Corcoran, James (Renison University College / University of Waterloo); Allison Rose Yealdon (Lester B. Pearson & L Commission Scolaire des Trois Lacs School Boards), Christina Tijandra (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education / University of Toronto), Mary Alicia Welsh (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education / University of Toronto; Edmonton Public School Board), and Maria Gennuso (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education / University of Toronto)
This duoethnographic project explores emergent tropes from conversations between a language teacher educator and four language teachers on the impact of a digital autobiographical identity text (D-AIT) assignment in an online, graduate-level teacher education course entitled, “Critical Academic Literacies: Supporting Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students in our Schools”. In attempting to better understand the complex potential and limitations of digital technologies in the language teacher education classroom, we discuss at length several themes: the immediate and enduring impact of this assignment on teachers’ conceptions of language, language teachers, and language teaching; the inextricable links between language, identity, power, and (digital) pedagogies; the potential of this type of activity on both teachers’ and their students’ language learning outcomes and perceptions of themselves as legitimate users of additional languages; and the limitations of using digital technologies with teachers and students who have different digital access and literacies. Our presentation forefronts teacher voices while grounding these conversations in the extant literature from Educational Linguistics. Following a brief presentation of teacher D-AITs, we conclude with recommendations for adapting this pedagogical tool in different contexts in order to effectively and equitably support our increasingly diverse populations of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Our presentation may be of acute interest to both language teachers, language teacher educators, and those interested in duoethnographic research in teacher education.
References
Barkhuizen, G. (Ed.). (2016). Reflections on language teacher identity research. New York: Taylor & Francis. Corcoran, J. N. (2017). The potential of autobiographical identity texts in English for academic purposes classrooms. College ESL Quarterly, Winter 2017, 1-7.
Cummins, J. (2007). Rethinking monolingual instructional strategies in multilingual classrooms. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée, 10(2), 221-240.
Morgan, B. (2009). Fostering transformative practitioners for critical EAP: Possibilities and challenges. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(2), 86-99.
Norris, J. & Sawyer, R. D. (2017). (Eds.) Theorizing curriculum studies, teacher education, and research through duoethnographic pedagogy. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change. Language Teaching, 44(4), 412-446.
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