Researching Identity in Language Teachers – Current Challenges and Implications

Language teacher identity has been at the forefront of pedagogical research in recent years; this has become particularly important due to the demographic changes seen throughout the world since 2015; since then, there have been significant changes in the cultural landscape of schools in general and language teaching in particular, which presents unique challenges for teachers in their process of identity construction. This study aims to explore the transformative nature of language teacher identity in two settings: teaching in online classrooms in one’s home country, and teaching in online classroom abroad. The research will explore how cultural identity shapes an educators’ relationship with students, how one’s own cultural identity influences methodological and pedagogical choices, how these can improve literacy in the young adult classroom, as well touching upon the relevance of cultural identity is in a developing teacher. The findings revealed a general consensus on the need to gear pedagogigcal practices towards a student-centered approach; they further showed a general split in how teachers view the role that cultural identity plays in the classroom: while some felt that local cultures hindered their approach to teaching, others felt it helped build rapport and understanding between teachers and learners.

Tâches, interaction et présence à distance

This article presents the highlights of the learning experience within the teaching-learning scheme of French as an additional language as it was proposed to international students at the university to ensure pedagogical continuity during the health crisis between April and June 2020. Through vignettes that give an overview of the course, it proposes, on the one hand, to reflect on the pedagogical choices that were made in order to measure their effects effectively. On the other hand, it looks at the role of the tasks and the way in which they stimulate interaction, articulate or organise the cognitive, conative and socio-affective presence at a distance in this particular context. What emerges from the experience is that the flexible articulation of a set of tasks creates an organising framework that helps learners to shape their own curriculum while supporting their engagement. Overall, the pedagogical organisation of the device has led to potentially beneficial creative and socio-interactive use.

How Constructivist Theories of Development can be used to Re-conceptualise NAPLAN as an Opportunity to Develop Student Resilience

Teachers have come under increased pressure to improve educational outcomes as Australia has sought to meet the challenges of competing on an international level. This intensified pressure has been accompanied by improved levels of funding, a National Curriculum for all Australian states, and territories, along with assessments to measure these key outcomes. However, this increased level of scrutiny has affected the pedagogical choices of teachers. Traditional modes of instruction have been reinforced, with teachers moving away from effective constructivist approaches to learning. This article will propose that a reinterpretation of constructivist theories of development is needed to arrest this decline, so that increased accountability measures, like NAPLAN, can be perceived as constructivist opportunities to build both core subject knowledge and broader 21st Century skills, such as resilience.

Les pratiques enseignantes pour soutenir les premiers apprentissages de la langue écrite à l’éducation préscolaire : entre l’approche développementale et l’approche scolarisante

In the context of opposing approaches to research and educational practices, it is important to know whether teaching practices are consistent with ministerial programs that prescribe a developmental or an educational approach. This article presents quantitative, exploratory research that aims to document pedagogical choices in preschool education in Québec. A questionnaire was given to 159 teachers. Results showed slight preferences on the part of teachers for academic approaches to language learning. The value teachers placed on play increased their preference for developmental approaches to learning. Teachers in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas expressed a more distinct preference for developmental approaches than those in comparatively more socioeconomically advantaged areas.

Unintentional teaching of entrepreneurial competences

Research on entrepreneurship education (EE) emphasizes the role of learning environments, contexts and pedagogical choices in developing students’ entrepreneurial competences. EE has assumed that it solely carries the task of improving entrepreneurial competences. Yet, the objectives, content and methods of teaching vary, and hence non-entrepreneurship teachers’ classrooms can also provide a learning environment for entrepreneurial competences. However, whether or not this kind of unintentional teaching of entrepreneurial competences takes place has not been widely addressed. In this study, the authors investigate how business school non-entrepreneurship teachers’ teaching methods unintentionally match the known framework of entrepreneurial competences. The findings indicate that non-entrepreneurship teachers do unintentionally expose their students to entrepreneurial competences such as creativity, learning from experience and financial literacy. However, competences such as opportunity recognition, perseverance and mobilizing resources do not receive similar attention. The findings indicate that some entrepreneurial competences are not solely owned by EE, but can be embedded in non-entrepreneurship education. Accordingly, the study extends the current understanding of EE and which “niche” competences should be emphasized in it, but also demonstrates how non-entrepreneurship teachers can expose students to entrepreneurial competences while teaching in their own subject areas.

Pedagogical Reflection

Instructors in higher education are often asked to reflect on their pedagogical choices in formulaic, detached, rote ways such as end of the year faculty evaluations or in response to peer review of teaching. Yet, because of the parameters for these reflections, they often lack depth or much consideration. Particularly because higher education institutions, especially in the United States, are focused on assessment, outcomes, student performance, and retention, little time is focused on particular pedagogical choices or interaction with students. Numerous studies demonstrate that faculty-student interaction has a remarkable impact on student success. This paper, a Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN), explores the value of sustained pedagogical reflection and how such reflection can benefit instructors and their students.

Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-Wide Framework

While Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research has at its core the desire to support student learning, experience from other AI domains suggest that such ethical intentions are not by themselves sufficient. There is also the need to consider explicitly issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, and inclusion. At a more general level, there is also a need to differentiate between doing ethical things and doing things ethically, to understand and to make pedagogical choices that are ethical, and to account for the ever-present possibility of unintended consequences. However, addressing these and related questions is far from trivial. As a first step towards addressing this critical gap, we invited 60 of the AIED community’s leading researchers to respond to a survey of questions about ethics and the application of AI in educational contexts. In this paper, we first introduce issues around the ethics of AI in education. Next, we summarise the contributions of the 17 respondents, and discuss the complex issues that they raised. Specific outcomes include the recognition that most AIED researchers are not trained to tackle the emerging ethical questions. A well-designed framework for engaging with ethics of AIED that combined a multidisciplinary approach and a set of robust guidelines seems vital in this context.

Preservice teachers’ expressed awarenesses: emerging threads of retro-spection of learning and pro-spection of teaching

In this paper, we report an enquiry into elementary preservice teachers’ learning, as they engage in doing mathematics for themselves. As a group of researchers working in elementary Initial Teacher Education in English universities, we co-planned and taught sessions on growing pattern generalisation. Following the sessions, interviews of fifteen preservice teachers at two universities focused on their expressed awareness of their approach to the mathematical activity. Preservice teachers’ prospective planning and post-teaching evaluations of similar activities in their classrooms were also examined. We draw on aspects of enactivism and the notion of reflective “spection” in the context of teacher learning, tracing threads between preservice teachers’ retro-spection of learning and pro-spection of teaching. Our analysis indicates that increasing sensitivity to their own embodied processes of generalisation offers opportunities for novice teachers to respond deliberately, rather than to react impulsively, to different pedagogical possibilities. The paper contributes a new dimension to the discussion about the focus of novice elementary school teachers’ retrospective reflection by examining how deliberate retrospective analysis of doing mathematics, and not only of teaching actions, can develop awarenesses that underlie the growth of expertise in mathematics teaching. We argue that engaging preservice teachers in mathematics to support deliberate retrospective analysis of their mathematics learning and prospective consideration of the implications for teaching can enable more critical pedagogical choices.

Transgressions Towards Difference: A Tertiary Arts Educator’s Reflection on Teaching in Norway

This chapter explores the idea of transgressions within tertiary arts education, focusing on how transgressions might lead us toward understanding notions of difference, and contributing to understandings of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), inclusion, and diversity in education. These ideas are explored from my first-person perspective as a tertiary arts educator and researcher, with the research taking a qualitative auto-narrative approach. Through unpacking my auto-narratives this chapter identifies how transgressions within teaching might add to the teaching and learning context, and I ask: How might we, as educators, see these transgressions as opportunities, and as ways to encourage difference in our teaching and learning? Through critiquing my own pedagogical choices and practices, I reveal that when seeking to embark on an inclusive and dialogical approach towards education, transgressions can be made, and through these transgressions there are opportunities to develop teaching practices in arts education.

Using Learner Centered Pedagogy and Social Justice Pedagogy in Post-Secondary Technical and Professional Communication Writing Courses

This chapter discusses the author's approach to implementing social justice and learner-centered pedagogies in a course titled Technical Communication in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter. The author uses the Black Lives Matter movement as a springboard for teaching technical communication students about the responsibilities of workplace writers. Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) make use of a skills-based pedagogy and, at times, omits the importance of providing students with cultural competency skills. However, there is a shift in the field of TPC as some scholars are advocating for the inclusion of topics such as race, culture, gender, and class in pedagogical discussions. Discussed in this chapter are the theories behind the author's pedagogical choices when creating the described course, the student assignments, and the challenges encountered while teaching the course.