Josephine Moate

The Impact of Foreign Language Mediated Teaching on Teachers' Sense of Professional Integrity in the CLIL Classroom.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has received significant interest in recent years as a practical means of creating a plurilingual European community. A key feature of CLIL is the non-native speaking teacher responsible for developing learners’ content and language knowledge in a foreign language mediated environment. Teachers often enter the CLIL classroom with established expertise in either content or language learning; however, the impact of entering the foreign language mediated environment is little explored in existing literature. This investigative research is based on six teacher interviews intended to access the teachers’ own understanding of how foreign language mediated teaching impacts their professional integrity. The interviews aimed to explore how CLIL teachers experience the change in language, how new demands are encountered and handled. This research found that foreign language mediated teaching affects teachers’ sense of professional integrity with regard to both the person and the practice of the teacher at a fundamental level.

Identity, agency and community: reconsidering the pedagogic responsibilities of teacher education

ABSTRACT This article presents a model for teacher education based on an ongoing action research project at a Finnish university. This model draws on the educational theory of Dewey and the pedagogical sensibility of Bakhtin to critically consider the concepts of teacher identity and agency and to highlight the role of community in teacher development. Our aim is to propose a model that supports the development of new directions in teacher education that would better prepare teachers to face the challenges in their future work by engaging with the educational community in the present.

Global connectedness in higher education : student voices on the value of cross-cultural learning dialogue

The study explores how sense of global connectedness can be enhanced by creating opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue in higher education. Thematic analysis of randomly selected 15 learning journals, students’ reflections on their learning during an international seminar was used to identify students’ significant learning experiences. The results emphasise the added value of diversity (geographical, disciplinary, cultural and social) among students, faculty and invited presenters for creating meaningful learning. Furthermore, they suggest that designing an integrated approach of contents, contexts and activities for critical engagement in global dialogue and knowledge generation in higher education can open up new perspectives to students in education and thereby increase their sense of global connectedness. The research addresses internationalisation of higher education, contributes to the development of international study programmes and provides means to enhance inclusion of global issues in higher education policies, curricula and practice.

Proactive and reactive dimensions of life-course agency: mapping student teachers’ language learning experiences

Although the concept of agency has received a lot of interest in recent educational research, its significance in language learning biographies as well as contextual and relational aspects of learner agency are still little studied. This paper aims at a more thorough understanding of agency by studying student teachers’ previous language learning experiences. This paper is based on a dialogical analysis of 12 student teachers’ biographical essays describing their relationship with English as a foreign language. The participants are students in a Finnish class teacher and language teacher education programme that uses English as the primary medium of instruction. The study proposes a tripartite model to better understand different dimensions of life-course agency and its implications for language teacher education. The study has its origins in an ongoing action research project aiming at developing dialogic pedagogical practices for language and teacher education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Voicing the challenges faced by an innovative teacher community

This research draws on sociocultural theories of learning and activity theory to explore the challenges faced by an innovative community of teachers in Central Finland. The aim of the teacher community was to develop a stream of foreign‐language (FL)‐mediated teaching and learning in the locality from kindergarten to upper secondary level. To achieve this goal, the teachers needed to form coherent groups within the member schools, as well as between the schools. The aim of this research is to give voice to the challenges identified by the teachers and in so doing give voice to the teacher community itself. Recognising the voice of this community also contributes to a broader conceptualisation of teachers and teaching both within and beyond the classroom. The data were gathered during a number of community activities and thematically analysed to identify recurring challenges the participants identified and encountered. The challenges became manifest in both the talk and activities of the community. The positive teacher responses to the community highlighted the value of this kind of interaction for often isolated teacher practitioners. The wealth of data also produced through these activities suggests that further exploration and development of teacher activity outside of the classroom would be a worthwhile endeavour.

Dialogic struggles and pedagogic innovation

The aim of this research was to explore the way in which talk is used in teacher focus group discussions. The data from these discussions belong to a wider study on the challenges teachers face when introducing foreign-language mediated education. The research presented here provides a careful analysis of the talk between teachers drawing on Bakhtin’s dialogic theory. This theoretical framework allows for the critical consideration of the relationship between the teachers and the cultural context of institutionalised education. The main outcome from this research is the notion of ‘dialogic struggle’ as an important characteristic of and window into thought-in-progress. As a key feature of the teacher discussions analysed here, dialogic struggles are understood to be important indicators of tensions and contradictions between teachers as conscientious educators and members of institutionalised education.

The moral journey of learning a pedagogy: a qualitative exploration of student–teachers’ formal and informal writing of dialogic pedagogy

Students of education encounter a range of pedagogies yet how future teachers’ appropriate moral principles are little understood. We conducted an investigation into this process with 10 international students of education attending an intensive course on ‘dialogic pedagogy’ in a university in Finland. The data comprising student learning journals and essays were coded for the level of questioning, acceptance and irreverence. In the findings, reverential acceptance was more frequent than questioning and irreverence; however, our qualitative analysis also found a large number of micro-transitions between questioning, acceptance and irreverence suggesting a dynamic interplay. Recognising this vacillation as part of a moral journey may support better understanding of what it means to engage with a different pedagogy.

Teacher agency within the Finnish CLIL context: tensions and resources

ABSTRACT Recent discussion indicates that the initial enthusiasm of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers can be undermined by the demands of foreign-language mediated education. However, there is a lack of research on the resources and tensions that respectively support or limit the professional agency of CLIL teachers. By means of semi-structured interviews with fourteen participants, this study seeks to better understand how teacher agency is experienced by CLIL teachers working in Finnish primary schools. To examine tensions and resources in CLIL teachers’ work lives, a holistic and dynamic theoretical conceptualization of teacher agency is suggested, paying particular attention to the classroom, professional relationships and the wider sociocultural environment. Findings showed that language, classroom-related tensions and temporal, material and developmental resources were perceived as tensions limiting teacher agency. In contrast, autonomy, openness to change, teacher versatility, and collegial community were found to support teacher agency. The study concludes with practical implications for teacher education, practicing teachers and future research.

A narrative account of a teacher community

This narrative account draws on dialogic approaches to education to critically reflect on teachers’ expressed pedagogic thinking in community. The context for the study is a teacher community in Central Finland comprising teachers from pre-primary to upper secondary contexts. The shared interest of the community is in the foreign-language mediation of education. The data were collected over a period of one and a half years and primarily consisted of teacher-produced notes from community sessions. These data were thematically analysed using a theory-driven approach. The key findings underline the value of pedagogic relationships between teacher-colleagues to support enriched critical understanding of pedagogy. This research suggests the importance of mutual pedagogic relationships to support teacher development.

Seeking Understanding of Foreign Language Teachers’ Shifting Emotions in Relation to Pupils

ABSTRACT Teaching is recognised as an emotional practice. Studies have highlighted the importance of teachers’ emotional literacy in the development of pupils’ emotional skills, the central position of emotions in teachers’ ways of knowing, and in their professional development. This longitudinal study draws on a dialogic understanding of emotion to present findings from qualitative interviews with teachers. This study aims to provide further understanding in this area by offering a perspective into 7 foreign language teachers’ emotions in relation to their pupils during their first decade in the profession. The most important finding was that negative emotions decreased while the positive emotions increased. Understanding what emotions teachers face and how they deal with them may help practicing teachers better understand their daily work and support student teacher preparation.