English Language Teaching , professional development and teacher narratives in present day educational contexts of compulsory schooling

Mg Silvana Barboni

Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Ongoing educational debates centre around PARTICIPATION and SOCIAL JUSTICE

How are we participating in those debates?

From ELT we have traditionally addressed questions of INTECULTURALITY and how ELT fosters intercultural

dialogue

Interculturality

It involves being open to, interested in, curious about and empathetic towards people from (any) other cultures.

Interculturality is the capacity to experience cultural otherness and use it to:

-reflect on matters that are usually taken for granted within one’s own culture and environment;

- evaluate one’s own everyday patterns of perception, thought, feeling and behaviour in order to develop greater self-knowledge and self-understanding;

- act as mediators among people of different cultures, to explain and interpret different perspectives.

Ongoing educational debates centre around PARTICIPATION and SOCIAL JUSTICE

How are we participating in those debates?

INTECULTURALITY and intercultural dialogue

relationship between KNOWLEDGE & TECHNOLOGY

And how ELT mediates in that relationship

Present day debates are focusing on a deeper understanding of the relationship between

KNOWLEDGE & TECHNOLOGY

in our knowledge societies

and how this relationship shapes PARTICIPATION and SOCIAL JUSTICE.

Knowledge societies

Those in which different forms of production (using science and technology) and distribution (using new communication technologies) of knowledge have become fundamental processes in the tapestry of these societies (Dominguez Rubio and

Baert, 2012).

This conceptualisation of the knowledge society creates a new agenda for the State, current administration and public policies because of three main aspects of the knowledge society:

1.knowledge becomes key to understand new forms of economic accumulation and development.

2.the sociocognitive relationships that are established are based on new social, cultural and political articulations and bring about changes in the way relationships are established at both an interpersonal and institutional levels.

3.by taking advantage of a diversity circulating bulks of knowledge, new possibilities in the generation of goods and services are developed, as well as new cultural goods and learning trajectories.

The relationship between knowledge and technology shapes participation and social justice in 2 distinct ways

1. DEVELOPMENTO OF THE SOUTH

production and distribution of knowledge have become central processes in the generation of value in capitalist economies. “surdesarrollo” in terms of the way knowledge and technology can help add value to primary exploitation of natural resources in a region which has historically been characterised as the source of primary resources namely from mining and agricultural exploitation.

2. CITIZENSHIP

the paradox of knowledge and non-knowledge

New knowledge, under the conditions presented by the knowledge society, brings about uncertainty and risks requiring citizens´participation before the ethic and political debates generated by knowledge.

both knowledge intensive as well as uncertainty intensive

LITERACY BECOMES CENTRAL

The flexible and sustained mastery of a repertoire of practices through oral, written or multimedia texts containing a variety of semiotic systems used for different purposes in different contexts (Luke and Freebody, 2000; Anstey and Bull, 2006).

DIGITAL LITERACYlearners need to:

* develop an understanding on how digital content is created making use of images, text, sound and languages considering communicative purposes.

* become aware of the collective responsibility for construction and distribution of knowledge in a connected world, "the collective intelligence". So, developing digital literacy at school is not about learning to use software per se but rather learning to operate with this "collective intelligence" with discernment and responsibility using multiliteracies.

The multiliterate person can

Interpret, use and produce

Electronic, live and paper texts that employ linguistic, visual, auditory, gestural and spatial semiotic systems

for

social, cultural, political, civic and economic purposes

in

socially and culturally diverse contexts

(Anstey and Bull, 2006: 41)

Translanguaging:

The multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds.

It is a systematic, strategic, affiliative and sense making process.

Bilinguals tanslanguage to include and facilitate communication with others, but also to construct deeper understandings and make sense of their worlds.

Challenge before teachers:

Mediate LITERACY in particular contexts of compulsory schooling for PARTICIPATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE.

Social Justice“Bilingual teaching combines two or more languages and cultures. It is thus important for equity between the two languages and content to be established, and for students of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds to be recognised as knowers (Freire, 1970)…. This principle… enables the creation of a learning context which is not threatening to students´identities but that builds multiplicities of language uses and linguistic identities, while maintaining academic rigour and upholding high expectations.” (García, 2009: 318)

4 dimensions:•Equity• Language tolerance• Expectations and rigor• Assessment

Social practice“Places learning through an additional language as a result of collaborative social practices in which students try out out ideas and actions (Lave and Wenger, 1991), and thus socially construct their learning (Vygotsky, 1978). Learning is seen as occurring through doing (Dewey, 1897). Thus, an action based pedagogy falls within this principle. In the field of language education, this is often referred to as task based pedagogy (Ellis, 2003)”. (García, 2009: 323)

4 dimensions:•Interactions and involvement• Language• Collaboration and group work• Relevance

What is the educational context of compulsory education today?

EXPANSION, APARENT DEMOCRATIZATION AND LOW QUALITY

Early exclusion. 50% students do not finish secondary school, they drop out or re attend repeatedly and leave.

Total exclusion 700 thousand young people between 13- 17 are out of school in Argentina

Exclusion due to inclusion with no quality: students attend school but learn very little or do not learn.

National and international assessments show:

•Low levels of attainment (in particular when analysing reading skills).

• Dispersion of results, inequality in distribution of learning achievement depending on the socioeconomic level of students.

Challenge before teachers:

Mediate LITERACY in particular contexts of compulsory schooling for PARTICIPATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE in contexts of EXPANSION, APARENT DEMOCRATIZATION AND LOW QUALITY

The REAL trajectories of students in contrast to the THEORETICAL ones.

“Las injusticias que el sistema educativo reproduce, las que legitima y sobre todo las que origina pueden ser consideradas “injusticias reparables”, tal como las denomina Sen, que son las que nos mueven a la discusión crítica y a la investigación (Sen, 2011). Este movimiento hacia la reflexión es crucial para la producción de conocimiento, en tanto la percepción de las injusticias y los fuertes sentimientos que éstas pueden desencadenar sirven de estímulos para la acción, aunque son insuficientes para la comprensión del problema. Comprender requiere razonar, examinar, buscar explicaciones que puedan sostenerse con evidencias.”

(Claudia Romero, Gabriela J. Krichesky y Natalia Zacarías, 2012)

Construction of an inquisitive teacher identity to look for answers and to introduce innovations informed before the present challenges.

• Development of an interpretive perspective of the teacher before their own practices, classes and institution.

• Development of a space for systematic research practices in teacher practice to feed teaching.

A never ending process of investigating and experimenting, reflecting and analysing what one does in the classroom and school, formulating one´s own personal professional theories and using these theories to guide future practice, and deciding what and how to teach based on one´s best professional judgement. (Loughan, 2010)

What is teaching ?

ITE and INSET need to address that challenge

A growing body of research has fostered the popularity of a variety of school-based, practitioner-driven, collaborative, inquiry-based approaches to professional development

Fundamental concept of Inquiry based teacher learning:

Participation and context

essential to teacher learning

A common goal of inquiry-based approaches to professional development is to replace the traditional theory/practice dichotomy with the more fluid construct of:

praxis

How does teacher education account for that?

JubileoLa historia grande, se hace de historias chicas? o es otra cosa? Una vida es un conjunto de momentos o es algo más? Este momento largo que finaliza, es una historia que termina? , un peldaño?, una vuelta?, una trayecto? un sentido? antes y después es como atrás y adelante o todo es siempre? reflexiones de jubilada? ja! no sé bien....

Como cada vez que cambia algo uno se asoma como a un sino desconocido, elige, proyecta, se juega, se sorprende, vive, sufre, disfruta, siempre con otros, con algunos que terminan siendo como uno mismo y entonces cuando uno se quiere despedir no puede, con historias chicas que terminan siendo nuestra historia grande, con momentos que no terminan porque uno los siente o son como el sentido de ser uno acá. Ahora es una bisagra, doy la vuelta, quizá encuentre alguna respuesta o solo mas preguntas...

Una cosa sí, este trabajo que hoy dejo tiene muchos componentes que son para siempre , que creo no dejaré nunca: la pasión por hacer un otro mejor de alguien y de uno mismo y de hacerlo con los demás que creen más o menos en las mismas cosas y terminan siendo como socios de una tarea infinita.

Gracias a todos esos socios en la tarea, por todo. Claudia

A sociocultural perspective argues that human cognitive “development can be understood only in light of the cultural practices and circumstances of their communities—which also change”

Learning to teach, from a sociocultural perspective, is based on the assumption that knowing, thinking, and understanding come from participating in the social practices of learning and teaching in specific classroom and school situations.

Teacher learning and the activities of teaching are understood as growing out of participation in the social practices in classrooms; and what teachers know and how they use that knowledge in classrooms is highly interpretative and contingent on knowledge of self, setting, students, curriculum, and community.

•Continuous Professional Development

•Personal agency• A community of practice• Code of Ethics

Teacher authored accounts of professional development

Retrospectively interpretative

They selectively infuse meaning to those interpretationsThey actively seek to bring meaning.

“educative mentoring”

mentoring that is aimed at teacher growth by enabling teachers at all levels of experience and expertise to respect, challenge, and support one

another as they collectively seek to reach standards of excellence in their work

Teachers as learners of teaching

We can trace teacher learning from a sociocultural perspective bylooking at the progressive movement from externally, socially mediatedactivities to internal mediation controlled by the individual teacher.

This means the process through which a person’s activity is initially mediated by other people or cultural artifacts but later comes to be controlled by him/herself as he or she appropriates and reconstructs resources to regulate his or her own activities. Three types of tools which humans use to mediate their activities are cultural artifacts and activities, concepts, and social relations.

All three will help teachers walk through the “zone of proximal development” (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978), that is, the distance between what a person can do on his/her own and what a person can achieve with the support of a cultural artifact or someone else.

The models of inquiry-based professional development described here seek to:

1.create alternative structural arrangements that support sustained dialogic mediation between and among teachers and teacher educators 2.provide assisted performance as teachers struggle through issues that are directly relevant to their professional development and classroom lives.