Pilar Méndez Rivera
Dirección de Tesis
Coloniality of knowledge and power in ELT pre-service teachers' education in the English language textbooks
Colombian Education faculties in the teacher education programs have taught English using the guide of well-known language textbooks without having in mind those textbook contents can have a high levels superficial cultural components in a conscious or unconscious way, those future teachers of language do not problematize the cultural component of textbooks or take into account the teaching-learning context. The purpose of this research is to examine and compare the concepts of coloniality presented in the English language textbook from multinational publishing house in pre-service English teacher education. Throughout this project, it is proposed to see how multinational publishing houses have a clear colonial purpose in the production of their texts. I want to analyze: How textbooks of international publishing house influence in the teacher training of the EFL student-teachers the coloniality of knowledge and power, the cultural components of English textbooks and the different...
VER MÁSCritical reflections to understand EFL teachers perceptions and particularities that affect co-working
For 10 years, I have taught English with communicative purposes, and trying to favor students’ critical thinking development. I want to make of my classes a meaningful experience, so I consider learners’ backgrounds, individual characteristics, likes, dislikes, emotions, contexts, and needs. For doing so, I design authentic material for my lessons, based on students’ needs and characteristics, and share it with my colleagues with the intention of building a school’s contextualized material bank. I also try to lead activities that involve the whole community, particularly to my colleagues, because teachers’ teamwork can offer opportunities to build knowledge and improve teaching practices, allowing us to be better professionals working as a group (Richards & Farrell, 2005). Unfortunately, this idea of actively co-working to improve the English Language Teaching (ELT) in my institution seems to be a personal endeavor because I have found some resistance from the other teachers to...
VER MÁSEmerging teacher leadership stories in pre service teachers
This proposal on nurturing teacher leadership in pre-service teachers, promotes reflecting about teacher identity through: journals, interviews and focus groups. Using pedagogical practices as an opportunity to observe, analyze, discuss and adapt, pre and in service teachers will reflect about themselves and their methodological strategies, they could talk about their failures and achievements, there will be an authentic reflection process with the intention to accept who they are as persons and as teachers.
This research will be carried out at IED Colegio Sorrento, afternoon shift in secondary. It will involve practicum professors, mentors and pre-service teachers; finding a meeting point in pedagogical practices attach to Bachelor's degree in Foreign Language with Emphasis in English at Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas since August 2022 to November 2024.
Change will become a common factor in pre-service teacher identity and will give them more...
VER MÁSRe-signifying the Subject Positions of the observers: The narrated experiences of ELT class observers in Colombia
This research project explores the unseen, silencing and effective invisibilization within the observers’ subject positions in the process of classroom observation practices in Colombia. Also, the research tries to sustain such practices carried out by observers are not simply normalized (formats, rubrics, and data), but represent more than a process of instrumentalization, functioning into social practice, where the observers are involved in an asymmetrical power-relations situation where an expert reasoning system within school contexts prevails merged with reflection and criticism.
It is important to mention that this project is based on the observers’ subject position. There is a lot of literature about classroom observations, but little has been said about the observers’ subject positions during this practice. The observer is the person who analyzes, judges, criticizes, offers feedback, and supports English language teachers in a strategy of Classroom Observation (...
VER MÁSSocial class identities and discourses in the efl classroom
Since the onset of poststructuralist and sociocultural approaches to the applied linguistics area of second language acquisition and learning (SLA/L) and the advent of identity research in foreign language (FL) teaching and learning, different dimensions such as gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity have been greatly explored. Nonetheless, an identity inscription which has been under examined in the abovementioned fields is that of social class. Scholarship on identity and FL educational research has not yet fully examined the hidden class-based power dynamics and the struggles for symbolic capital that students and educators experience and exercise in the EFL classroom that lead to construction and negotiation of class identities through discursive acts. Examining social class identities and discourses in FL practices such as literacy practices, interculturally development, project work, and linguistic practices becomes paramount given several factors around the world such as the...
VER MÁSUne initiative disruptive de création de matériel pour les cours de français
En el marco del semillero de investigación creado desde el área de francés de una institución de educación superior de Bogotá, se inició un riguroso proceso investigativo en el que se indaga sobre las diferentes necesidades y experiencias que presentan, semestre a semestre, nuestros docentes y estudiantes de la lengua francesa. El presente artículo es uno de los resultados de este proceso, en el que se desarrolla el análisis de las experiencias de los estudiantes y docentes, particularmente, su perspectiva sobre el material que se utiliza en las sesiones de clase, y en general, en los cursos de francés de la institución.
El contexto general es el siguiente: los estudiantes de la licenciatura en lenguas extranjeras con énfasis en inglés escogen en tercer semestre una segunda lengua extranjera para aprender, esta puede ser francés o portugués. Actualmente, más de 300 estudiantes han elegido francés como opción y el área crece semestre tras semestre. Esta última plantea que el...
VER MÁSWho teaches the teachers? Analyzing ELTEs' subject constitution at English Language Teaching Education Programs
From my experience as bilingual advisor at Secretaria de Educación de Bogotá and professor at a master of education program, I have wondered whether there is a curriculum on ELT education that could be studied from national policies, from institutional initiatives at undergraduate careers, specifically at the programs of future English teachers or from the teaching practices carried out at the same programs. Can it be said that the national policies proposed from the government shape the educational practices at the programs of prospective English teachers? The purpose of this research is to examine official documents, as follows, self-evaluation documents, general programs structures of the careers, accreditation documents and lesson planning among others taken from three undergraduate programs on the initial formation of English teachers, in order to identify the possible connections or discrepancies between English teaching practices in those programs aimed to prospective...
VER MÁSUnpacking future language teachers’ sense of communities from a knowledges otherwise perspective: decolonizing research on language teacher education in Colombia
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...
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