Supporting Productive Pedagogical Discourse Through Expansive Framing in Online Language Teacher Education

• In Event: Imagining a World Anew: Designing Teacher Education to Support Expansive Visions of Multilingual Learners

Abstract

Language teacher education coursework can shift teachers’ deficit beliefs (Coady et al., 2011), and improve their self-efficacy with regard to teaching emergent bilingual students (Flores & Smith, 2009). Yet despite rapid growth of online language teacher education (OLTE) programs, research examining the potential of these courses to foster the same results is nascent, and more is needed (Delahunty, 2018; Shin & Kang, 2018; Tandon et al., 2017).
Dialogic and situative theories of learning demonstrate that learners learn best when they are in conversation with one another (Putnam & Borko, 2000) and the course material in pedagogically productive ways (Lefstein et al., 2020). Within situative and social cognition research, a focus on the socially constructed contexts in which learning occurs has been described as ‘framing.’ This notion draws on discursive and ethnomethodological traditions (e.g., Goffman, 1974), which understand framing as the characterization of what is happening in a given context. Engle and colleagues posited that expansive framing, which designedly encourages learners to make connections between new content and current/future contexts of use, may foster the later use of knowledge (see Appendix A).
This study presents an examination of how required weekly discussions encouraged pre-/in-service teachers to engage in pedagogically productive discourse related to linguistically responsive pedagogy (Lucas & Villegas, 2013) by 1) positioning participants as authors of their own ideas and 2) fostering epistemic commitments that make visible the relationship of the current learning context to past and future contexts, topics, and stakeholders. Deductive coding was applied via content analysis (Krippendorf, 2018) to identify evidence of expansive framing within the weekly discussion activities before a recursive, inductive process using discourse analysis (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002) was used to explore teachers’ epistemic commitments within these discussions.
Findings demonstrate that weeks in which discussion guidelines were expansively framed resulted in greater evidence of pedagogically productive discourse suggesting that expansive framing may be a useful pedagogical design tool to promote meaningful engagement. Furthermore, discursively tracing students’ epistemic commitments (e.g., ‘I think,’ ‘it seems to me’) made visible how PSTs collaboratively engaged in sense-making regarding responsive pedagogy and what it entails. Collectively, these findings demonstrate how inviting preservice teachers to engage critically in purposeful conversations regarding issues and opportunities for practicing equitable instruction creates opportunities for generative dialogue which supported teachers’ sense-making around responsive orientations.
Given that supporting teachers in understanding and developing ownership over culturally and linguistically sustaining practice is central to preparing them to enact such stances, the use of expansive framing as a framework may offer a critical tool for rethinking and informing the design of forum-based discussions in online language teacher education. Additionally, as students identified as “English learners” (ELs) continue to be among those most likely to be educated by teachers under-prepared to meet their needs (Heritage et al., 2015), effectively promoting teachers’ preparedness to adopt culturally and linguistically sustaining stances is critical to ameliorating misinformation that may lead to deficit-orientations that affect teachers’ instruction of these students.

Author

• Amber N. Warren, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author