APLNG 587 Theory and Research in L2 Teacher Education

Meetingobjectives: 1, 3, 4, 5

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Let’s think about knowledge based teacher education as a social artifact, and teachers as learners of teaching.  

        This course was designed to help teacher educators evaluate and critique the existing professional developing programs and related issues (e.g., how policy or culture affects the focuses of teacher training). To go through these key issues, every week students should write a blog post to address the hot questions related to the assigned reading(s). 

I like this design a lot. In these posts, a topic was investigated from different perspectives with diverse examples. For instance, entry 3 discussed how teacher learners’ mental life should be evaluated from the perspective of teacher as a learner learning to teach. Entry 4 elaborated the topic that uses teachers’ narratives to reflect on their mental development process. In these two weeks, we investigated important parts of teacher development—emotion, identity re-construction, and dialectical development—which have long been neglected. In weeks 6 through 8, the topic shifted to teacher training programs work as mediation tools playing different roles in mediating teacher learners’ developing. From week 11, the focus was the broader context affecting the teacher learners’ development and program design (please refer to the attachments: Entry-week 3, 4, 6, 8, 11). By posting, I got mediations from peers and instructors and became able to talk these issues deeply.

The mediating partners!

The second project was writing a book review for some classical sources related to teacher education (please refer to the attached file: book review). I chose Language, Culture, and Community in Teacher Education which is a series of research investigating the role of community and culture of community in teacher education. It was my first time writing a review. While learning the convention of this particular genre, I explored the topics we had discussed with more detailed examples provided by this book.

Group work and presenting in-class

My final project was a further exploration of the topic in week 8—teachers’ language awareness (TLA) (please refer to the attachment: final project). This project combined a literature review of TLA and a course design which aims at developing TLA. Because of this project, I first put myself in the shoes of the teacher educators and considered more than “what do teacher learners want to learn” but “how to create mediations that make learning happen” by analyzing the context restrictions.

The course bought me the knowledge basis of being a teacher educator. Even though I may not become a teacher educator soon, the issues unfolded in this course introduced me useful sources for further reflections on my own professional development.