarding misbehavior. Finally, even though democratic

classrooms mean that traditional hierarchy placing the teacher in the divine seat is avoided, the

teacher still remains the ultimate decision maker in her class, and must exercise penalties if cases

become extreme. The best way to start dealing with extreme misbehavior is to consult a

colleague. Lisa Rodriguez reminds teachers to be mindful of not overtly insulting their students

in front of their peers or other teachers, using “positive”, encouraging words and most

importantly, to not forget their own experiences of being a student earlier in life when dealing

with even the worst of student misbehavior.

Conclusion

I had once overheard a teacher during a conference in Malaysia say that becoming a good

teacher is easy if you can remember the bad teachers who taught you. It is not difficult to

recognize the frustrations of one’s students through their displayed level of motivation and the

extent to which they voluntarily participate in learning. Teachers and educationists must not be

deceived by a completed syllabus or a completed written assignment but must also make sure

that they understand and share with their students the process by which these have been

achieved. Not only that, it is important to create an environment that fosters students who

actively seek out learning inputs through interaction with peers and the teacher. The absence of

such a democratic classroom can be disastrous for the self-esteem of both the teachers and

students. Creating such an environment is a continuous process of trial and error as there is no

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one particular kind of classroom that fits all. The students and their teacher need to be co-

participants in deciding the norms, values, practices and feedback and grievance management

measures in order to co-learn – the teacher learns to teach while the students learn to learn.

Finally, a teacher must remember that she is a caregiver, and historically speaking, autocracy has

never fostered growth but only dissatisfaction.

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Teachers should remember that, as Richards and Lockhart argue, “the interactional dynamics of

a classroom are largely a product of choices the teacher makes about learning arrangements”

(1994, p.146).

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[[ This paper addresses the present-day Bangladeshi tertiary-level language teacher’s woes over

her student’s lack of creativity and empowerment in the classroom by discussing how effective

discourse strategies, especially questioning can overcome to a large extent this problem that is

seen as a barrier to language learning among many of her contemporaries around the globe.

has seen the language teacher, especially in the tertiary level, heave a loud sigh of frustration at

her students’ lack of creativity and assertiveness – skills that are deemed obligatory to function

profitably in the present globalized world order. ]]