Practitioner research in preservice teacher education and the promotion of teacher autonomy

In this chapter, the authors describe project based learning for preservice teachers that is designed to promote Action Research and Reflective Practice to enable teachers become more active and autonomous shapers of learning and not just deliverers of curriculum content. This chapter provides an insight into the Low-Threshold Practitioner Research that they carry out with their ELT students in their respective university-based teaching contexts. The projects that they supervise are realised during long-term school placements, which are a compulsory part of students’ Master of Education programme in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. By introducing the ELT students to the ideas of Action Research (e.g. Burns, 1999, Mertler, 2017) and Exploratory Practice (e.g. Allwright, 2005; Hanks, 2017), Heim and Gabel aim to empower them not only to take charge of their own professional development, so that they are not reduced to “passive receivers of curricula” (Barnes, 1976, p. 188), but also to contribute to shaping the whole “educational landscape” (Vaughan & Burnaford, 2016, p. 290) in the long run. The authors are convinced that it takes these kinds of independent teachers to create a culture of English language teaching in which more and more responsibility is handed over to learners (Little et al., 2017). As is argued later in the chapter, this will not only be true if the ELT students’ projects explicitly focus on aspects of learner autonomy in the classroom. The authors will argue that involving learners in joint discussions and decisions on any given aspect of classroom teaching, e.g. the aspect of classroom discourse, in itself already is a vital step towards learner and teacher autonomy.