English in Inclusive Multilingual Preschools. Kirsten Birsak de Jersey
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prevailed the discussion that disciplinary knowledge1 and theories of second language acquisition (SLA) alone would prepare teachers adequately for language classrooms (Freeman & Johnson, 1998). Instead, they argued, the knowledge base of teacher education would need to be reconceptualised to include pedagogical content knowledge (Johnson, 2009, pp. 21-22). This knowledge base cannot be defined without a particular group of learners in mind. What can be defined, though, is the general approach and principles for teaching languages (→ chapter 5.8). The pedagogical content knowledge appropriate for a particular group of learners may only be developed by ‘translating’ these principles in the design of tasks that then have to be tested in practice and reflected on their appropriateness for this particular group of learners. This way teachers will gain an insight into problems that can occur, they will develop a perception of how to put theory to practice and will become aware of how they respond in and to their context (Schön, 1983, pp. 54-55; Johnson, 2009, p. 23). Reflecting practical experiences and drawing conclusions to improve the quality of learning for a particular group of learners form the basis for teachers’ decision making in classrooms. Therefore, what qualifies as appropriate content for a particular group of learners can only be defined through this process of reflection in context. This research therefore consequently sets up a teacher education model which supports participating teachers to develop the pedagogical content knowledge for their preschool groups.
The resulting research questions, the description of the preschool teacher education model and general approach that has been chosen to be able to understand and to reconstruct teachers’ development processes will be in the focus of the next chapter.
5 The preschool teacher education project: researching professional development through an approach of participatory action research
It is the purpose of this study to understand in what way preschool teachers can be educated to teach and to implement English in a regular preschool in an effective and sustainable way and in doing so include all the children who attend the preschool. Regular refers to preschools that do not offer a particular pedagogic approach to enhance the teaching of foreign languages within the preschool routine (for example preschools that subscribe to immersion education). Effective means that there is evidence that the children develop communicative English language competences, that is, the children are able to use English as a tool to do meaningful things with the language. Sustainable means that introducing English is not a burden to either the children or the teachers and can therefore become an integral part of the preschool curriculum. Including all the children means that the children’s participation is not dependent on criteria such as their linguistic competence in German (either as their mother tongue or their second language), their age (whether they are perceived as being too young), their social or intellectual skills or speech difficulties, for example.
Due to the general recognition in applied linguistics that the teaching profession is complex and therefore requires designs of professional development and research approaches that aptly capture this complexity (→ chapter 4), a number of collaborative forms of teacher development and research have emerged in the past and have meanwhile become established approaches (see surveys in Savoie-Zajc & Descamps-Bednarz, 2007; Burns & Richards, 2009; Burns, 2010; Caspari, 2016). While the nature of practitioner – teacher educator – research collaboration in participative research differs, all types of collaborative research have in common that they
advocate doing research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ practitioners … [and direct research] toward changing practices, since its primary goal is to produce change in a concrete situation … [and the research is] aimed at bringing the world of research and the world of practice closer together and to mediate between these two cultures in order to construct knowledge leading to informed practice. (Savoie-Zajc & Descamps-Bednarz, 2007, p. 578)
Through this approach they “mobilized” practitioners’ practical “pedagogical and didactical knowledge” (p. 578).
This research approach entails bringing together what Lave and Wenger (1991) have termed ‘communities of practice’, within which these researchers and practitioners operate” and in doing so belong “to a group engaged in common practices whose members … construct between themselves a method of acting and thinking about their everyday affairs according to their own constraints and resources. (p. 580)
The term that seemed appropriate to describe the teacher development / research design of my study is participatory action research: action research refers to research that is organised as a cyclic development process which would be required to address and to understand the complexity of concerns of both theory and practice that related to my study, and it would depend on the committed participation both from the teacher educator as an expert preschool practitioner and researcher and participating preschool teachers to sustain the development process. Two general research questions resulted from the purpose and approach of my study:
What teacher education model for introducing English into preschool would develop the teachers’ competences needed to teach EFL effectively and accommodate the complexities of the preschool context at the same time?
What evidence is there that they have successfully developed the competences intended?
With this focus, the teacher development study that is presented here covers all three of the main concepts of professional teacher development that Terhart (2011, pp. 206-210) distinguishes:
1 As seen from a structural theory perspective, teachers’ tasks are complex and inherently contradictory in nature due to contextual conditions. Consequently, professional teachers manage to cope with often contradictory uncertainties in a reflective, competent way.
2 As seen from a competence-oriented perspective, teachers’ required knowledge, skills and motivational disposition needed to teach effectively need to be identified first. This knowledge base must be derived from empirical research evidence. Consequently, teachers are able to act in a professional way if they can build their work on these relevant areas.
3 As seen from a biographical perspective, teachers’ development closely relates to individual teachers’ biographies and professional ideas of self.
The focus of this study is on preschool teachers’ competence development (2) but also considers contextual affordances and constraints (1) and relates teachers’ developments to individual teachers’ biographies and resulting profiles (3).
While chapter 5 will present a survey of the research questions in detail and will focus on the design of the teacher education model, the ensuing chapter 6 will focus on details and issues related to the research approach that participatory action research entails.
5.1 Survey of the research questions structured as multiple case study
The teacher education project is organised in the form of a multiple case study that the research questions are assigned to. The case study comprises three levels: the macro level (the evaluation of the survey of state preschool in the Salzburg area) (→ chapter 3), the meso level (all the participating preschool teachers of the selected preschool that would represent preschool teachers’ joint development as a social community of practice) (→ chapter 6.2) and the micro level of the case study (the individual participating preschool teacher’s development processes presented at first as separate individual case studies followed by a concluding summary of their experiences) (→ chapter 7) (→ diagram 2; also presented in chapter 6.1 to describe the levels further):
Diagram 2: Multiple case study design
The following table (→ table 1) provides a survey of the research questions of my study and relates them to these three case study levels and the corresponding chapters in which the research questions are addressed.
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Research questions and related chapters |