The Global and the Local

Allwright’s concern about the connection between principles and practices in Exploratory Practice (EP) highlights the importance of balancing global principles with local everyday practices. He acknowledges the need for global principles to guide EP, but also recognizes the importance of working out their implications in local contexts. This cyclical relationship between global and local is represented in his “crude loop diagram” of think globally, act locally, and think locally. Allwright argues that local action and thinking can generate practices adaptable to any context, thereby developing our thinking about global principles.
Allwright also acknowledges the contributions made by practicing teachers in firming up the EP framework and the admirable personal and practical knowledge they have demonstrated. However, he was initially puzzled as to why practicing teachers still wanted to be trained in exploratory teaching, as they were already using certain underlying principles in their everyday teaching practices. Allwright has been insisting on teachers themselves deriving global principles from their own practices, but eventually surrendered to summarizing the teachers’ practices and giving back distinctive features of principles drawn from the practices.
Allwright also reflects on the complex issue of the dialectical relationship between the principle and the practice, the global and the local, and generalities and particularities. He questions whether it is better to carry global principles with us from context to context or to carry practices around. He recognizes that his “intellectual baggage” accumulated from a wide range of experiences in different contexts might mean that his “global” thinking is simply multiple context-bound, rather than in any strong sense “context-free.”
Overall, Allwright’s concern highlights the need for a balance between global principles and local practices in EP, as well as a greater awareness of the complex and dialectical relationship between the two. This issue is also prominent in the macrostrategic framework of the postmethod approach.