Читать книгу The Art of Foreign Language Teaching - Peter Lutzker - Страница 45

Since the type of clowning courses that will be the subject of this study are generally unknown in a pedagogical and/or academic context, it becomes a primary task of the researcher to give the reader an accurate picture of what goes on in such a workshop. To achieve this, the role of an outside observer is crucial. At the same time, the subjective experiences and perspectives of the participants must also be seen as a key factor in establishing a clear picture of the work.

During the English Weeks in November, 2004 and November, 2005 in Altenberg, Germany, I attended Vivian Gladwell’s courses as an observer and to a certain degree also as an active participant. Each day, I kept a running record of the course activities and set down most of the comments made by him and the participants. At the same time, it also seemed appropriate in the context of these workshops to take part in some of the exercises and improvisations, in order to experience the course from the perspective of the participants, as well as to avoid conveying the sense of only being an external observer. This meant that my protocols were at different points briefly interrupted by my own activities as a member of the group. (The fact that a few years earlier I had taken a clowning course at the English Week and, in addition, an advanced course in the summer of 2004 in England, made it much easier for me to go back and forth between the roles of participant and researcher.) In an intensive three-day course which Gladwell gave at the Institut für Waldorf Pädagogik in Witten Annen in January, 2005, I was present only as an observer and kept a complete protocol of the sessions.

Having had the chance to experience these courses from both the standpoint of an observer as well as a participant, proved to be a significant element of between method triangulation, insofar as each of these roles offered important insights which were only realizable through adopting these perspectives.