The symposium abstract draws on an ethico-political turn and demands "an effort to contest classed, gendered, monolingual, neocolonial or raciolinguistic discourses." This echoes calls for critical foreign language instruction and asks, how teacher education can possibly respond to this.
The current conversation on critical foreign language instruction focusses on how to enrich classrooms with critical topics (e.g. Gerlach 2020) and thus operates on the level of subject matter. This is mirrored by teacher knowledge research and teacher education research focussing on which kind of knowledge teachers need to implement which content into their classrooms. This research draws on explicit teacher knowledge (e.g. König et al. 2016, Krauss et al. 2017) and reflection. It assumes that teachers' actions are determined by explicable norms or goal-oriented cognitions, thus echoing common-sense-based theories, such as rational choice models. This approach underrates the institutional and organisational frame of both schooling and teacher education.
In a study on co-operative learning in the EFL classroom, we tried to establish how this institutional and organisational frame influences teachers' actions. Co-operative learning is a highly relevant case in point, because it ranges from affirmative micro methods to participatory macro-methods that seriously interfere with assessment driven classroom cultures and power dynamics (Sharan 2010).
In the talk, I will present the overall design of the project (3-year-longitudinal, classroom study, teacher knowledge study, student language tests) and focus on the classroom and teacher studies. The first core finding is that implicit knowledge, i.e. habitus, seems to overrule explicit knowledge, i.e. knowledge of teaching methods, norms, and intentions. The second core finding is that teachers' actions are not only complicated by conflicting norms, but also by conflicting habitus dimensions, in this case a habitus of "teacher as assessor in control" vs. a habitus of "autonomy, participation and co-operation". In our study, it has become clear that the question, which habitus dimension overrules the other is crucially influenced by the field, i.e. the social context or practice, it has been acquired in.
These findings have implications for teacher knowledge research and teacher education. They suggest that any change towards more ethico-political foreign language classrooms cannot be achieved by introducing new content within the existing institutional and organisational structures. Rather than that, any such attempts will fail, unless (1) teacher knowledge research pays attention to implicit knowledge; unless (2) teacher education finds ways of impacting on implicit knowledge, e.g. by experiential, or disruptive approaches; and unless (3) the contradiction between an ethico-political orientation towards democratic EFL-instruction / teacher education and the current organisational and interactional frame of standard-orientation, modularisation and over-assessment is addressed and healed.
Gerlach, D. (2020) Kritische Fremdsprachendidaktik. Tübingen: Narr.
König, J. et al. (2016) Teachers' Professional Knowledge for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. J. Teacher Education 67: 4, 320-337
Krauss, S. et al. (eds)(2017) FALKO: Fachspezifische Lehrerkompetenzen. Münster: Waxmann.
Sharan, Y. (2010) Cooperative Learningfor Academic and Social Gains: Valued pedgagogy, problematic practice. Europ. J. of E. 45/2, 300-313.
