[SYMP78] Innovations In Language Teacher Education In Times Of Decolonization And Antiracism

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Session Information

D2-101 Live Meeting | Pre-recorded + Live Q&A

Jul 18, 2023 13:15 - Jul 18, 2024 16:15(Europe/Amsterdam)

Venue : 100 % Online session

20230718T1315 20230718T1615 Europe/Amsterdam [SYMP78] Innovations in Language Teacher Education in Times of Decolonization and Antiracism 100 % Online session AILA 2023 - 20th Anniversary Congress Lyon Edition cellule.congres@ens-lyon.fr

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View Abstract

Decolonizing Pre-Service English Language Teacher Training Programs

Oral Presentation[SYMP78] Innovations in Language Teacher Education in Times of Decolonization and Antiracism 01:15 PM - 04:15 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2023/07/18 11:15:00 UTC - 2024/07/18 14:15:00 UTC

Narratives from English teachers at Japanese schools suggested that they realized that pre-service trainings at their universities had been based predominantly on value and concepts from West and difficult to fit to their classroom. The presentation will discuss strategies to overcome the problem before it is too late.

ArgumentIn Japan, pre-service teacher trainings are conducted in teacher training programs approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) at universities. Students who wish to become teachers must complete one of the programs at their institutions. These training programs not only play an important role in shaping teachers' identity but also affect learners' beliefs about language learning.

In this presentation, I will first look at the current guideline for the programs and examine 1) how it has been interpreted by institutions and consequently 3) how teacher training programs limit the trainees' access to information relevant to their own contexts of teaching. Narratives from English teachers with a few years of experience were analyzed in order to investigate how their beliefs about English language teaching had been influenced by their limited accesses to the resources provided by teacher training programs and how they had modified their beliefs as well as their subsequent actions through their experience. Through the preliminary analysis, it was found that the training programs were designed based on dominant concepts mostly those of the West, such as 'native speakers', 'four skills', and/or 'standards' without sufficient discussion on their relevance to the contexts of Japanese schools and the trainees had no choice but to accept them as their alternatives were rarely presented.

The presentation will conclude by stressing the importance of the teachers' continuous reflections on the trainings they had received at different stages of their teaching career, as an effective strategy to align their training and experience with their own contexts.

References
Oda, M. (2014) Reconditioning the Conditions for Second Language Learning: Social Conditions and Learner Motivation. In Sung, K and Spolsky, B, eds. Conditions for English Language Teaching and Learning in Asia. Cambridge Scholar Publishing. 105-125.

Presenters

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Empowering English Language Teacher Candidates from the Global South

The presentation shares a personal inquiry, as a language teacher educator of the Global North, to decolonize a short-term English language teacher education program with the intent to empower teacher candidates from the Global South. Among many layers of modification, this presentation focuses on the modifications to the Pre-TESL course designed for international candidates.

ArgumentThis presentation discusses the preliminary findings of a personal inquiry into the role of the English language teacher educator to support decolonization of English language teacher education for international TESL candidates from the Global South. The private vocational college is in Western Canada, where it offers a short-term TESL program with an additional 2-week Pre-TESL course for non-local candidates, many of whom are from the Global South.
Originally coming from the Global South and teaching in the Global North, I questioned the rationale behind the 2-week Pre-course, and progressively modified it to move away from outcome-focused direct instructions to skills-focused and inquiry-based approach. Much of the course content asked the teacher candidates to ask why certain methods seem to be preferred, and whether it would be applicable for them and their future teaching contexts. From the program feedback at the end of 6 weeks, as well as their self-evaluation and weekly journals, many of the teacher candidates felt more confident, in-control of their learning, and appreciated the two extra weeks prior to beginning the 4-week short term TESL course.
Acknowledging that a Pre-TESL course is specific to the school, the presentation does not aim to suggest a generalized approach in designing and managing a language teacher education program. It certainly does not attempt to advocate for a Pre-TESL program to discuss the impact of the education from Global North to the teaching context of the Global South. Rather, my hope is that though the presentation shares a small case set in a specific context, it would be able to share insights and inspire other educators to make use of their teaching context to support the decolonizing of English language Teacher education.

Presenters

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Decolonizing the Curriculum through Community-Engaged Partnerships

This paper examines the possible pathways, processes, and practices to decolonize and transform the language teacher education curriculum through community-engaged programs and partnerships. In this presentation, we report on a qualitative case study that explores the reported experiences, processes, and practices of a team of ten multilingual families and community-based organizers; and thirty language educators, staff, and faculty who co-created and animated two community-engaged projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this narrative report, we first share the community-engaged, decolonial, and anti-racist principles and practices guiding our collaborative work and partnership. We also share our curriculum re-design and our collaborative processes and challenges. With examples from these co-created community-engaged projects, we suggest ways to resist academic privilege by foregrounding and centering multilingual families and community organizations' voices, leadership, expertise, and knowledge in our practices. In this paper, we advocate for a view of community-engaged partnerships and programming as co-learning sites to enact change, and as a collective "attempt at a way of doing" (Phipps, 2019, 6) decolonizing and antiracist work in language teacher education.

ArgumentLanguage teacher education programs at U.S. universities have increasingly turned to local-global communities as sites for language learning and teacher preparation (Clifford & Reisinger, 2018). Such initiatives commonly involve partnerships between universities and community-based organizations, whose multilingual and transnational members often belong to linguistically marginalized communities. The equitable and mutually beneficial dimensions of such partnerships are often assumed, but rarely examined (Authors, 2019). Also less documented in the literature are the voices and perspectives of multilingual community members, as well as the leadership, time, resources, and work committed by community-based organizations and members to ensure such programs and projects are successful (Authors, 2018). Finally, there is also much to learn about ways to enact liberatory, asset-based, and culturally-sustaining frameworks together with multilingual communities to de/re-create collaborative spaces of learning that move away from colonial legacies and towards ethical, equitable, and socially just practices. This paper explores the possible pathways, processes, and practices to decolonize the language teacher education curriculum and transform relationships of presumed power and dependency.
A team of community-based leaders, students, staff, and faculty from a public, land grant, university in the United States, came together to embrace these challenges. In partnership with a community-based organization that advocates for workers' rights, and in collaboration with multilingual families, teacher educators, and language teachers, we developed several projects for our language teacher education programs. Our partnership aimed at: 1) co-creating community-engaged projects that center and celebrate multilingual communities' knowledge, expertise and activism; 2) answering the urgent call to re-imagine language teacher programs, curricula, and praxis (López-Gopar et.al., 2021).
In this presentation, we report on a qualitative case study that explores the reported experiences, processes, and practices of this team and of the program participants who co-created and animated these community-engaged projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data for this study include stakeholders' planning meeting notes and documents, interviews of community organizers and multilingual participating families, written reflections from language teacher candidates, instructional materials and activities developed with and for participating families, and teacher educators' critical reflections. In this narrative report, we first share the community-engaged, decolonial, and anti-racist principles and practices guiding our collaborative work and partnership. We also share our curriculum re-design and our collaborative processes and challenges. With examples from these co-created community-engaged projects, we suggest ways to resist academic privilege by foregrounding multilingual families and community organizations' voices, leadership, expertise, and knowledge in our practices. In this paper, we advocate for a view of community-engaged partnerships and programming as co-learning sites to enact change in language teacher education and beyond.

Clifford, J. & Reisinger, D.S. (2019). Community-based Language Learning: A Framework for Educators. Georgetown University Press.
López-Gopar, M., Schissel, J., Leung, C. & Morales, J. (2021), Co-constructing Social Justice: Language Educators Challenging Colonial Practices in Mexico, Applied Linguistics, 42(6), 1097–1109.
Phipps, A. (2018). Decolonizing Multillingualism: A Struggle to Decreate. Multilingual Matters.

Presenters

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Translanguaging as an inclusive practice for world language learning: Insights from teachers and teacher candidates

In this study I discuss how 15 world language teachers and teacher candidates negotiated the concept of translanguaging in an online Educational Linguistics class. Using Seltzer's (2022) critical translingual stance with Ruiz's (1984) language orientations and Peña-Pincheira and De Costa's (2020) ecological model of language teacher agency, findings explore how participants negotiated the macro- and meso-constraints of standards and classroom contexts while drawing parallels between translanguaging pedagogies and well-established language teaching practices.

ArgumentWhile translanguaging is viewed as an antiracist pedagogical practice for emergent multilinguals learning English, it is less known in US world language (WL) classrooms, which are traditionally perceived as comprising monolingual English speakers. Yet US WL learners are increasingly multilingual and multicultural (Kubanyiova & Crookes, 2016). Moreover, research has shown benefits of translanguaging pedagogies for monolinguals, including increased multilingual, multicultural awareness (García & Baetens Beardsmore, 2009; Back et al., 2020). These findings suggest that translanguaging pedagogies could help scaffold acquisition of an additional language. However, concerns about maximizing target language use, particularly vis-à-vis ACTFL's policy of 90% target language use in the classroom, may conflict with encouraging the use of a student's entire linguistic repertoire. How can WL teachers explore the potentials of translanguaging while still fostering target language and culture acquisition and use?
In this study I explore how 15 WL teachers and teacher candidates were introduced to and negotiated the concept of translanguaging in an online, asynchronous Educational Linguistics class. Integrating Ruiz's (1984) language orientations, Peña-Pincheira and De Costa's (2020) ecological model of language teacher agency, and Seltzer's (2022) critical translingual stance, I describe how this stance evolved among participants in their discussion board and journal assignments. I used open and selective coding on these data to analyze the complexities surrounding participant conversations and reflections regarding translanguaging (Gibbs, 2018; Glaser, 2016).
Findings indicate that participants were open to the possibility of using translanguaging pedagogies, drawing parallels between these pedagogies and several well-established WL teaching practices. Meso- and macro- constraints of standards and school environments were explored through discussions with peers from WL and other content areas, and candidates used language paralleling Ruiz´s (1984) orientations, including (trans)languag(ing)-as-resource and (trans)languag(ing)-as-right. I discuss how a critical translingual stance can promote inclusivity and equity in WL teacher education.

References
Back, M., Han, M., & Weng, S. C. (2020). Emotional scaffolding for emergent multilingual
learners through translanguaging: Case stories. Language and Education, 34(5), 387–406.
García, O., & Baetens Beardsmore, H. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global
perspective. Wiley-Blackwell Pub.
Seltzer, K. (2022). Enacting a critical translingual approach in teacher preparation: Disrupting
oppressive language ideologies and fostering the personal, political, and pedagogical
stances of preservice teachers of English. TESOL Journal, 13(2), e649, 1–11. https://doi-org/10.1002/tesj.649
Kubanyiova, M., & Crookes, G. (2016). Re‐envisioning the roles, tasks, and contributions of
language teachers in the multilingual era of language education research and practice. The
Modern Language Journal, 100(S1), 117–132. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12304
Peña-Pincheira, R. S., & De Costa, P. I. (2021). Language teacher agency for educational justice–
oriented work: An ecological model. TESOL Journal, 12(2), 1–13.
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.561
Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE: The Journal for the National
Association for Bilingual Education, 8(2), 15–34.

Presenters

View Abstract

The Imperative for the Decolonization of Language Teacher Education

ArgumentThis session is intended to lay the foundation for the symposium titled "Innovations in Language Teacher Education in Times of Decolonization and Antiracism." The presenter will discuss why this decolonization work constitutes an imperative for the field of applied linguistics and the language teaching profession in general. It will offer participants the opportunity to build background knowledge on key topics/terms necessary to participate in this important project and, ideally, help advance this ongoing professional discussion. Therefore, the discussion of the following key terms will be at the center of this presentation: positionality, decolonization, decoloniality, hegemonic epistemologies (i.e., epistemologies from the North), epistemologies from the South, etc. The presenter will also address the following questions: Why does it matter that we work on decolonizing our field? How does this work support antiracist initiatives in applied linguistics? What role do we, applied linguistics professionals, play in this process? What can we do to legitimize other ways of knowing? How do we go about decolonizing our own research, educational, and leadership praxis? How does this work contribute to the preparation of antiracist language educators? How does this work impact our society at a time we face so many global challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, water and food shortages, energy crisis, and so forth)?

Bibliography

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Diniz De Figueiredo, E.H.D., & Martinez, J. (2019). The locus of enunciation as a way to confront epistemological racism and decolonize scholarly knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz061
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2019). Bridging race into second language acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 103 (Supplement 2019), 145-151.
Hoppers, C. O. (February 9, 2021). Connecting decolonial and sustainable futures in education. UNESCO Chair series: Decolonising education for sustainable futures.
Kendi, A. (2019). How to be an antiracist. One World.
Kubota, R. (2016). The multi/plural turn, postcolonial theory, and neoliberal multiculturalism: Complicities and implications for applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 37(4), 474-494. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amu045
Kubota, R. (2019). Confronting epistemological racism, decolonizing scholarly knowledge: Race and gender in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 41(5), 712-732. Applied Linguistics, 41(5), October 2020, pp. 712–732, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz033
Lopez, A.E. (2020). Decolonizing educational leadership. Palgrave/MacMillan.
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Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research. Routledge.
Pennycook, A., & Makoni, S. (2020). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the Global South. Routledge.
Santos, B. de S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge.

Presenters