Minimizing Perceptual Mismatches

I never really realized that when a topic being taught in class that I found highly irrelevant or over taught could have been due to a mismatch between me, the student, and the teacher.  After reading Chapter 4 in Kuma, I understood a lot more about some of my classroom experiences.  I found that I encountered some mismatches before in my classrooms and that mismatches were what had me getting so frustrated with my teachers at times.  Now knowing that what really was happening were mismatches, I look back at situations with some of my teachers differently.  I can easily see how mismatches can occur.  Kuma explains how there are ten different kinds of mismatches, which makes it even more likely that teachers and students will encounter mismatches in their learning.  I feel mismatches are even more likely to happen when working with learning other languages.  As Kuma mentioned it is important to note that mismatches will always happen, they are always identifiable, and they are also always manageable.  By knowing these three things, teachers and students can work through their mismatches and even turn them into a learning opportunity.  I feel it is very important for teachers to identify mismatches that are happening so they can manage them for their students.

Being able to minimize perceptual mismatches I felt related well to what Kuma had to say in his article "Toward A Postmethod Pedagogy".  In his article, Kuma talked about postmethod teachers and postmethod learners.  Postmethod teachers need to know about their students and be aware of their needs.  They need to be able to know the context of their classroom.  The teachers job is to constantly be working towards helping create learning opportunities for their students.  They have a very active role.  The postmethod learners need to take control of their learning by being autonomous.  They have to be willing to learn and be effective learners.  It seems that in order to help minimize perceptual mismatches there need to be postmethod teachers and postmethod learners.  A postmethod teacher would be working towards knowing their students and their perceptions and the postmethod learners would be working to take control of their learning.  If teachers postmethod and the learners are postmethod it seems they would be most aware of mismatches that may happen and have an easier time of turning the mismatches into learning opportunities.