The Power of Teacher Learning Community in Foreign Language Teaching: Collaboration, Reflection, and Teacher Identity

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The teacher learning community (TLC) has received much interest as a means to enhance teacher quality and student achievement. The purpose of this symposium is to explore the possibilities of evolving the concept of the TLC for college-level foreign language teaching. We explore how teachers’ collaborative learning, reflection, and identity formation occurred in the TLC, connecting their pedagogical practices with content knowledge as well as bridging the gap between research and practice. Drawing on an auto-ethnographic research method, we share how we, Korean language teachers, experience ongoing interactions and an operative relationship in the TLC and how it reflects our personal experience while teaching at a higher education setting in the United States.

Sub Unit

• Division K - Teaching and Teacher Education / Division K - Section 3: Focus on the Lives of Teachers (knowledge, thinking, dispositions, perspectives, ideology, reflective practice, and the moral dimensions of teaching)

Chair

• Sandra M. Webb, Georgia College & State University

Papers

• Collaborate to Teach: How Foreign Language Teachers Learn by Building a Teacher Learning Community - Ji-Hye Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• "Moving Forward by Looking Back": Enacting Teacher Reflection Through a Teacher Learning Community - Jonghun Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Crossing the Imaginary Boundary of "Foreign" and "Native": An Autoethnographic Exploration of Foreign Language Teachers' Identity in the Teacher Learning Community - Jieun Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Discussant

• Sandra M. Webb, Georgia College & State University