Active Learning Methodologies: Teacher Engagement in Recife’s Public Schools

• In Event: "It's Our Responsibility as Teacher Educators": Toward Justice in Brazilian Public Schooling

Abstract

Public schools in Brazil overwhelmingly enroll low-/no-income Black and Brown students, being sites of de facto racial segregation. Nevertheless, this is not necessarily a byproduct of schools being under-resourced. In our research, we found that public schools in urban areas like Recife are well equipped with technology and there are ongoing investments in professional development, both for the use of these technologies and for bolstering teaching approaches and curriculum. Nevertheless, public school teachers have been found to be less engaged in their teaching than their private school counterparts.
Given the equity of resources between public and private schools as these pertain to technology and professional development, in the context of the municipal system of Recife, we sought to uncover the roots of this lowered engagement, which has shown to have palpable consequences for student learning by engaging in a study of Recife public school teachers. The following questions guided our study: what are the reasons that can engage teachers for their teaching performance? Is there a relationship between teacher engagement and the methodologies they use? Are teachers who use active methodologies more engaged? And why?
Engaging with Klassen, Yerdelen and Durksen scale (2013) to assess teacher engagement, establishing the scale as a valid and reliable measure of teacher engagement, validated in Brazil by Nascimento and colleagues (2020), we attended to the following dimensions of engagement dimensions: emotional, behavioral, cognitive and social in a design-based intervention in the form of a professional development institute on Active Learning Approaches for teachers from Recife’s public school system.
Findings point toward the need to expand the conceptualization of engagement, (re)considering teacher and student engagement as entangled and interdependent. Further, some teachers located their own learning at the fulcrum of their engagement, pointing toward the need for teacher education and development to better attend to approaches to mediate relationships with students, document students’ assets (as opposed to their deficits), and to create spaces of belonging where they as teachers can be nurtured and feel valued. While our data show that engaged teachers are socially, cognitively, and emotionally engaged with students, they lack social engagement with their colleagues. This is certainly an area that warrants further attention.

Authors

• Auxiliadora Padilha, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

• Marina Jacinto da Silva Oliveira, Instituto Federal de Pernambuco

• Isabel Pauline Lima de Brito, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

• Ana Paula Andrade de Oliveira, Recife Municipal Schools, Brazil

• Nathanael Noberto da Silva, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

• Katherine Rodriguez, Teachers College, Columbia University