Beyond the bureaucracies of the English Practicum: a political-affective language teacher education perspective from the SouthAbstract
In this article, I discuss experiences in critical language teacher education throughout a one-semester English Practicum course at a Brazilian university. The theoretical framework draws on Global South epistemologies, which, according to Merladet (2020), do not refer to a geographical location, but to anti-capitalist and anti-colonial ways of knowing that reject monocultural modes of knowledge production and seek to unlearn legitimized forms of oppression and unjust human suffering. Key concepts also include knowledge constellations (Herrera, 1997), the bureaucratization of the Practicum (Borelli, 2018), and the concept of universityschool (Mastrella-de-Andrade, 2020). The discussions highlight three significant movements towards overcoming bureaucracy in the Practicum: (1) opening space for the geo-body-political positionalities of those involved in teacher education, exploring their meanings and affects; (2) adopting critical perspectives on literacy and language education, understanding them as spaces for constructing democratic access to the English language and empowering teachers and students as legitimate users of legitimate local contexts; and (3) breaking with the colonial hierarchy between university and school to foster constellations of knowledge among educators from these different formative spaces. In conclusion, in my discussions I propose a political-affective perspective for language teacher education, grounded in unpredictability as a condition for the construction of new, living knowledges in language teacher education.
Keywords
Critical teacher education; English Practicum; Universityschool; Critical lieracy
Resumo
Neste artigo, discuto experiências de formação crítica de professoras/es de inglês durante um semestre de Estágio Supervisionado em Letras Inglês em uma universidade brasileira. O referencial teórico se apóia em epistemologias do Sul Global, as quais, segundo Merladet (2020), não se referem a espaço geográfico, mas a saberes anticapitalistas e anticoloniais que recusam formas de produção monocultural e buscam desaprender formas legitimadas de opressão e sofrimento humano injusto. São também importantes as noções de constelações de saberes (Herrera, 1997), burocratização do estágio (Borelli, 2018) e universidadescola (Mastrella-de-Andrade, 2020). As discussões apontam para três movimentos importantes para a superação da burocracia do/no estágio supervisionado: 1) a abertura de espaços para as posicionalidades geo-corpo-políticas dos sujeitos da formação; 2) o trabalho com perspectivas críticas de letramento e educação linguística, como espaços para construir acessos democráticos à língua inglesa e fortalecer professoras/es e estudantes como usuários legítimas/os de contextos locais legítimos; 3) o rompimento com a hierarquização colonial entre universidade e escola para criar constelações de saberes entre docentes desses diferentes espaços formativos. Como conclusão, proponho uma perspectiva político-afetiva de formação de professoras/es de inglês, que se assenta no campo da imprevisibilidade, sendo esse seu requisito para a construção de conhecimentos vivos para a formação docente.
Palavras-chave
Formação docente crítica; Estágio Supervisionado de Inglês; Universidadescola; Letramento Crítico
INTRODUCTION
Before starting my English practicum, I thought: I’m going to teach the way I know how, the way I’ve always seen it done in school. I already had an idea of how to do it, based on how I’ve seen it done. I was pretty worried about how we were going to sign all the paperwork, because everyone says there’s a lot of bureaucracy, that it takes time, that we have to fill out tons of forms. And I thought we’d get a bunch of explanations about that, but mostly that we’d just go to the school and start. But then, when I actually started the practicum, the first things we did didn’t seem to have much—if anything—to do with teaching English. (Felix, English Practicum Narratives, 2024).
When we discuss the English Practicum Courses in Teacher Education Programs in Brazil, bureaucracy often tops the list of worries of educators and student-teachers, as stated in the narrative above by one of the participants in the discussion in this article. In Borelli’s (2018, p. 90) work, for example, some of her participants argue that it “is more about meeting bureaucratic requirements than actual learning”, which implies “emptying the educational, formative meanings of the Practicum, as well as its potential for knowledge construction” (Borelli, 2018, p. 171). The red tape, according to Pimenta and Lima (2012) and my own experience, usually has to do with filling out and signing commitment agreement forms to formalize entry into public schools with the State Department of Education; writing lots of class observation accounts; ticking off observation sheets on what was present or absent in the observed classes; preparing the final report with descriptions of how things unfolded throughout the Practicum term, among others. Some institutions, to make things flow more easily, have the so-called English Practicum Manual, where student-teachers find the step-by-step procedures to make it all officialized and validated, avoiding misunderstandings and unnecessary stress.
Rosenberg (2008, p. 18), analysing one of such Manuals, reported that it had “pages and pages of bureaucratic aspects and little instruction on the educational field”. The author also points out that vocabulary itself, which designates roles in the Practicum, may be part of the bureaucracy. The very term “supervisor”, for example, may be part of the red tape: “influenced by its use in corporations, it tends to be associated with the job of a secretary in a protocol department”, while, as he asserts, being a supervisor should encompass inspiration, vocational direction, theoretical guidance, and even emotional support (Rosenberg, 2008, p. 22).
To resist the English Practicum colonialities of putting our attention, efforts, and affect into red tape and paperwork, I am inspired by the work of critical and decolonial thought to discuss ways to live language teacher education otherwise, as Borelli, Silvestre and Pessoa (2020) propose. In this article, my aim is to present and discuss our (my own, as a teacher educator, the student-teachers enrolled in the course and school teachers who participated as supervisors) attempts to build the English Practicum experience grounded in what I call a political-affective perspective, that is, one that does not disengage education from living and loving, and understands it, as in bell hooks’ (1994) thought, as an exercise of power to transgress. My main question, then, is: in our context, how do we build the English Practicum so as to make it go beyond bureaucratic matters?
We have long known that we lack language education policies in Brazil, and scholars, such as Siqueira and Anjos (2012), have discussed its effects for the realities of teachers and students in public school classrooms. Furthermore, we have a vast range of research on language teaching problems as well as on teachers’ working conditions asserting that education has been a project designed to fail. Patto (2000), for example, argues that public school failure is produced by a set of social practices, all accepted, recognized, authorized, and institutionalized with well-established scientific language. Bureaucracy, then, becomes the mortar to hold the components of the social practices framework together.
When bureaucratic tasks take up most of our attention and effort, we end up with weakened desire and drained energy to resist and confront coloniality in language teacher education. Moreover, we tend to distance and disconnect ourselves from local school teachers and students’ realities, which results in the reproduction of idealized, artificialized, and universalizing practices coming from colonial Europe-USA language education traditions, overlooking questions of body, race, and territory, as well as other important intersectionalities.
Taking education as always political and never neutral is at the heart of the thought of Paulo Freire (1970) and bell hooks (1994). In that sense, I understand, present, and discuss the language teacher education we do as, likewise, our political attempt to create counter-hegemonic ways of living in and with this world, especially because, as Walter Benjamin puts it, “the crisis, the true crisis, consists in keeping everything as it is” (Benjamin apud Santos, 1999, p. 45). Political as it must be, I conceive language teacher education as a space for transformation, which requires moving from a position of merely pointing problems out to a stance of taking action towards change.
This is only possible because teacher education is dependent on translation, which, according to Viveiros de Castro (2015), does not refer to finding an equivalent meaning in another language or overcoming difference; rather, like language itself, always culturally dependent and contextually grounded, always unpredictable and impossible to be fully grasped. Thinking of translation this way, we can say that it is from, in, and because of difference that we learn. It is then through translation that we gain access to knowledges. And unpredictability - sine qua non condition for education to take place (Tomé e Santos, 2021; Lopes, 2018) - exists in language teacher education because of and precisely in the very school encounters that it promotes, as I shall discuss from this point forward. All this implies that teacher education and its partnership and collaboration with schools is a matter of translation, not transmission, that is, it does not take fixed routes to say, do, and live. Instead, it is dependent on creating ways to make ourselves understood.
Such a process of creation is unpredictable, for it resides in difference. When we embrace unpredictability and difference, education takes place, for new knowledges can be mutually recognized and accommodated. As conceived from a Freirean perspective: we teachlearn and learnteach. This is a way of understanding teacher education from the South. As Merladet (2020, p. 90) describes them, South epistemologies are not defined in terms of geographical space and do not refer to denying what is produced by the North. It is “a constellation of anticapitalist and anticolonial epistemologies”, a “refusal of every and any form of monocultural production and the unlearning of all forms to legitimate oppression and unjust human suffering”.
ON THE CONTEXT OF THE EXPERIENCE
In this paper, my purpose is to present student-teachers’ narratives on their English Practicum course, which was part of their English Teacher Education Program at a public university Midwest of Brazil in 2024. According to Brazilian guidelines and regulations for teacher education, undergraduate programs must include 400 hours of Practicum courses (BRASIL, 2024). For English teacher education at my institution, these hours are distributed across four courses, organized as follows: Practicum 1: Elementary School (90 hours), Practicum 2: High School (90 hours), Practicum 3: Language Institutes (120 hours), and Practicum 4: English teaching projects (120 hours). The data under consideration here refers to student-teachers enrolled in Practicum 2.
For this discussion, I selected the narratives, activities, lesson plans, final sharing session, and written final papers of five student-teachers (out of a group of 22) who had completed all tasks and authorized their participation.
All of them agreed to sign to have their data used for research purposes. Throughout the academic term, student-teachers were invited to reflect over and narrate their experience, including their understandings, impressions, and feelings over what they lived throughout the Practicum. They gave themselves a pseudonym. In the following table, I show more information on the ones selected for this study.
The empirical material that informs my discussions was all part of the tasks assigned and developed throughout the Practicum course, as will be explained further along the next sections, when I describe my praxiologies (that is, actions and reflections, practicing and theorizing, leading to more actions and reflections, as Freire, 1970, explains). As I argue in Mastrella-de-Andrade (2020), in my institution we have been trying to develop the English Practicum courses in stronger and closer partnerships with public schools. We assume that the teacher education we do can be less elitist, less colonial, more critical, inclusive, and democratic as we form dialogic partnerships where school teachers, student-teachers, and teacher-educators from the university work as a learning community. As hooks (2003) brings it, we form community to study and learn together new ways of thinking and teaching to resist imperialist, racist, sexist, elitist and class-based domination systems. We form community to resist the banking concept of education, where teachers would deposit knowledge into students’ minds (Freire, 1970). We form community to resist the colonial idea that universities create knowledge and schools apply them; instead, we understand both places, par excellence, as equally and ecologically formative (Mateus, 2009; Borelli, 2018).
Just as significant, I must here acknowledge my positionality, or my locus of enunciation (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 5), which is “the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks”. I am a 50-year-old white Brazilian woman, born and raised in the Midwest of the country. I worked as a teacher of English at a private institute for 14 years and at a Middle School for six years. I have worked as an English teacher educator since 2008 and have been responsible for the English Practicum in the English Teacher Education Program in my university since 2013. Coming from a low-middle-class childhood and youth, I have learned to see education as an important way to build access in social life. Along with it, women and black people’s experiences in this very unequal context I live in have brought gender and race to be part of my concerns as well. This reality influences the lens through which I develop my praxiologies and the way I discuss them here.
As for the methodological ways of carrying out the discussions in this article, I propose ontoepistemological conversations with both the empirical material I selected to discuss here and the authors whose theoretical work inspires and underpins my reflections. Therefore, I cannot let go of my subjectivity, for it is deeply implied in my praxiologies. By praxiologies I mean “epistemologies merged with our practices, mixed in such a way that they can only be expressed in a single word”, as Pessoa, Freitas, and Silva (2021, p. 16) define it. The use of this term is a rejection of all forms of separating theory and practice, as advised by Freirean perspectives.
ORGANIZATION AND CONDUCTION OF THE ENGLISH PRACTICUM COURSES
In this section, I present how the English Practicum course is organized within the English Teacher Education Program where I work. I then explain more directly how things are intentionally arranged and what grounds such praxiologies.
Our Practicum experience is marked by the constant process of reading, reflecting, discussing, and doing, that is, steps to ground our praxiologies. The main focus of our readings is on critical literacy and language education. The goal is to challenge the traditional views of learning English as only a way for students to get a good job in the future. Instead, we highlighted its role in the curriculum as a place to develop critical understandings of the world, in and through language. Therefore, by reading and discussing articles by different authors, we problematize concepts such as language (Lynn Mario Menezes de Souza, 2019), the role of English in Brazilian public schools (Sávio Siqueira; Flávio Anjos, 2012; Miriam Jorge, 2009); language teaching methodology (Barbra Sabota, 2024; Margareth Schlatter, 2009), language and literacy (Angela Kleiman, 2005), and critical literacy and English teaching (Camila Fonseca, 2019; Silvana Lima, 2022; Josiane Tonim, 2019). The authors and their texts pave the way for us to create lesson plans under the supervision of the school teachers during our time in school classrooms. The first part of the course (30 hours) is usually devoted to study and preparation and the second one is dedicated to creating lesson plans and teaching weekly in the schools (60 hours).
In addition to all that reading, reflecting, discussing, and doing, much more is involved, since our work is not singularly focused on cognition or rationality. As Dias (2024, p. 41) points out, “between thinking and acting, in the struggles against inequalities, it is essential to invoke the principle of feeling”. Feeling, then, is explored through the proposal of some writing activities, which generate sharing and knowledge creation, as I aim to present and discuss further.
Our writing activities are mostly inspired by the Research Group GECRIA - Critical Education and Creative Authorship, coordinated by Professor Juliana de Freitas Dias (Dias, 2024), whose goal is to form cure-and-creativity-oriented writing communities for teachers. I believe such writing activities, as will be described in the next sections, can be used in language teacher education to make way for personal-political stories, lived experiences, and feelings. I agree with Lima (2024, p. 51) in that we are all engaged in the modern-colonial-neoliberal structure that reduces humans to an “inanimate cog, devoid of critical thought and affect”. Considering this, I take Arias’ (2012, p. 41) term corazonar to underscore the need to produce knowledge that does not take thinking and feeling as separate categories: “corazonar is a political answer to coloniality, for it displaces the hegemony of reason and shows that our humanity is constituted in the interrelation between affectivity and reason”.
The writing activities explored our creativity and, as a result, explored our own ways to create knowledge to look at and discuss our contexts, allowing us to affirm ownership over our own praxiologies, that is, our own way to do the teaching in/with/for our local realities That is not to say that we disregard the knowledges produced in the past. On the contrary: it is precisely because we are aware of their existence and of how they do not always apply to our interests and needs that we choose to develop our own ways to look at and produce knowledge for and with our local contexts.
WHERE WE ARE FROM: GEO-BODY-POLITICAL POSITIONALITIES AND EMOTIONS
For Brazilian writer Rubem Alves (2013, p. 206), “each person is a poem made flesh”. Rejecting the modern divisions of mind and body, emotion and reason, I usually enter the Practicum pursuing questions such as: how could we embody our stories and share that together in class? How could we let ourselves be known in a way that would value our past? Poetry, then, emerges as a possibility. In order to introduce myself, get to know the student-teachers and let us all start knowing each other, I proposed the so-called “Where I’m from” Poem, by George Ella. To begin with, I shared my own one with the group, which (partly) reads as follows:
I’m from a family of five, with no fancy clothes or toys, but an effort for good education. I’m from “a marriage is not a job” and “study because I could not”.
I am from a white family
who, at times, favored comfortable silences.
I am from a small school at first, and later a larger, upper-class school where I barely felt like I belonged.
I’m from “speak like a native” and “don’t sound Brazilian”.
I’m from crowded Elementary classes
and aching legs for long teaching hours.
I’m also from criticality in English teaching, problematizing the native speaker’s fallacy and myth. I’m from Paulo Freire’s and bell hooks’ writings on education.
I’m from butterflies in my stomach when a new semester begins.
It lights up my hope for new possibilities.
(Mariana, “Where I am from” poem, 2024).
In my own poem, as in others from the group, gender and race shape my story, since I mention to be white, which is something usually made neutral, not marked or racialized. As Nascimento (2021) argues, it is necessary “to bring back the body, stolen by coloniality, and mark the unmarked” (Gabriel Nascimento, 2021, p. 59). If not intentionally in a poem, maybe it would be hardly ever brought up and shared on a first day of class, I believe, for in poetry writing we can bring up hidden joy and pain for reflection, as Dias (2024) states. In that sense, my body appears in the poem, as I talk of comfortable silences in the same line I refer to myself as being white. And all that is not disconnected from school, where I refer to as “barely feeling like I belonged”. My poem, then, opens up our stories to be problematized: as a group, we did not need to turn to other works or authors to legitimize our discussion on happy or painful school experiences at that moment, for our own lived ones bring up and back up our discussions. Equally important to point out here is the value of such activities in language teacher education: when student-teachers’ body, stories, joys, and pains are respectfully and legitimately addressed in teacher education programs, chances are that they, in turn as schoolteachers, do not overlook their own students’ stories and pain and how they relate to language education at school. As Menezes de Souza and Hashiguti (2022, p. 169) put it, which should not be overlooked in language teacher education, “the locus of enunciation refers to being constituted by discourses and also by stories”.
After sharing and explaining the basics of the poem structure, I asked them to write their own, which they did, and we had a round of sharing. I select Sandra’s poem to discuss here, which reads as below:
I am from Ceilandia.
I am from a family of 7 that now is 5
I am from their hard work for a better life
I am from love and caring
I am from colorful streets with running kids
I am from where sometimes you can only dream
I am from classes with happiness and sadness
(...)
I am from schools that I am back
Hoping that now they are not only dreaming
(Sandra, Where I’m from poem, 2024)
In the poem above, Sandra mentions “classes with happiness and sadness”, which gave us a chance to discuss how and why school can be this place where we live joy and sorrow. Again, school experiences can be problematized in terms of unequal power relations through our own lived stories, acknowledging their importance to make teacher education relevant from, in, and for our own local contexts and bodies. Problematizing our lived school stories can, therefore, become the necessary strength to think education otherwise. As hooks (2010, p. 34-35) describes her journey: “it was the painful experiences that motivated me to strive to teach in ways that were humanizing, that would lift my students’ spirits so that they would soar toward their own unique fullness of thought and being”.
As part of their writing activity, each one of the group was supposed to narrate that first encounter, to be shared with the group at the beginning of and as a preparation for the following one. The narratives served to show how we (the student-teachers and I) felthought2 and reacted to writing the poem and the follow-up discussions, as Darien, for example, wrote:
In the first class, the Professor asked us where we were from. That, to me, was the basics. I’m from Brasília. I’m from Samambaia, I said. But no, it did not stop there. She asked where we were from beyond the physical, geographical place. And that started stirring something inside us. We wrote and cried, because we are from different places, memories, sensations, histories indeed. Then, with that, I started asking myself: where is this leading us to regarding the discussion about English at school? What does it have to do with anything? (Darien, English Practicum Narratives, 2024).
As in the excerpt above, Darien perceives himself, in and through the poem, as “from different places, memories, sensations, histories”, which, at the same time, leads him to question in what ways that would relate to “English at school”. In other words: what do our identities have to do with what we do as educators? Western thought in modernity, according to Castro-Gomez (2007), has been marked by different kinds of separations, leading us to dichotomize who we are and what we do, how we feel and how we think, among others. In that sense, teacher education programs tend to focus more on what to do, how to teach, and methodology and techniques, with little space to explore and interrelate our stories, actions, and feelings in language teaching, as if emotions were a variable in the process, rather than inherent to all of it (Barcelos, 2024).
In Darien’s narrative above, he notes that the writing process “started stirring something inside us. We wrote and cried, because we are from different places, memories, sensations, histories indeed”. The activity proposed seemed to let emotions flow and, even more, to explore how our stories can be similar by being so different. I find it interesting that he wondered and questioned in what ways all that could be connected to teaching “English at school”, which seems to suggest that the writing and the discussions around it opened up questionings to be explored and continued throughout the Practicum experience.
CRITICAL LITERACY AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION FOR ACCESS AND TRANSFORMATION
Rooted in the English Practicum program on focus here is a revision of language - from viewing it as a mere means of communication to understanding its active, constructive role in social life. Therefore, we studied English language education as literacy, that is, the social practice of using language to act and react and identifying it as inherent to making sense of the world, including ourselves, in society. Also under revision was the place of grammar in teaching and the meanings of criticality in language education. To all such ends, we studied some texts:3 “Language education: rethinking concepts of language” (Menezes de Souza, 2019), “English language teaching and critical language education: a critical-reflexive movement” (Fonseca, 2019), “The Roads We Take – The Pedagogic Route as a Proposal to Build English Classes Along Critical Decolonial Pathways” (Sabota, 2024), “English can be learned: an experience with rap in a public school” (Tonim, 2019), and “Language education and the (re)construction of an English teacher’s praxis” (Lima, 2022).
As we read and discussed the texts just mentioned, student-teachers were in charge of selecting, creating, and sharing multimodal materials, such as memes, photos, song lyrics, images, comic strips, works of art, etc., that would relate to their understandings of the authors’ thoughts and concepts. Flora selected the following excerpt from Menezes de Souza (2019, p. 247), along with the picture below, to discuss about what the focus of our language classrooms should be on:
Our focus now is on users’ practices, no longer on the system itself. As a result, users take on enormous importance. We no longer accept the abstract system built around the hypothetical native speaker. What we want for foreign language teaching in our context is the Brazilian student, the Brazilian teacher — the user of the language, which no longer exists in the singular. In Brazil, what do we use this language for? In this way, it ceases to be “the language” in the singular. Besides, once it is no longer a singular language, the very concept of language as it has traditionally existed also begins to dissolve. We then start to think of language as something nebulous, without fixed boundaries — a set of repertoires and practices that vary from place to place, from context to context (Menezes de Souza, 2019, p. 247).
The quote above brings up the need to rethink language, as the author urges students and teachers to consider local users, including themselves, as the focus and (temporary) models of language use and language education today. What are our repertoires, after all, and what do we need them for? This provoked us to critically look back on our own learning histories, where we had the so-called “international” or “global” textbooks dictating standards of living and speaking for all of us.
Along with the quote above, and thinking of critical literacy, Flora presented the picture below as illustrative of how the English class can be a place for building equity.
Her selection gave us some fruitful time to discuss the different realities of English learning in Brazil, especially in public schools, and how learning languages in this context can mean social transformation. As Fonseca (2019), Siqueira and Anjos (2012), and Barros (2022) point out, access to English has been a matter of inequality in our country: those who can pay benefit from expensive, good-quality courses in order to learn. Those who cannot pay find English in abstract, reality-distanced and grammar-focused practices that, as Tonim (2019) states, do not engage or welcome students to even believe English can be learned: “it remains as something impossible to be part of their lives, as if they were not worthy of this language”, as student-teacher Flora remarked in her final paper. In addition, the picture selected by Flora (as above) also gave us an opportunity to discuss and understand that being critical has to do with identifying who is privileged or favored in social life, and at whose expense. Therefore, we concluded that access to English at public school has to do with social transformation for students’ lives, requiring praxiologies that make room for students’ knowledges and lived conditions to be incorporated and legitimized as classroom content. This sets language learning proposed in international books (with themes that do not really relate to our classrooms, such as Global-North-like tourism, shopping, and leisure, to cite a few examples, as in Block, 2017) apart from what we desired to create: political-affective spaces for local, contextual, place-rooted public school language education.
Studying and discussing ways of teaching English in a critical literacy perspective started to make more sense and inspire us to question: if English at school is a matter of social justice (Barros, 2022), then how can we shape our teaching to ensure that it does not go unnoticed in and through our classroom praxiologies and relationships at the school? Our readings of Menezes de Souza (2019), Lima (2022), and Tonim (2019), especially along with Sabota (2024)’s guidelines on critical and decolonial lesson planning possibilities, opened ways for critical literacy in the praxis developed at school. It also inspired us to devise approaches to get to know the school students, that is, to (begin to) grasp at least the basics on who they were, where they lived, what they liked doing, and their views and expectations about the English language. Considering all that, the goal was to build relevant and significant praxiologies so that students could see aspects of their own realities, preferences, needs, and interests somehow represented in all our language education movements, whether in the choice of topics, texts, videos, images, and others. Also, we wanted to ensure that students’ knowledges were addressed as part of the contents discussed. For the purpose of this text, due to time and space limitations, I will relate to one example of praxiologies developed within a second-year high school class that generated engagement from the school students and invited them to start using English in relation to their own lives and local contexts. As hooks (1994, p. 87) claims,
All students, not just those from marginalized groups, seem more eager to enter energetically into classroom discussion when they perceive it as pertaining directly to them (when nonwhite students talk in class only when they feel connected via experience it is not aberrant behavior). Students may be well versed in a particular subject and yet be more inclined to speak confidently if that subject directly relates to their experience.
The student-teachers, as they started getting to know the class, decided to relate to the topic “Identity”, which unfolded in their weekly lessons into five other subtopics along their two-month teaching experience: 1) What is identity; 2) Identity and media representation; 3) Identity and memories; 4) Identity and language; 5) Identity and art. By the end of the two months, the school students were supposed to have a portfolio with the set of activities they developed weekly. The two-hour classes happened only once a week. As instructed by the school teacher, the grammar content to focus mainly on was supposed to be: adjectives and comparatives and the text genres to be explored were: letter, diary, and poem.
Sandra was one of the student-teachers ahead of the project “Identity” for this second-year high school class. By the end of the experience, her students were supposed to write, as part of their assignments, short poems in English entitled “Who am I?”. She singled out one of them to reflect on in her final paper, which read:
I’m creative and friendly.
I want to see my sister again.
I feel like a sword of pain and happiness
it’s cutting my soul.
(School student poem in Sandra’s final paper, 2024)
As she brings up the poem above in her final paper, she remarks on how the experience of receiving it from the student touched her as an educator and fueled her desire to keep pursuing the teaching career. Part of her narrative is as follows:
One situation I experienced during the Practicum was fundamental for me to want to keep on in this profession: the contact with one student in particular. When we started teaching the group, that student was never open to forming connections. Despite completing the activities as requested, his reaction was always one of suspicion and distance. In his final activity, the poem, he opened himself up and wrote something very personal. I read it and said some reassuring words to him. I felt it was the first time he saw me as a distinct but similar being. It was very important to realize that even if some students shut themselves off to avoid bonding, we can produce classes that foster real and sincere activities, with a space for authentic expression. With this, I hope to bring true contributions. I feel hopeful to bring valuable contributions to my future students, creating safe places for their effective production in English. Planning lessons under a relevant theme and in a critical perspective gave our classes more relevance for students’ lives. This changed my view of a lesson. (Sandra, Practicum Final Paper, 2024).
The possibility to plan “lessons under a relevant theme in a critical perspective” and “contribute”, as Sandra argues, seems to confront the ongoing repetition of meaning-emptied grammar-terminology narrations commonly found in Brazilian school English classrooms (Siqueira; Anjos, 2012). Instead, the project “Identity”, built in a critical literacy perspective, allowed student-teachers and school students to practice authorship, that is, to use the English language to produce meanings to/on their own realities, needs, and interests. For Sandra, designing lessons that could touch students’ realities in a critical way, address their feelings, and open them up for further discussions in class, as we can see in the school student’s poem above, gave her a sense of relevance to planning a lesson and, thus, to the teaching career itself.
Another aspect that deserves drawing attention to is when Sandra (in the excerpt above) describes her encounter with her student as “the first time he saw me as a distinct but similar being”. Here, in line with Tomé and Santos’ (2021, p. 17) thought, we see the “invention produced in the pedagogical experience, not as pragmatism, but as relational production”. Her creation and proposal resonate with the school student in a way that he gets willing to respond to - that is, to engage in conversation with - and take part in the activity with a very personal poem. I find it interesting to note that, just like we started out our semester with the “Where I am from” poem, student-teachers proposed a poem as the final activity in their praxis at the local school. In my view, it strongly highlights how language teacher education and school language teacher praxis may be intertwined in the sense of giving up rationality in favor of relationality, building political-affective teaching education praxiologies. Rationality has to do with telling what and how to be and do; relationality, opening up for building relationships and, thus, to the unknown, the unpredictable, which is where subjectivity grows: “it is through unpredictability that subjects present themselves as subjects who do not rely on the discourse of sameness” (Tomé; Santos, 2021, p. 8).
From Sandra’s narrative of her teaching experience, as well as based on her student’s production, we learn about the centrality of the school in/for/with teacher education - school is its launch point, not the landing place. In the next section, I shall discuss it further.
UNIVERSITYSCHOOL FOR KNOWLEDGE CONSTELLATIONS
It is with/in schools that teacher education can find and create new meanings: “if there is any way to build knowledges, to build teacher education, it is only through what the subjects and the school have as difference and [only] through the unpredictability to feel the school and the subjects in what most disturbs, scares and limits the view to the uncommon” (Tomé; Santos, 2020, p. 60). Within the Brazilian context, the school is, par excellence, a place where teacher education can have encounters with difference and, therefore, build knowledges. It is in this sense that I discuss universityschool here, considering both university and school as formative places for teacher education.
For such a discussion, I see universityschool as a way to build what Herrera (1997, p. 86), discussing how knowledges are created in indigenous communities in Latin America, calls “knowledge constellations”. As he argues, “in the collective action of creating knowledge, emotional bonds with particular persons is what generates new visions and knowledge. And knowledge is never detached from emotion”. Knowledge constellations in teacher education, as I try to discuss here, therefore, are formed in and through the relationships we foster between university and school - the people from these two places - so that they are no longer seen isolatedly in their roles or capacities. In this session, then, I discuss two narratives that show the kinds of relationships we built.
Throughout the Practicum term, school teachers were invited to participate in the readings and discussion encounters that took place before we began the teaching praxis at the school classrooms. Since they had to be in their school classrooms at the same time we had our encounters at the university, none of them managed to participate all the time. However, they had access to the texts we studied and were aware of and agreed with our intention to do the teaching of English from a critical literacy perspective. Besides, they supervised all the contents student teachers were supposed to teach and received all their lesson plannings in advance in order to have a say in all that we prepared to do in the school classes. As responsible for the Practicum Course, I also saw the plannings in advance and participated during the student teachers’ praxis in the school classrooms. Therefore, we were a group of teachers at different stages in our teaching journey; all teachlearning and learnteaching.
One of the topics student teachers requested to study and discuss throughout the Practicum Course was about how to teach language to students with autism and other disabilities. In order to lead the discussion, we invited a local public school language teacher, Mayssara Reany Oliveira, who has teaching and research experience over this topic. She kindly accepted the invitation and gave us a 4-hour talk with main principles and a question-and-answer session deconstructing misconceptions and biases over teaching possibilities for autism and other disabilities at public school. About this, Olivia wrote the following in her final paper:
Something I will take forever with me is the way teacher Mayssara talked about teaching students with autism and students with other disabilities. I had read some texts about it, but nothing compares to how much we can learn from a school teacher. She shared her experience, her ways of doing, her ways of looking at the students in her classrooms, the way of dealing with all their learning process. She shared her own praxiologies, her ways of leading things in the classroom. She made it practical and visible and connected with classroom life as no one else ever could! I am very thankful to the opportunity of having encountered her in my pre-service teacher education. (Olivia, Practicum Final Paper, 2024).
In Olivia’s narrative, she highlights “how much we can learn from a school teacher” - her “ways of doing”, “ways of looking at students” and making things “practical and visible and connected with classroom life” - which can be shared with greater meaning than we might find in texts or any other academic resources. This, in turn, leads us to conclude that it is with and in the school that teacher education can constellate knowledges and create ways to “read the night skies” (Herrera, 1997, p. 91). In this sense, we were forming relationships in order to create new meanings about language teaching in our local context.
As Mastrella-de-Andrade and Pessoa (2019) bring it, the predominance of the university as the exclusive and isolated site of teacher education fosters a model that is elitist, classist, and racist, and that remains disconnected from the local realities of language education. In this sense, Darien also made an interesting remark on his final presentation about lessons learned from another school teacher, as he narrates:
We had prepared a class designed to be interactive, aiming to capture the attention and participation of the 2nd year high school students. But we weren’t succeeding promoting that participation. We were the only ones speaking, while the students just looked at us. Then, during the break, teacher J called on us and said: “Look, it seems like you’re at the university presenting an academic seminar. But you’re not presenting a seminar. Aren’t we working with critical literacy, which requires the active participation of students? So, our questions need to invite them to engage from their own experiences. You can’t take the stance of a university lecturer who simply presents a topic. You need to get involved, get closer”. After she said that, we really began to understand that we needed to get closer to the students. And not just physically closer, but also to bring the class content closer to their reality, creating space for them to share how they experienced the issues we were presenting as the theme of the lesson. (Darien, Practicum Final Sharing Session, 2024).
From Darien’s remark, it is interesting to point out how the school teacher seems to take responsibility to help student teachers understand their role and the kind of teaching school classrooms request. She contrasts universities and schools by saying that teachers are not to “present seminars or a topic”. More interestingly, she resorts to critical literacy, the very perspective we studied for language education, to remind student teachers that they should get their students involved by engaging their own realities and experiences in the classes. Because of our attempts to build a closer and horizontal bond between university and schools for teacher education, breaking up with the colonial hierarchies that name universities as places of theory constructions and schools as places for their application (Borelli, 2018), the school teacher in Darien’s narrative has a voice in what goes on in the classroom and in how student teachers should make adjustments to improve their teaching. As the university professor, I was not the only one to have a say in it. In addition, she even felt empowered enough to criticize university pedagogical practices that she viewed as unsuitable for language education.
The Practicum, then, in our experience, seems to be a space where univesityschool can generate knowledge on both teacher and language education. In this regard, it becomes important to ask: why does Darien choose to narrate this occasion (and not anything else)? As Herrera (1997, p. 91) writes: “when we narrate, we translate and this transforms us. We are always telling stories because we are changing all the time. When we feel that we have changed, when we recognize it, a narration is born, too”. Darien, as well as the other student teachers, narrates because he feels the need to translate what was learned and taught, that is, the knowledge he has created for himself throughout the Practicum experiences. As he feels that he learns, as he recognizes such learning operates changes in him, he narrates and translates what happened in a way we can understand it.
CONCLUSIONS
In this article, I have explored and problematized English Practicum experiences to move language teacher education beyond bureaucracies and live it otherwise. In this sense, I have presented and discussed our (my own, as a teacher educator, the student-teachers enrolled in the Practicum course, and school teachers who participated as supervisors) attempts to build the English Practicum experience grounded in what I propose to be a political-affective perspective, that is, one that does not disengage education from knowing and feeling, living and loving, and understands it, as in bell hooks’ (1994) thought, as an exercise of power to transgress.
My discussions suggest three important moves toward the construction of what I call political-affective perspectives of language teacher education. First, I suggest the need to bring our geo-body-political positionalities as indissociable from who we are and what we do as teachers. By doing this, as I have shown, we open language teacher education to become a space where people can position themselves, breaking up with the ideals of neutrality and building knowledges that matter more to what we are and do than the time and emotion-consuming red tape and paperwork Practicum practices usually require.
The second move relates to adopting critical literacy perspectives for language education in the Practicum experiences, understanding it as a place for building access to English learning as well as for strengthening teachers and students as legitimate English users from legitimate local contexts. Critical literacy perspectives offer ways to deconstruct abstract views of language, understanding it as repertoires acquired throughout lived biographies. As a pedagogical result, language education praxiologies open up for bringing students’ realities, desires, and needs to classroom practices, in order to contextualize and make their learning local, valuing who and where they are. All of this seems to motivate school students to understand languages as places they can inhabit for different reasons, instead of viewing them as distant and unattainable acquisitions.
As for teacher education, this emphasis on critical literacy perspectives in a political-affective teacher education seems to make way for what Menezes de Souza (2019, p. 255) states: preparing a teacher who is capable of “analyzing who their students are, what their teaching context is, what the needs of that context and those students are, what resources are available, and, based on that, what can be done — is far more important than any language policy document or methodology to be taught”.
Finally, the third move concerns breaking up with the colonial hierarchy that assumes universities as places of knowledge construction and schools as places for its application. A universityschool relationship, instead, understands both university and school as language teacher formative places (Borelli, 2018) and opens up for more horizontal, democratic ways of constellating knowledges (Herrera, 1997). As I have attempted to demonstrate, close relationships between university and schools are fundamental for a more democratic teacher education, where knowledges are constellated and new ones can be created. This means having school teachers at the university and university teachers at school, circulating subjects, ideas, experiences, and praxiologies.
My attempts to discuss what I here call political-affective perspectives for overcoming bureaucracies in language teacher education involved three moves, as I have outlined them through the praxiologies carried out in a one-semester Practicum Course. However, by no means do I intend to suggest that this is a fixed, prescribed set of rules to be developed in teacher education. Quite the opposite, my discussions concentrated on very contextual, contingent praxiologies, which only took place because of the local histories, identities, time, and places put into play that semester. As Sussekind and Maske (2020, p. 181) argue, “there are no assessments capable of measuring what is lived, learnedtaught, and practiced in those places where the unpredictable resides”. Let us continue moving beyond bureaucracy, and other contexts and subjects will generate the beauty of different and unpredictable praxiologies, knowledge constellations, and, therefore, movements.
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1
This article is part of the results of my post-doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr. Amparo Clavijo Olarte, researcher in the area of language teacher education, from the Distrital University in Bogotá.
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2
The word felthought is the fusion of felt and thought to mean the refusal to separate feeling and thinking or emotion and reason. The option for joining words without a hyphen is, according to Sussekind and Coube (2020), a resistance to modern dichotomies.
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3
To help the reader make sense of the readings completed during the Practicum, the titles here are translated into English. Their original titles, however, are in Portuguese, as listed in the references.
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RESEARCH DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request and with appropriate justification.
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STATEMENT IF AI WAS USED
The author used ChatGPT (OpenAI) as a language support tool for linguistic (vocabulary and grammar) revision of a few selected passages of this manuscript. All intellectual content, analyses, text writing, and interpretations remain the sole responsibility of the author.
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The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the author upon reasonable request and with appropriate justification.
Source: author’s archives of student teachers’ activities.