Cynosures for Development
A Functional Linguistic Approach to Chinese as a Foreign Language Teacher Development
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jingzi Huang
Accompanied the desire for more students studying Chinese in the K-12 classrooms around the world is a need for Chinese as a Foreign Language teachers who are developed to embrace a language pedagogy targeting integration of language and culture or content. In the U.S., The Five Cs (Communication, Culture, Comparison, Connection, Community) proposed by ACTFL through the National Standards Collaborative Board (2015) specifically require attention to the integration of content, culture, and language. In Europe, the CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) approach (Llinares & Pena, 2015) to foreign language education also reflects the inclusive ideal of integrating language and content in foreign language instruction. However, the reality in the U.S. is that the urgent need for more Chinese teachers has resulted in the hiring of many Chinese speakers in the K-12 classrooms without systematic training in the pedagogy for integration. Addressing the multiple goals in a systematic and integrated way presents a challenge for Chinese classroom teachers. In the field of research, studies focusing on Chinese teachers’ professional development are very limited. At the level of instructional design and practice, a question is how a professional development program can help Chinse teachers move from skill-focused language teaching toward systematic integration. This paper presents a case study to focus on a public school in-service Chinese teacher studying in a language education program utilizing a functional linguistic perspective (Halliday, 1994) to approach language curriculum and instruction. The study is both self-exploratory and an action research that has taken the shape in actions. It specifically examines the participants' struggles in the process of using Mohan's Knowledge Framework (2001) to organize instructional units that integrate the five Cs and the achievement in their joint effort to create and implement an instructional unit in a middle school exploratory Chinese program. Data were collected during a regular school year in the forms of curriculum design, teacher's self-reflection, oral and e-mail correspondences between the researcher and the teacher, videotaped lessons, and students' learning products in both oral and written formats. Output from the students are analyzed from a systemic functional perspective to capture the ideational meaning (Halliday, 1994) realized via limited linguistic resources available to students at the time. The findings of the study provide implications for both language teacher development and classroom actions.
Engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Challenging Circumstances
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Moragh IJ Paxton
Recent student protests in South Africa have underlined the persistent underfunding of higher education with state contributions to university education declining in the period 2000 to 2015. At the same time the post-apartheid era has seen student numbers in higher education double. Yet what is seldom mentioned in the media coverage given to the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall protests is the impact that all this has had on university staff. Staff have had to do more with less. Larger classes, more marking and growing pressure to offer quality teaching has led to a more demanding working environment with less time for research. Yet the pressure to publish has not gone away. Academic staff are still expected to do the scholarly work and to publish it, in fact their jobs and promotion may depend on this. This paper will argue that in the current uncertain climate in higher education, it is crucial that research is developmental and that it links to and seeks to inform teaching and assessment practices. In 2016 two Senior Scholars were appointed in the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town. The goals for this Senior Scholar project were to strengthen research capacity in education development practice and to support research capacity of black and female researchers. The presentation will report on this project and describe the theoretical framework used for understanding this work.
Expanding Online Teaching and Research Opportunities with an Integrated Online Research Environment
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stephen Mc Kenzie
The demand for increasingly flexible learning options in universities has resulted in changes to the way that university courses have traditionally been offered, including the expansion of online and mixed online/ on-campus (hybrid) teaching/ learning methods. A limiter to the expansion of online and hybrid courses has been a lack of suitability of online methods to some aspects of teaching and learning, including clinical and research related teaching and learning. The Monash University Graduate Diploma of Psychology – Advanced (GDPA), is a new, large scale, fully online fourth year university course, and unique in its large student cohorts, and teaching and learning innovations, which include the development of an integrated online research environment – one stop shop. These innovations allow the creation of online courses with substantial research components, by allowing students, and other researchers, to conduct all aspects of research, including research supervision; participant acquisition; data collection, analysis, storage, and dissemination, remotely. This presentation presents preliminary research findings on the use of the Monash Psychology Research Portal, and how it benefits both online and on-campus research and teaching.
