Developing inclusive pedagogy for autonomy in a master's TESOL programme
This presentation reports on my developing an inclusive pedagogy for autonomy in a master's programme in TESOL in the UK. For the past three years that I have been teaching in this programme, not only have I incorporated learner autonomy (Holec, 1981; Dam, 1995) as content, but also developed an inclusive pedagogy for autonomy in the modules I teach in the programme. Under this pedagogy, the learners' knowledge, experiences, contexts, and idiosyncrasies take a prime role. It is their interests and needs based on their previous experience, knowledge, and the contexts they are familiar with that shape the curriculum to a great extent (Little, Dam & Legenhausen, 2017). In this respect, the pedagogy is inclusive of students' own needs and own background knowledge and idiosyncrasies, as well as autonomous. Also, my teaching and practitioner research practice has been informed by Exploratory Practice (Allwright and Hanks, 2009), whose principles call for inclusivity understood as involving everyone in working together for mutual understanding and development.
Other aspects of autonomy that an examination of my teaching reveal include: students' choices and decisions regarding assessment, tasks, materials, timing, and homework, as well as students' meaning making, discussions, development of understanding and sharing understanding, together with students' epistemic enquiries, creativity and spontaneity. Collected practitioner research data includes video-recorded sessions of my teaching, and students' reflective drawings on the experience and their video-recorded explanation of the drawings. Participants are comprised of three consecutive cohorts of students, each one comprising of a maximum of 10 students.
Regarding the incorporation of inclusive pedagogy for autonomy in the curriculum as content, the presentation reports on the teacher-researcher's own reflections in developing student-teachers' understanding of autonomy within the MA TESOL programme.
The data has been collected as a part of a project that aims to identify signs of criticality (Salvi, 2020) in the researcher's own teaching practice and in the students' learning experience in the MA TESOL programme, via a pedagogy for autonomy and the principles of Exploratory Practice. Since a pedagogy for autonomy has been deployed, the data, together with the teacher's description of and reflection on practice, will be insightful in revealing signs of an inclusive pedagogy for autonomy in the educative practice, including what an inclusive pedagogy for autonomy constitutes in practice and how it was developed.
Allwright, D., & Hanks, J. 2009. The Developing Language Learner: An introduction to Exploratory Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dam, L. 1995. Learner Autonomy: From Theory to Classroom Practice. Ireland: Authentik.
Holec, H. 1981: Autonomy and foreign language learning. Oxford: Pergamon. (First published 1979, Strasbourg: Council of Europe)
Little, D., Dam, L. & Legenhausen, L. 2017. Language Learner Autonomy: Theory, Practice and Research. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Salvi, A.I. 2020. A practitioner-research study of criticality development in academic English language. In A. Simpson and F. Dervin (Eds.), The Meaning of Criticality in Education Research: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy. Palgrave Studies in Education Research Methods Series.
