English in Inclusive Multilingual Preschools. Kirsten Birsak de Jersey
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developing teaching competence. It is the teacher’s own conscious development and growth that matters. … The counsellor cannot limit his task to the transmission of his own understanding but must take the skills, knowledge and values of the learner as the point of departure. (Handal & Lauvas, 1987, p. 1, 7)
Ideally, the teacher educator organises the education project in a way that her/his relationship to the teachers qualifies as collegial cooperation so that the preschool will be supported to become pro-active, play an active role and do not become completely dependent on the teacher educator:
Teaching is first and foremost a “helping profession,” which depends on the relationship created between the teacher and the learner. It is crucial therefore to determine which forms of help, or teaching, are most effective within that relationship. Such a determination depends on a number of variables: the purpose of the help (its objective), the particular context in which the help is being offered, and the interaction that makes up the process of offering and receiving it. (Freeman, 1990, p. 103)
This involves taking an emic insider’s perspective so that the subjective meanings and understandings that participants associate with their workplace and their development could be understood and eventually be reconstructed. It would be their interpretation of the situation that I needed to uncover to be able to view their development processes and the required support that needed to be provided from their angle (Croker, 2009, p. 8).
Support involved developing the preschool teachers’ confidence by actively involving them in teaching the children from the beginning so that they would systematically develop their competences and ultimately become autonomous professionals. In education autonomy is “the capacity of an individual to be an independent agent, not governed by others” (Boud, 1981, p. 18; as cited in Bailey, 2006, p. 56). “[It is] not an ability that has to be learnt but a way of being that has to be discovered and rediscovered” (Breen & Mann, 1997, p. 134; as cited in Bailey, 2006, p. 56). The teacher educator therefore has to encourage active participation of the preschool teachers from the beginning so that ideally a non-hierarchical relationship of working cooperatively with the children will result.
This differs from the relationship of a teacher educator and a student-teacher. Preschool teachers are to keep their role as expert preschool teachers, in which “the context is very much an integral part of their teaching act” (Tsui, 2003, pp. 30-31), rather than having them lapse into the role of novice teachers, for whom the “context is very often taken as something external and ignored” (pp. 30-31). By working together, collegially an authentic equality can develop between the teacher educator and the preschool teachers, despite preschool teachers’ inexperience in the field of teaching English. This collegial relationship helps to contribute to an environment that is conducive for the preschool teachers to operate as experts as they take part and teach English with the teacher educator in the same lessons and continue during the week. In Tsui’s study on exploring the concept of expertise in teaching she clarifies this distinction between the different roles of novice preservice teachers and experienced in-service teachers as follows: “Novice teachers tend to act according to rules and guidelines laid down by people with authority, whereas expert teachers rely on their own judgment and exercise autonomy when planning” (Tsui, 2003, p. 25). This role description of teachers in-service and teacher educator resembles the characterization of language learners’ roles as independent learners in a classroom:
Learner roles in an instructional system are closely linked to the teacher’s status and function. … Some methods are totally dependent on the teacher as a source of knowledge and direction; others see the teacher’s role as catalyst, consultant, guide, and model for learning. (Richards & Rogers, 2001, p. 28)
With these general considerations on the role relationship between the teacher educator and participating preschool teachers in mind, the following two chapters will describe in detail the required competences of the teacher educator so that the aforementioned non-hierarchical relationship of working cooperatively with the children and teachers’ developing through this process will be supported. This is done by describing the components that have been integrated in the teacher education model.
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