Investigating the Role of Portfolio Reflections within Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Contexts: Online Professional Learning with Uzbekistan Teachers of English

• In Event: Roundtable Session 9
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Teacher education: Diversity, participation and motivation

Proposal

This qualitative study took place within an online professional learning program for teachers of English in Uzbekistan, hosted by a large, public university in the U.S. Funded by the U.S. Department of State, the program content was developed by a team of faculty and graduate research assistants from the host university and delivered in two 11-week program cohorts with a total of 202 participants in 2021. Participants were all English language educators in K-16 settings across all regions of Uzbekistan. The purpose of this study is to examine participants’ reflections presented in their online portfolios, which called them to share emergent changes in their teaching practice, a goal for enhancing teacher professional learning across the country of Uzbekistan.
This investigation is empirical yet draws on previous studies conducted by a subset of the project faculty who have used a framework (Taggart & Wilson, 2005) that defines three modes of reflection: technical, contextual, dialectical. The reflection modes served as a guide for the teachers as they considered ways to reflect purposefully on developing classroom practices aimed toward communicative language development while teaching English through English. More than merely measuring the teachers’ pedagogical learning, we wanted to understand how to implement deep, or critical, reflection with global educators who had, for the most part, not been heretofore exposed to the role and purpose of critical reflection in their teaching practices. While much research has been conducted with U.S. teachers, with calls for reflection that support social justice agency (e.g., Authors, 2021, 2022; Liu, 2015, 2017; Zeichner & Liu, 2010), more research is needed in international contexts that examines the process, implementation, and impact of incorporating critical reflection, particularly in light of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural terminology and practices.
The research team, comprising culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, engaged in qualitative analysis of a sequential set of the teachers’ portfolio reflections applying indicators of Taggart and Wilson’s (2005) reflection modes as an a priori coding scheme to consider the mode of reflection the teachers attained for each reflection entry. Researchers regularly met during the analysis sequence to discuss criteria and examples of these three reflection modes and to seek inter-rater reliability. The research team maintained detailed documentation of their discussions in a collaborative research memo file to reference for ongoing coding and analysis. The reflection development in teachers became a window for our own development as responsive cultural and linguistic insider/outsider researchers with increasingly deeper understandings of teacher professional learning in international contexts.
The findings of this research allowed the research team to more deeply understand the role that reflection might play in guiding results toward sustainable teacher professional development that expands critical reflection research across international settings. Through critical reflection, teachers deepened their understanding of their existing educational practice, considered alternative instructional practices that resulted in more engaged classrooms, and took steps to create changes in their teaching, extending prior research (Authors, 2020, 2021) to an international context and leading the way for improving education for a more equitable world.

Authors

• Kelley Webb

• Woomee Kim, George Mason University

• Dildora Khakimova