Practitioner research and the challenges of the good teaching canon in multilingual and multicultural globalized society

Anna Costantino,Assia Slimani-Rolls

doi:10.12957/soletras.2018.34446

Anna Costantino, Assia Slimani-Rolls

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.12957/soletras.2018.34446

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Abstract

This article seeks to respond to some of the tensions that face language teacher educators in globalized society. For teachers, an increasingly diverse, multicultural and multilingual globalized world means having to acknowledge diversity in their daily pedagogy, while confronting inequality in the distribution of learning resources and the demands of ever- bureaucratized educational settings. Even when theory indicates spaces for the enactment of local pedagogies responding to those challenges, teachers are unable to translate academic-based research into practice. This article argues for practitioner enquiry, practiced by the authors as Exploratory Practice (ALLWRIGHT & HANKS, 2009; HANKS, 2015a; SLIMANI-ROLLS & KIELY, 2014), as an instance of how the empowering spaces suggested by theory can indeed be enacted as lived educational experience.

Highlights

Language teacher professionalism is today the crucible of a number of tensions that have been brought about by the very multifaceted nature of globalization processes and demands on education
As Cochran-Smith and Villegas (2015) suggest in their review of literature on teacher preparation, academic research is today concerned with the way pre-service teachers hone their professional tools so that these are “[...] consistent with new understandings of how people learn and what they need to know in the 21st-century knowledge society, which demands workers who can think critically and work collaboratively” (COCHRAN-SMITH, VILLEGAS, 2015, p. 387)
There is nothing wrong with routines and techniques, as they constitute part of our daily doings, problems arise, we argue, when teaching technologies become internalized to an extent that they become an “order of normative reason”, which is both “a behavioural norm” and “a model of subjectivation” (DARDOT & LAVAL, 2013, p. 3; see FOUCAULT, 1997); namely when such technologies become internalised by teachers, and learners in a way that such an “order of reason” becomes a rationality that encompasses the full scope of teacher professional identity

Summary

Introduction

Language teacher professionalism is today the crucible of a number of tensions that have been brought about by the very multifaceted nature of globalization processes and demands on education.

Results

Conclusion