Teaching, Writing, Developing Identity: Self-Study in the EFL Practicum

• In Event: Self-Study of Language and Literacy Teacher Education Practices Across Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Contexts

Abstract

In the last decade, public policies in Brazil have greatly impacted undergraduate teacher education programs: the EFL supervised internship in my context, for example, a public university in northeast Brazil, has undergone major positive changes. Nevertheless, teacher educators face many challenges which hinder collaborative school-university partnerships, as well as preconceived notions held by student-teachers, who often consider the practicum ‘just one more academic discipline’. Envisioning the supervised internship as a collaborative, academic-professional literacy practice, I strived to create a supportive field experience enhancing identity formation. This self-study examines how my practice with novice teachers on reflective writing and collaborative work had an impact on their teacher identity.
Framework
This self-study is framed by a sociocultural approach to literacy, based upon the New Literacy Studies (Bartlett, 2013; Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 1999; Kleiman; 1995; Street, 1984). Focusing on interactionism, I also draw upon Bakhtin (1981), Johnson (2006), Machado & Bronckart (2009), and on Burton et al. (2009) and Freeman (2002) with respect to narrative/reflective inquiry.
Methods and Data Sources
Situated in the field of Applied Linguistics, the present self-study was conducted within a higher education context, focusing on situated literacy practices and self-making in the EFL supervised internship (Author, 2012, 2014, in press). In order to investigate the impact of my work, I explored teacher narratives such as photobiographies, a field blog, and reflective internship reports produced by five beginning EFL teachers over one academic semester. Qualitative analysis, based on dialogism, involved linguistic-discursive traces of enunciative mechanisms, such as voices and modalizations (signaled by personal markers, citations, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and nominalizations, for example). In this study, I will discuss significant fragments extracted from my data.
Results
This self-study investigated how my practice with novice teachers on reflective writing and collaborative work impacted teacher identity formation: an important finding is the emergence of a layered professional voice, suggesting that pre-service teacher identity is construed collectively and subjectively by means of voices of others and voices of self, evoked in narratives produced by student teachers engaged in field experiences and interactions. In regards to my mentoring, whereas discursive constructions suggest that pre-service teacher empowerment occurred, a peculiar silence regarding post-observation feedback was detected, suggesting that further self-study is necessary, namely, addressing the need for more meaningful feedback strategies. Results also signal progress in terms of school-university partnerships (in spite of a challenging context), as well as the need to implement more changes involving the practicum in the overall structure of the Letters curriculum.
Significance
This self-study suggests that the practicum offered more supportive field experiences for EFL novice teachers and enhanced teacher identity formation. Highlighting the vital importance of the practicum, the study also underscores the importance of further discussion in the EFL teacher education program in regards to mentoring and teacher identity formation.

Author

• Carla Reichmann, Universidade Federal da Paraíba