Anne Edwards

'What kinds of teachers for what kinds of learners?

Why agency is important in teaching'

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In this session Anne Edwards will take the Vygotskian idea of learners’ social situations of development as her starting point to show how student agency is central to student learning and their later engagement in the emerging new landscape of work. She will then discuss the implications of this understanding for teaching, teacher education and how teachers and researchers collaborate in research to support student learning. She addresses emotion through a discussion of the relational aspects of agency together with ethics and values in professional work. She concludes with the argument that the challenge is to understand the ethical self within a framing of the constant quest to shape the conditions of our existence – striving towards creating a new reality.

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Anna Stetsenko

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Talk 1 (23.05) Agency and Emotions at the Intersection of Development and Education: Relational and Transformative Perspectives

 

This talk will provide a critical review of research and theories addressing the concepts of agency and emotions as these are presently employed at the intersection of human development and education (e.g., in constructivism, pragmatism, cognitive-interactivist and experiential approaches, sociocultural and critical theories). The following questions will be in the focus: (a) What are the broad theoretical premises (ontological and epistemological) that have shaped contemporary understandings of agency and emotions? (b) What are the main obstacles that prevent their full integration into the core accounts of development, teaching and learning? On the basis of this discussion, I will consider advantages of the recently prominent relational perspectives that have produced many breakthrough ideas such as the communities of practice approach. I will then discuss how a further shift from a relational perspective to a transformative one opens ways to revolutionize relationships between knowledge and reality and consequently, to undo many dualisms in conceptualizing teaching and learning. This includes novel understandings of agency and emotions with implications for interdisciplinary research and practices in the classroom. In the transformative approach, agency and emotions are not extraneous to knowing, being and doing – and therefore, to teaching and learning -- but immanent to these processes as their constitutive-formative dimensions.

 

 

Talk 2 (24.05) Making Teaching and Learning Meaningful: Integrating Agency and Emotions in the Pedagogy of Daring

 

What makes teaching and learning meaningful to students and teachers? In this talk, I will discuss pedagogical implications of Vygotsky’s project though a critical examination of its gaps and an expansive reconstruction of its insights to address this important question. The framework resulting from this analysis is the Transformative Activist Stance (Stetsenko, 2016) that advances Vygotsky’s project while integrating insights from an array of critical, feminist, and sociocultural theories and pedagogies.  This perspective unambiguously assigns agency -- and by implication, emotions -- with a truly primary and constitutive (formative) role in development, teaching, and learning. The notion of agentive contribution to collaborative practices of purposeful transformation geared to the sough-after future at the intersection of individual and social levels is crucial for such an integration. Using this approach, teaching and learning are rendered meaningful through their embedding as tools in identity development understood as an activist project of forming and carrying out purposeful life agendas. To be meaningful, teaching/learning needs to draw on knowledge construction revealed as stemming: (a)  out of social practice – in the role of its constituent tools; (b) through social practice – where students rediscover these tools through their own active pursuits and inquiries; and (c) for social practice – considered in light of its possible use in future activities. Imagining the future and committing to its realization in situated agentic quests for knowledge through resistance and innovation takes on a center stage in the creation of meaning and significance. These conceptual points are illustrated with research findings and applications in the pedagogy of daring.

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Paula R. Golombek

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Talk 1 (23.05) 'Unifying language teacher cognition, emotion, and activity'

 

This talk illustrates how the pervasive emotional content in the self-inquiry discourse of English language teachers can be used to enhance professional development.  I present a model of how the emotional content found in teacher reflections indexes emotional and cognitive dissonance between teachers’ ideal (how they want to teach) and the reality of their classrooms (how they actually teach), offering potential growth points (Golombek & Doran, 2014; Johnson & Worden 2014).  Because this dissonance is frequently rooted in teachers’ sense, language teacher educators need to tease out and make explicit teachers’ perezhivanie in order to shape the social situation of development.  These growth points can be addressed in concrete ways, for example through plans of action that orient teachers to alternative instructional practices. In the process, teachers may, at a minimum, feel better about their teaching; ideally, they may take greater agency in their own learning, transforming themselves and their classroom practices in the process. 

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Talk 2 (24.05) When feeling “good” about teaching isn’t enough:  The importance of language teacher educator mediation in fostering language teacher agency

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Vygotsky’s proposal that formal school learning is the leading activity in student development establishes a theoretical foundation for why language teacher education (LTE) should be the pivotal experience in language teachers’ professional development.  From a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical (SCT) perspective, we (Johnson & Golombek, 2016; Golombek & Johnson, 2017) have thus argued for the centrality of expert language teacher educator mediation that engages teachers with multiple psychological tools and activities meant to transform their thinking and doing of teaching, as well as mediate the myriad of teachers’ emotions within the learning-to-teach experience.  In this plenary, I will argue that our (Golombek & Doran, 2014) original characterization of the functional role of teacher emotion in their development—dissonance/congruence between teachers’ ideal (how they want to teach) and the reality of their classrooms (how they actually teach)—is potentially misleading.  Beginning language teachers may articulate positive emotions that superficially and speciously point to congruence because of 1) a need to regulate their emotions in the face of the cognitively and emotionally demanding enactment of their initial teaching experiences, and 2) enactment of a pseudo-concept (Vygotsky, 1987).  Through the example of a beginning language teacher’s understanding and enactment of student participation, I will illustrate the challenge for language teacher educators to uncover these moments of teacher cognitive/emotional dissonance, while being cognizant of teacher perezhivanie in the social situation of development, and to create the conditions for responsive mediation to emerge in support of the development of L2 teacher/teaching expertise and agency.