Teaching and Learning
Teacher’s Sharing of Power for Responsible Students
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melanie Dumouchel, Anderson Araújo-Oliveira, Karine Rondeau
The exercise of power is a prerequisite for the student’s empowerment (Lanaris 2014). The teacher must share his or her power at both the school and social levels if the student is to be responsible for his or her learning (Dumouchel, 2017). The process of empowerment in class management requires a coherent dynamic that is articulated around, the class management accountability (social dimension) and the curriculum didactics devolution (school dimension). The school dimension has been explored through the didactics of mathematics in a doctoral research (Dumouchel, 2017) that highlighted the difficulty for teachers to establish this link at both the theoretical and practical levels. The teacher is open to allowing more power to the student in mathematics; however, he remains focused on obedience, submission for classroom management. The teacher's internal coherence between these didactic choices and these choices in the conduct of the class seems to lead him or her towards the optimization of his teaching practice (Butlen, Charles-Pezard and Masselot, 2011). Does considering this link through another discipline be more facilitative for the teacher? The general objective of the field of the social studies is to bring the student to "build his or her social conscience to act as a responsible and enlightened citizen" (MÉQ, 2001). Can the student act as a responsible citizen outside an empowering class? The present paper proposes to weave the theoretical link between the study of social realities and the conduct of the class in order to explore the possible practice for the teacher.
Humanising Teaching to Make a Difference: From Page to Stage
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Logamurthie Athiemoolam
The paper outlines of how a journal article, based on an educator’s experiences of social injustice within a secondary school in the US, was used as a stimulus for the creation of a piece of theatre within the context of a university classroom in South Africa. The article entitled ‘And the Band played on? Social Justice and the Middle School Arts Program’ by Carol Karpinski was presented to a group of fifty third year education students, registered for an education module in a South African university, for analysis under the theme of social justice. The students were divided into groups to analyse the article in terms of social justice issues and pedagogy. This led them to critically engage with their own notions of the humanising pedagogy as espoused by Freire. Flowing from this discussion it was suggested that students present improvised plays to demonstrate their perceptions of the humanising pedagogy. The paper focuses on one of the group’s plays, entitled ‘Humanising Teaching to Make a Difference’, analyses the crux of the play and explains how the play was adapted into a piece of theatre and showcased to a wider audience of learners. The paper argues that drama and theatre-in-education could be used effectively to embrace new ways of knowing and learning so that academic articles and texts may be used in conjunction with students’ lived experiences to embody learning and deepen understanding of issues such as the humanising pedagogy.
"Ethnic" Families and Teacher Ideology
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mariana Alvayero Ricklefs
Best pedagogical practices are unsuccessful in the hands of teachers whose ideologies are left unchecked (Bartolomé, 2010). Hence, this research study has two objectives: 1) to explore what are teachers’ ideologies of literacy regarding English Learners (ELs), and 2) to examine how global and local factors influence these ideologies. The framework of the study is informed by critical theory (Freire, 1970; McLaren, 2016; Pennycook, 2010), and ideological linguistic racialization (Darder, 2011; Urciuoli, 2013). The research design is a comparative qualitative case study of two K-5 public schools with large percentages of ELs. Data comes from a larger ethnographic research project, but this study is an original submission; neither presented nor published before. The current study’s data included weekly video-recorded classroom observations conducted during one school year, semi-structured interviews of ten focal teachers, English curriculum, school district and state documents. Data analysis consisted of open coding (sorting of patterns of teachers’ ideology) and analytic coding (thorough breakdown of recurring themes of ideologies). Data findings showed that teachers’ ideologies related to viewing language proficiency as transitional monolingualism, literacy as a family trait, and school performance as behavior-knowledge dichotomy. Thus, this study also directly aligns with the ISS conference theme since “social groups (e.g., mainstream teachers; EL children and families) are not immune to prevailing Universalist tendencies.” Such tendencies are strong in the U.S. (and in other countries dealing with “ethnic” immigrants) with its current political climate and anti-diversity sentiment. Finally, implications for teacher preparation and training and for future research are considered.
