Mediating Teacher Learning Through Dialogical Learning Spaces Integrated in a Practicum Experience

Teacher preparation programs in the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) often require pre-service teachers to engage in some observations and teaching as part of their coursework or practicum. Some programs require their students to observe classrooms and record their thoughts in their observation journals. These observation journals could vary from being unguided with little or no support to being guided with specific directions or readings on what to observe. For practicum students, they may be asked to tutor one-on-one, work in small groups or teach the entire class, but what they are expected to learn from these experiences remains unclear. This article reports on a case study, documenting the learning of two candidates and myself, serving both as their mentor teacher and teacher educator, as we worked together to negotiate their learning tasks during their practicum experiences. Throughout the process beginning with unguided journals then transitioning to guided journals, and finally microteaching experiences, it was hoped that the dialogical learning spaces interwoven throughout these iterations would serve as a mediation tool to understand candidate learning from these experiences. As a mentor teacher seeking to provide optimal learning experiences for these candidates, it became clear that navigating teacher learning is indeed a challenging and complex task. Further research in this area may support mentor teachers in providing teacher candidates with the kinds of deliberate dialogues necessary to gain insight into candidate learning about teaching practice

Transnational English Language Teaching: Opportunities for Teacher Learning and Development

As a teacher educator, I have long been interested in looking for ways in which to provide educational opportunities for students, particularly for those who are unable to receive education due to a variety of social and contextual factors. As a faculty member of a University dedicated to the values of equity and social justice, I looked for ways in which to embed these important principles into our TESOL teacher education program. In the fall of 2012, I had the opportunity to meet the founder of Kito International, a nonprofit organization in Nairobi, Kenya. At the time, our School of Leadership and Education Sciences had named this organization our “Partner of the Year”. The mission of this organization is to get homeless youth off the streets and provide them with professional development opportunities and skills to successfully transition into society as a means out of poverty. In my conversations with the founder of Kito, we considered how our TESOL program could continue to be of service to them. In collaboration with the founder, his staff at Kito International, and our graduate students, we developed an online business English program to support their entrepreneurial goals. During the spring of 2013, we piloted this project with four of Kito’s staff members. In the fall of 2013, I paired the Kito staff members with our TESOL graduate students into collaborative teaching teams. This project was a two-year initiative with the intention of training the staff members, working with them on training their youth, and then handing over the curriculum to them to use with their subsequent cohorts using the “train-the-trainer” approach to empower the local trainers to then take on the leadership around this work. Because we were developing the program as we were simultaneously trying to understand the needs of the learners enrolled in the program, I instituted dialogical learning spaces (Molina 2015), which were weekly teaching-team sessions lasting from one to three hours, where we brainstormed lesson plan ideas, pre-screened and uploaded lessons, reviewed student submissions, provided feedback, while having conversations around our assumptions about language learning and teaching, particularly within this transnational context. After a presentation of the literature that informed our understanding of the complexities of teaching in this transnational context, this paper will focus on the learning that teachers derived through their participation in this project. Lastly, implications for TESOL teacher education in this global context will be considered

Creating Authentic Contexts for Transnational Language Learning and Teaching in TESOL Teacher Education: Online ELT for Kenyan Youth

Creating authentic contexts for our teacher candidates to learn about ELT in transnational contexts has become increasingly important for the depth of learning it affords as boundaries begin to blur in this transnational world. In this chapter, I present our work in developing and teaching an online Business English program for Kenyan youth, who were part of a non-profit organization with a mission to help homeless youth escape poverty through the provision of professional development opportunities. Through the process of engaging in this transnational context, our teacher candidates became more cognizant of the conceptual understanding of the historical, political, economic and social influences impacting the process of language teaching and learning within this context. Preparing English teachers to teach in this transnational context allowed for critical conversations around power, language hierarchies, ownership of English, and post-methods and post-structural perspectives on language teaching. It also provided a space for our teacher candidates to continually examine and negotiate their positionality as English teachers within this transnational context

English language teaching in China: Teacher Agency in Response to Curricular Innovations

This chapter explores the unique history of English Language Teaching in China, and the role of teacher agency in response to curricular changes. This study employed survey methodology with 72 Chinese English language teachers to understand the ways in which they adapt their curriculum within their local contexts. Interviews with five teachers and one teacher educator selected through purposeful sampling revealed additional factors that contributed to the teachers’ sense of agency. The complexity of the translation of theory into practice is revealed in light of the current ecological systems in which teachers and students are situated

Romanticizing Culture: The Role of Teachers’ Cultural Intelligence in Working With Diversity

As the world is becoming increasingly flat (Ang, Van Dyne, Koh, Templer, & Chandrasekar, 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Friedman, 2005), the classroom has become a mirror that often reflects this phenomenon at a microcosmic level. As such, teacher preparation programs are continuing to emphasize the importance of understanding and valuing student cultures to inform teaching practice. This study sought to examine how 10 in-service teachers in the San Diego area understand the role of culture in their daily work with their culturally and linguistically diverse students using the cultural intelligence framework (Earley & Ang, 2003). While the cultural intelligence framework provided some insight into how teachers understood certain aspects of culture in relation to their students, it also brought to light the complexity of defining and assessing cultural competence. In fact, teachers challenged the elevated emphasis on culture in the literature, and instead, highlighted additional competencies of value to them in this work

The Value of Meaning-Making and Cultural Knowledge for Teachers Working in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Contexts

The tapestry of classrooms today is transforming into a mosaic of colors, languages, and backgrounds. As the population of culturally and linguistically diverse students continues to rise, a deeper understanding of how teachers construct meaning and understand their internal and relational experiences when working with these students has become an important area to examine. This study included in-depth interviews with ten public school teachers in the San Diego area, which assessed the teachers’ meaning-making systems and their cultural competence. The framework of constructive developmental theory (Kegan, 1982, 1994) was drawn upon to assess how teachers’ make sense of their experiences, and the framework of cultural intelligence (Earley & Ang, 2003) was used to determine their cultural competence. Although both frameworks provided some insight into this phenomenon, their limitations far exceeded their utility in terms of understanding the complex ways in which teachers understand and approach their work with culturally and linguistically diverse students. Additional frameworks for understanding teacher -student interactions are considered

Growing Emerging Researchers in a TESOL Teacher Education Program: Implications for Feedback Practice

As teacher educators (TEs), we have a unique and remarkable opportunity to mentor the next generation of teachers. Over the years, our teacher candidates (TCs) have reported a sense of cognitive and affective dissonance while engaging in their culminating master\u27s research requirement as part of a research seminar course. Cognitively, this research study requires knowledge-generation quite different from research they engaged in throughout the program, where they would synthesize and analyze published work in response to a prompt. This knowledge-generation process would often result in challenging previously held assumptions regarding the topic of inquiry through an analysis of authentic data gathered in the field. Many also experience affective dissonance when beliefs about their sense of self as emerging practitioner-researchers are questioned. Some research has examined ways in which to provide deliberate feedback thatattunes not only to the TCs\u27 cognitive and affective dimensions but also to where they can be moved in terms of the outer limits of their learning potential. This study examines how the lenses of socio-cultural and constructive-developmental theories can complement TEs in supporting their TCs in navigating the complex task of teacher research and proposes a framework for feedback practice grounded in a person-centered approach that accounts for TC developmental potentialities

Cultivating a Sense of Critical Consciousness in Teacher Candidates within a Community-based Adult ESL Program

As more teacher education programs commit to developing critically conscious educators, it has become increasingly important to provide teacher candidates with opportunities to engage in critical actions within authentic contexts. To this end, the TESOL program in partnership with community stakeholders instituted a language program, where candidates were provided opportunities to explore the role of advocacy in their work through engaging in iterative dialogic reflections with their students. This chapter illustrates how the candidates came to embrace their role as agentive forces that strived to contribute to the empowerment of their learners to advocate for themselves within their own communities

The Complexity of Providing Feedback when Teachers and Students Speak Different Varieties of English in Transnational Language Teaching Contexts

The paradigm of English as an international language has shifted the ways in which we think about the ownership and use of English, particularly because it is estimated that more than 80% of communication in English is between non-native speakers of English. When so many varieties of Englishes are acknowledged as legitimate varieties, the question of assessing what it means to be proficient in English becomes critical. Through qualitative analysis, this study documents the ways in which American English teachers approached teaching English online to students in Nairobi, Kenya, and revealed the complexities of teaching and providing feedback in such transnational contexts, where teachers and students spoke different varieties of English