“My English seems not enough”: Moving from language deficit views to Kazakhstani CLIL teachers' funds of knowledge

• In Event: Plurilingual, translanguaging, and asset-based pedagogies across contexts

Proposal

Introduction
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a globally recognized bilingual education approach that originated in Europe and uses an additional language to teach content and language (Llinares & Morton, 2017). We argue that the export of CLIL beyond Europe creates global pedagogical contact zones as CLIL leads to the flow and exchange of Western cultural ideas and ideologies (Appadurai, 1996). In such contact zones, teachers with different professional identities "meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (Pratt, 1992). Thus, CLIL needs bottom-up processes beyond Europe that address local practices to include "the absent knowledges [and] silenced epistemology" that are often ignored when policymakers rely on dominant forms of Eurocentric discourses, inadvertently disempowering them when local expertise is measured against Western-oriented philosophies (Santos 2014).
Although there is growing interest in the challenges of CLIL implementation in non-European contexts (Banegas, 2020; McDougald & Pisarello, 2020), there is little research on how science teachers' prior instructional language and pedagogy affect their CLIL implementation (Hedges, 2012). Numerous studies reported only on teachers' inadequate CLIL knowledge that hinders implementation, their limited language skills, and CLIL role in learners' language and content development (Banegas, 2012; Karabassova, 2022). But who determines the criteria for measurement, on what basis, with whose knowledge, or by whose standards is CLIL pedagogy judged good or bad? We argue that CLIL is not neutral because it transfers specific historical, cultural, and pedagogical orientations from one geographic context to another space (Darvin et al., 2020). Our intention is to change the narrative of teachers’ CLIL challenges and illuminate their lived pedagogical realities evident in their moment-to-moment decisions (Robeyns, 2017). We argue that Kazakhstani teachers are “competent, they have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge" (González et al., 2005). Therefore, we pose the following research question: What funds of knowledge (FoK) underlie the pedagogy of Kazakhstani biology teachers when they implement CLIL through EMI?

Theoretical Frame
When CLIL is exported beyond Europe, insufficient attention is paid to teachers’ accumulated funds of knowledge (FoK) (Canagarajah, 2013) and its influence on their responsive pedagogy during CLIL implementation. There is growing interest in how a FoK framework can tap into teachers’ beliefs, experiential knowledge, and “informal knowledge from life experience” and how this knowledge might establish its primacy “over theory in teachers' pedagogical decision-making” (Hedges, 2012, p. 7). The FoK concept can provide a lens to consider not the differences but the intersections of places "once thought of as separate-- identities, spaces, histories" (Kerfoot & Hyltenstam, 2017). Such a perspective challenges the relevance of a neutral application of European/Western pedagogical frameworks and points to the need for a postcolonial CLIL continuing education model that bridges and navigates Western and local knowledge (Gupta, 2020). Integrating a FoK perspective into CLIL research can provide a dynamic lens for explaining science teachers' daily instructional practices and pedagogical repertoires because it can break through the hegemony of a European-influenced CLIL pedagogy that unintentionally silences and devalues the local (Santos, 2014).

Research Methods
This qualitative study drew on social phenomenology, which values “an interpretive theory of social action” (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006). Fifteen biology teachers from eleven secondary schools who completed CLIL professional development training and had more than four years of experience implementing CLIL/EMI in grades five through ten were recruited for the study after getting ethical approval.
Three instruments were employed for data collection: teachers’ reflections, narrative descriptions of multimodal teaching, and focus group interviews. Using these different data sets, we aimed to uncover teachers’ subjective experiences and the meanings they associate with their pedagogical and lived experiences of using a CLIL approach in their classrooms. Data analysis employed hybrid coding strategy that combined deductive and inductive coding approaches.

Findings and analysis
We found that teachers are constantly evolving, adapting, and transforming as CLIL practitioners. First, Kazakhstani teachers’ FoK exhibit a hybrid epistemic stance as their pedagogy shows a shift from “right-or-wrong knowledge handed down by authority” to creating a supportive and collaborative learning environment (Morrow, 2007).
Second, our findings suggest that teachers’ science pedagogy has shifted from knowledge transmission to knowledge construction. Rather than simply imparting knowledge, teachers considered students' needs and used a learner-centered pedagogy (Vygotsky, 1978). Third, the participants’ FoK lens demonstrated their flexible linguistic stance as they effectively used a range of available languages and presented language hybridity as a valuable tool for reshaping linguistic boundaries and enhancing their science pedagogy. Finally, we found limited evidence of teachers FoK about using language as a meaning-making resource as they focused only on decontextualized scientific vocabulary which suggests the need for an explicit introduction to scientific genres and to how language encodes science disciplinary knowledge (Llinares & Nikula, 2016).

Conclusion and Implications
Our findings show that FoK concept provides a valuable perspective redirecting attention from the challenges CLIL teachers face to the interplay between their epistemic and linguistic stances and science pedagogy in managing the tensions that arise when global and local epistemologies intersect. Therefore, it offers insights into how participants navigate their emerging teacher identities when their prior professional knowledge intersects with new forms of CLIL professional knowledge. Rather than focusing on their differences, our presentation offers a new perspective to understand the complexity and richness of the ways in which local knowledge connects to and diverges from global knowledge. In this context, our work shows that FoK lens opens a "demystifying and deconstructing" vantage point to unravel and challenge Western or global epistemological dominance (Giroux, 2009) and reveals how Western systems can "fit “meaningfully within local systems and structures” (Needham et al., 2018). We conclude that effective CLIL professional development should leverage teachers' existing expertise and reflective practice and include specific training on scientific language, disciplinary literacies, and science translanguaging to improve teachers’ pedagogies. A postcolonial CLIL model is needed to create socially just, inclusive, and reflective spaces for teachers to grapple with connecting their prior knowledge and emerging CLIL discourses (Gupta, 2020).

Authors

• Sulushash Kerimkulova, Nazarbayev University

• Michelle Bedeker, Nazarbayev University