Mpofu 2021
Mpofu 2021
Mpofu 2021
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Nhlanhla Mpofu
Stellenbos University
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1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to provide a personal epistemological account of
facilitating learning for student teachers in English Language Teaching (ELT)
as a university instructor. Muis, Bendixen and Haerle (2006) state that the
study of one’s epistemic beliefs is a prominent field among educational
researchers. This occurs against an orientation in terms of which teaching is
an enactment of scholarship where the practitioners are able to describe and
reflect on their professional lives and practices by drawing from an array of
theoretical and philosophical reasoning (Kelchtermans, 2009). In tandem
with these views, I provide an account of my personal epistemology as a
lecturer in English teacher education. My goal is to provide details of my
personal epistemology based on the assumption that teachers tend to
is only based on truths held in context. A contextual thinker holds that truth is
located in the integration of experiences, learning, life histories and reflection.
Hence, from a contextual understanding, the ideas of personal epistemologies
and justification are critical in understanding how one shapes one’s own
meaning (Hofer, 2001). Although there is merit in being an absolute,
transitional and independent thinker, I regard ESL pedagogical practices as
effective when located in contextual thinking and justification. As a result, I
position my pedagogical practice and reasoning in culturally sustaining
pedagogy (CSP). By embracing CSP, I acknowledge that one’s ways of knowing
have a lot to do with culture. In explaining this position, Smith and Ayers
(2006, p. 8) state that culture is at the centre of what we do in the education
system in terms of “curriculum, instruction, administration, or performance
assessment. Even without our being consciously aware of it, culture
determines how we think, believe, and behave, and these, in turn, affect how
we teach and learn.” This means that in describing my epistemological
orientation in English teaching positioned in CSP, I explore the theoretical
grounding and the practical implications of pedagogical practices that are
designed to explore, utilise, sustain and expand the cultural practices of
student teachers in the way they construct knowledge in my classes (Christ &
Sharma, 2018).
Traditionally, schools have viewed the languages and cultures that ESL
learners bring to the classrooms as deficits that need to be ‘fixed’ in order for
them to be proficient in the dominant practices (Charamba, 2020; MacSwan,
2020; Menken & Sanchez, 2019). Such ideas are, of course, becoming
regarded as archaic in contemporary English language pedagogy, as the
resources that learners bring to the classroom in terms of languages,
literacies and cultural practices are seen as assets (MacSwan, 2020). An asset-
based approach to teaching views learners’ home and community cultural
practices as educational resources that should be honoured, explored and
extended to ensure effective learning experiences (Paris, 2012). The asset
worldview provides for an ideological space where positive assets such as the
language, culture and diversity of thought that students bring into the
classroom are valued as opposed to being viewed as lacking and deficit (Lin,
2020). The orientation in this conceptual paper is that learning is grounded in
an asset-based approach. Such an approach to English language teaching is
about creating a culture in which learners’ home and community strengths
are used to scaffold their language acquisition process (MacSwan, 2020; Paris,
2012)—That is, using English language classrooms to develop and facilitate
culturally relevant and sustaining learning experiences that resonate with
student teachers and connect to their backgrounds. This approach to ELT is
supportive of student teachers, as it acknowledges their diversity of thought,
culture, language and traits as positive assets to be celebrated rather than
International Journal of Language Studies, 15(3), 89-106 95
system, the home and the culture. By deliberately making these connections
the heritage is affirmed, as CSP requires that pedagogies be relevant to the
cultural experiences and practices that sustain the learners’ linguistic and
cultural competence, while simultaneously providing access to the dominant
culture. This approach encourages educators to go beyond tolerating and
accepting learners’ cultures to openly supporting parts of their cultures,
literacies and languages. By grounding my theoretical perspectives in CSP, I
sought to undergird my language pedagogies in order to recognise “students’
cultural displays of learning and meaning making, [and] respond positively
and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a
scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content in
order to promote effective information processing” (Hammond, 2014, p. 15).
6. Conclusion
The study of personal epistemology offers instructors an opportunity to
acknowledge their role in active knowledge construction and in the process of
meaning-making drawn from the experience of the profession (Ostman &
Wickman, 2014). This cognitive experience allows the instructor to
continuously interact with the social world of university teaching to develop
an epistemic base that they use to merge theoretical viewpoints to
incorporate their personal epistemologies. This situation positions personal
epistemology as an important exercise which is both idiosyncratic and
nuanced but necessary for shaping one’s professional development. By
analysing the content in which learning takes place, one develops a deeper
appreciation for teaching students to apply content knowledge meaningfully
by prioritising the students’ experiences in accessing and building their
knowledge (Nigar & Kostogriz, 2019; Paris & Alim, 2017). This means paying
attention when guiding the student teachers to access knowledge through the
sources that are used in that domain, but going a step further by emphasising
a multidisciplinary approach to learning. For example, by incorporating
theory, practicals (i.e., class demonstrations/simulated prompts, micro-
teaching labs), experiential learning (in real-world contexts) and reflection.
International Journal of Language Studies, 15(3), 89-106 101
The Author
Nhlanhla Mpofu (Email: [email protected]) is Associate Professor of
English Language Teaching at the Faculty of Education, Rhodes University,
South Africa. She is a South African National Research Foundation Y rated
researcher, a Fulbright alumna, COIL alumna and an Executive member of the
South African Young Academy of Science (SAYAS). Her research explores
second language learning approaches in second language classrooms where
English is the medium of instruction. Through this research focus, she seeks
to gain a strategic, epistemological and pragmatic understanding of the
nuanced discourse of knowing how to teach in language. She draws her
orientation from knowing sciences positioned within the Culturally
Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP). Drawing from this research foci she explores
teaching knowledge from an epistemological repertoire that is contextually
embedded and held together by the dispositional and linguistic resources at
the control of the practitioner. Her findings are important in dismantling the
hegemonic positivist orientation that disempowers the teacher, from the
critical role of a knowledge constructor to that of a transmitter.
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