Papers by Henrique Arruda
This presentation reports on the implementation of an alternative model of Language Teacher Educa... more This presentation reports on the implementation of an alternative model of Language Teacher Education (LTE) aimed at promoting change in classroom dynamics, successfully trialled through a professional development course in Brazil. The main idea presented here is the conceptualisation of teaching and learning as separate but complementary activities. The model addresses a number of problems identified in the literaturemainly related to the lack of students' engagement (Christenson, Wylie, & Reschly, 2012), the gap between research and practice and the resilience of highly criticised traditional classroom practices (Wells, 2009)through operationalizing classroom practices consistent with emerging ideas in education and interrelated fields (Burns & Knox, 2011; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). The presentation targets practitioners, academics, language teacher educators and policy makers. Current descriptions of teaching and learning overburden the teacher as the sole responsibility bearer, as if teachers could carry out their students' learning as well as teaching them. The notion of complementary activities, instead, places on teachers the responsibility for fostering the development of learning strategies, while the students are held responsible for applying such strategies in order to learn. It is claimed that implementing this notion-referred to as the complementarity principle-addresses a number of problems identified through research and discussed in academic literature. A substantial body of research shows that, despite decades of theoretical development in education, traditional models of education continue to fail to promote ideal conditions for learning (Palincsar, Brown, & Campione, 1994; Wells, 2009; Wells & Claxton, 2002; Wertsch, 1998). Language education, for the most part, follows such models, and exhibits classroom practices similar to those identified in mainstream education. Among the features believed to impair learning observed in classrooms and documented in the literature are: authoritative teacher regulated discourse, theoretically referred to as univocal discourse (Bakhtin, Emerson, Holquist, & McGee, 1986; Wertsch, 1998), the use of inauthentic questions, to which the teacher has a prespecified answer (Nystrand, 1997), and unbalanced power relations between teacher and learners, in which the teacher holds much more power than the students. These features contribute to classroom dynamics which do not promote crucial components of learning, such as learner autonomy, (Deci & Ryan, 1987), metacognition (Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Shneider, & Shernoff, 2003), and a meaningful epistemic role for learners, understood as a role the students themselves can value (Nystrand, 1997). Researchers find remarkable that traditional practices have not changed, despite decades of intense criticism and a great number of studies which show the necessity of a paradigm shift to promote the implementation of alternative models, more in line with how teaching and learning are current understood (Wells, 2009). There are myriad factors that contribute to the maintenance of traditional models of education-some of which are political and impose heavily on policy. However, one of the most fundamental seems to be the fact that learning has traditionally been conceptualised as a direct result of teaching. Obviously, nowadays, no serious educationalist believes that there is a direct causal relation between teaching and learning, and the concept of teacher as a facilitator is widely accepted. In practice, on the other hand, the idea that teachers are responsible for their students' learning appeals to many of those directly or indirectly involved in education, and is often taken as an axiom. In fact, the notion of teaching as causative of learning is so deeply entrenched that in some countries, such as Australia and the USA, teachers' salary increases are conditioned to their students' performance on national standard tests (Currently in 2014). One of the impacts of this is the undermining of the very essence of education, portrayed by John Dewey, Bertrand Russel and Alexander Humboldt as assisting the pupil to develop in their own way, similarly to tending a flower, which according to Chomsky "is what serious education would be, from kindergarten up through graduate school"(Chomsky & Barsamian, 1996, p. 44). The idea that the teacher is responsible for students' development promotes classroom dynamics emerging from the teacher striving to control what students do and how they do it, in order to pursue specific outcomes. Such models ignore the diversity of learners' preferences, and deprive them of meaningful participation (Wells, 2009). The rationale behind this mainstream view is that education is largely a matter of apprenticing learners in the acquisition of knowledge, defined as a body of justified beliefs, through a process of memorization (Wells, 1999). This presupposes that knowledge is static and can be transferred from teacher to students. An alternative to this view is that knowledge is dynamic and constructed by those who engage in meaningful academic activities (
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Papers by Henrique Arruda