I know that Bob Patrick has done work in England, and he works closely with John Piazza and David Maust and the other Latinists in our PLC to keep things together in the Latin world here in the U.S., but John in the article below is reaching out to the larger community with a question related to the situation in the UK, where nothing is happening:
Anyone teaching TPRS/CI in the UK?
A Latin colleague of ours, Keith Rogers, is really interested in implementing CI methods in UK Latin programs, but he is really a voice crying out in the wilderness. Not only is he up against a much more rigid and petrified (in all senses of the word) tradition of Latin pedagogy, which finds its culmination in the Victorian “grammar grind,”* but he recently informed me that he knows of none, not even one modern language program or teacher in his country who uses anything resembling CI. I was hoping that someone on this PLC might know of someone in the UK who is using CI methods, so that Keith can find some support, and feel a bit less alone.
John
*for anyone interested, Christopher Stray has written a book called “Grinders and Grammars” which describes the “no pain no gain” culture of suffering that was so prevalent in British Latin and Greek classes, and which still infects all language pedagogy over there and over here. It’s also a sad fact that many of the revolutionary teachers in the UK who sought to teach language in more comprehensible ways came of age just in time to lose their lives in WWI.