Pedagogy of autonomy for difficult circumstances: from practice to principles

This article sets out to consider the place of learner autonomy in an African context by recounting the first author's experience of teaching a very large class of more than 200 teenage learners in an under-resourced secondary school setting in Cameroon. It describes the essentially pragmatic solution he adopted in this context of engaging pupils in group work under trees outside, having negotiated rules and work plans. The subsequent value of creative writing activities is also emphasised given the lack of textbooks in this context. On the basis of this narrative, we shed new light on issues in language learner autonomy including the cross-cultural relevance of autonomy, the distinction between a pedagogy of and a pedagogy for autonomy, and how a pedagogy of autonomy can be an appropriate response to otherwise 'difficult circumstances'. The article ends with a number of principles derived from this practice that may equally be of broader relevance in the field of learner autonomy. Overall, the article is structured in an original manner that is presented as a possible model for future collaborative reports of bottom-up language teaching inquiry, in that an author's narrative of teaching experience is foregrounded and only subsequently related to (autonomy) theory.