Harold Castañeda-Peña

This research project looks closely at the emotional experiences that English language student-teachers go through during their pedagogical practicum. Often described by student-teachers as an emotional roller-coaster, this stage of their teacher education may be full of ups and downs, doubts, and moments of personal growth. Yet, despite its importance, the emotional side of learning to teach is still widely overlooked in many teacher education programs.

In Colombia, for instance, most teacher preparation courses focus heavily on technical aspects, things like lesson planning, classroom control, and designing materials. These trends have been documented in several studies that point to the predominance of instrumentalist approaches and standardized competencies in teacher education curricula (Castañeda-Trujillo & Aguirre-Hernández, 2018; González Moncada, 2009; Usma Wilches, 2009). These are, of course, important, but the emotional and human dimensions of teaching are...

This study intends to document how critical pedagogy can be promoted in the formation of EFL student teachers (the B.A. program on Bilingual Education at Institución Universitaria Colombo Americana- Única) by resorting to the narratives of a diverse minority EFL teacher as input to contest the givens of bilingualism policies from the schooling system. The study intends to create conditions and spaces for the reflection of future teachers, so that their personal epistemologies of the implications of language policies foster their awareness of their agentive role in society, and inform their professional discourse, their eventual teaching practices, and their contribution to society as intellectuals.

This doctoral proposal of the Doctorado Interinstitucional en Educación - English Language Teaching emphasis seeks to analyze the identities and pedagogical knowledge(s) of experienced English teachers who faced colonial situations in the field of English Language Teaching. First, I state the research problem by defining my locus of enunciation and three reasons why investigating the identities of experienced English educators and their pedagogical knowledge(s) while facing colonial situations is key. Second, a general overview of the key concepts and theoretical frames informing this project are presented, including epistemological reflections about identities, pedagogical knowledge, and colonial situations. Third, the methodological approach is outlined from a decolonial perspective, and the relevance given to narratives and the data collection instruments likely to be used. Finally, this proposal may positively impact the English Language Teaching field in Colombia and the...

This dissertation presents a study on teacher-educator interactional identities in English language education. The study extends Conversation Analysis by doing co-analysis and member-checking with three participating teacher-educators to analyze the enactment of their interactional identities in language-based and content-based classes in three different undergraduate programs in English language education. Findings discuss the presence of multiple interactional identities composed of varied forms of being and doing as interactants in the occurring organizations of classroom interaction. These findings highlight the relevance of studying teacher-educator interactional identities to explain how English language education occurs during classroom interaction.

This is a qualitative critical narrative research proposal grounded on trust (Sousa, 2018). The main objective is to reconstruct the meaning of the Colombian teachers of English’s stories about their experiences as participants in an immersion program led by the Ministry of Education. Such meaning reconstruction will be based on the interpretation of their experiences told as participants in one immersion held in Colombia, which can also be contrasted with the reports and information provided by the MoEd about these programs as successful to the point that these have been highly replicated under similar circumstances and for various opportunities. The theoretical framework includes the key constructs that are pillars of this research, such as teachers’ stories and immersion programs for teachers. The Short Story Analysis model as an eclectic perspective (Gómez-Vásquez, L., & Guerrero Nieto, C. 2018) will be used for the analysis of the co-constructed stories with the group of...

This proposal focuses on the identity reconstruction of transnational language teachers using a qualitative narrative inquiry as the research methodology. It begins by identifying the identity issues encountered by the transnational participants in a new foreign teaching context. And it aims to explore how socio-cultural complexities, interaction and negotiation with local educational traditions, beliefs and practices have prompted the reconstruction, transformation, or hybridization of transnational teacher identities. 

The literature review section of this proposal provides an overview on the development of LTI research approaches evolving from essentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism to discourse analysis as a field for finding identities in recent decades. Theoretical concepts such as Said’s (1993) intellectual exile and Wenger’s (1998) “Peripheral” trajectories were introduced to explain the transnational teacher identity status.  It also includes a...

This research project will take place in a public school in Bogota, with 38 students from 6 grade who are between 11 and 15 years of age. Some students (8) come from different parts of Colombia, but others from outside the country (3). In that sense, the idea of exploring students’ different backgrounds becomes relevant as the educational community, in general, tends to make these students invisible. This study would also allow students to unveil their experiences when they are segregated by their social identities, even more, when they intersect.

Taking that into consideration that intersectionality is the main aspect of this study, it is important to mention that scholars such as Crenshaw (1989), Collins (2000), Anzaldúa (1987), and Lugones (2005) have contributed to this field. However, both authors, Anzaldúa (1987) and Lugones (2005) included two important aspects: power and fusion, which played an important role in their writings. For Anzaldúa´s culture and family,...

Bearing in mind that the school contexts are dynamic, teaching and learning practices should be dynamic too. This means, understanding teaching from what Giroux (1998) has named “a form of cultural politics…that takes seriously relations of race, class, gender and power in the production and legitimation of meaning and experience (p. xii). Therefore, there is a situated need to reconceptualise what the teaching practicum or the pedagogical experience should entail in language teacher education programs in the local context, what the school contexts expect from them, what cooperating teachers and mentors consider relevant in their process of accompanying them and how to go beyond the hegemonic practices (new educational policies reforms, MEN, -2016), that are often focused on a very instrumental view of second language teaching, concentrating the attention on language certification levels adopted from the Common European Framework of Reference (2001), neglecting issues that tackle “...

The major incentive of this Doctoral proposal aroses after talking with some transgender students from university level; they mentioned have been mistreated by some teachers who apparently are not able to understand who they are, what being transgender person means. It is of paramount importance to remark on the pursuit of such a necessary training, giving the proper attention and assistance to the students who suffer silently, without having at the present time an alternative other than hiding themselves inside the social precepts and doing what our colonialist heritage imposes them, living in an insane anonymity. The problem itself is the lack of information we as teachers have about how to cope with the diversity of our students in our educational and academic contexts.

This proposal justifies why this doctoral dissertation is worth completing. It presents both theoretical and conceptual foundations to explain why this doctoral dissertation proposal inspires others to create spaces for sensing, thinking, doing, and emotioning decolonially. This proposal attempts to disrupt modes (including my own) of existing, thinking, being, and doing in academia. To do so, it proposes and elaborates on Trans-Pedagogies as a decolonial theory and methodology. Trans-Pedagogies have always been there; in the bodies, sensibilities, subjectivities, doings, pains, and sufferings of those wounded by coloniality. These have been there, within the exteriority; an exteriority that means “border dwelling and border dwelling generates border thinking and border sensing” (Mignolo, 2021, p. 515), but that, due to colonial regimes of control within universities, has been invisible to think about teacher education.

This proposal is thought to be developed through...

In initial teacher education, community has been conceptualized around modern concepts such as Target Communities (Higgins, 2012), Imagined Communities (Anderson, 1983), and Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998; Wenger-Trayner, M. Fenton-O'Creevy, S. Hutchinson, Kubiak and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Target Communities are understood as mostly cohesive groups of people who speak a (standard) language in relatively homogeneous ways, and whose cultural practices likely differ significantly from those who study the target language of that community. This view of community constructs the English Language Preservice Teachers through the dichotomy of Native Speakers of English (NSEs) vs. Non-Native Speakers of English (NNSEs) (Higgins, 2012). Imagined Communities point out groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of imagination (Norton, 1995). Within this view, the world is a global village where everybody shares an affiliation by...

This proposal explores how six female EFL student-teachers in a Modern Language Licenciatura program in Bogotá, Colombia, enact ways of being and knowing otherwise through communalized narratives of pedagogically contradictory experiences in the teaching practicum. The proposal is situated within decolonial language teacher education and responds to the persistent tensions between critical, transformative discourses promoted in teacher education programs and the institutional, pedagogical, linguistic, and gendered demands student-teachers encounter in school-based practicum contexts. Instead of understanding these contradictions as individual difficulties, lack of professional competence, or problems of adaptation, the study discusses them as gendered and epistemic borderlands where coloniality becomes visible in everyday pedagogical relationing.

The research focuses on “Tejiendo redes de saberes”, a non-disciplinary space created as a communal practice of storytelling,...