A Curriculum That Emanates From Practice: Reflections on Teaching English With Children in Brazil

• In Event: Critical American Language Praxis: Teaching, Navigating, and Resisting Global English

Abstract

The third paper in this symposium critically examines the booming popularity of English language instruction for children in Brazil. More specifically, in kindergarten and the early elementary grades, it has caused controversial conversations about curricular organization and teacher education (Secatto, Tonelli, Selbach, 2022). The paper starts with a conceptual overview of language education policies in Brazil and critically interrogates the policy-making process, as well as the voices of the subjects involved, which reflect and refract reasons and justifications for the insertion of English language teaching since the early years of schooling. It reviews the literature on movements in Brazil that have questioned and reinforced views of what it means to be an English teacher for young children. What is missing from these discussions, though, is an understanding of critical language education (Cavati & Kawachi-Furlan, 2021; Pessoa, Silvestre, Monte Mor, 2018). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore how critical pedagogy and critical applied linguistics can serve as important conceptual constructions in teacher preparation in Brazil. Responding to a call for research that is socially relevant, contextually sensitive and relationally ethical among the individuals involved, the authors demonstrate how teacher preparation for early childhood education can engage culturally and socially relevant pedagogies and prepare teachers for critical self-reflection to work with young, emergent multilingual learners.
It specifically focuses on early elementary teacher preparation in a program where practicing teachers are enrolled in a professional development course. This is an extension course for teachers to maintain their qualifications and includes a component of supervised internships. The purpose of the extension course is to prepare teachers to reimagine possibilities and implement actionable changes in practice related to critical language pedagogy. Drawing on course artifacts, instructor reflections and field notes, as well as interviews with participants, this qualitative study highlights relevant teaching practices and reflections from teachers on how to meet the demand for English language instruction, but from the tenets of culturally relevant and linguistically responsive pedagogy with a commitment to decoloniality. In sum, it offers implications for teacher preparation practices and curricula that extend beyond the Brazilian context and have relevance for any context in which CALP is a necessary tool for combating Global English.

Author

• Juliana Tonelli, Universidade Estadual de Londrina