CUARTA SEMANA

This chapter has presented Phase Two, a longitudinal experience of innovation in Web 2.0, including Emily’s Switch-Role and Katie’s Switch-Role. As this phase concerned the transition of Emily and Katie from being learners in Phase One to being mentor and teacher in their own innovation projects, the focus was on challenges relating to role switching in terms of how they supported Emily’s and Katie’s negotiation and construction of roles and identities in the new contexts of mentoring and teaching. For Emily, the challenges related to the fluid nature of the new environment of blog, which entailed challenges of learner-centredness in terms of needs, expectations, and beliefs of the learner. For Katie, the challenges derived from the conflict between her learner self and teacher self, which related to the learning experience of innovation in Phase One and teaching experience in Phase Two. This phase also examined how the participants adapted themselves to fit the new working environments in the switched roles, and thus called for the need for critical adaptive learning on the part of the teacher or the mentor. From a longitudinal perspective, this phase throws some light on the process of innovation as a cyclical process in terms of how initiation and implementation occurred in cycles: in Phase One I initiated and the participants implemented the innovation, and

148 in Phase Two I initiated the concept of switch role and the participants translated and transferred my mentoring into their initiation and implementation of their own specific innovation projects.

149

CHAPTER SIX

PHASE THREE: A CLASSROOM-BASED EXPERIENCE OF

INNOVATION IN WIKI WRITING

As in Chapter Four and Chapter Five, “The Story”, an overview of the lived experience of Phase Three, will begin this chapter. Next, the section of results of Phase Three will be presented in terms of innovation and innovation and identity. After the results will be a brief summary of Phase Three, which is followed by the discussion. The chapter will end with a brief summary of the chapter.

6.1 The Story

It was early September 2011, the beginning of autumn in Vietnam, the beginning of a school year, Semester One. Autumn in this part of the country is not enjoyable: the days are still hot, storms and floods begin to occur, and the deciduous trees still have their green leaves. Autumn however is often the season of excitement for students, who return to school after two months’ summer holiday.

At the college, however, the students face some difficulties in starting the new school year: because the number of enrolling students is often very big, many students are not able to be enrolled in the class of their choice in terms of scheduled class time, size, or teacher. In addition, each student has to take 12 subjects in a semester: apart from subjects taught in English language or a foreign language (e.g. Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Linguistics, Literature, Culture, etc.) the students have to take compulsory subjects taught in Vietnamese language (e.g. Philosophy, Party History, Government and Laws, and Pedagogical Psychology and Education for those majoring in teaching). Many students end up attending classes from 7 a.m. to noon and/or from noon to 5:30 p.m. because they cannot manage to enroll in better classes in terms of time. Also, many classes end up having up to 50 students per class, for example, one of the classes I visited for this research had 45 students. These are some of the constraints many students face. Teachers find these constraints equally challenging. It was against this backdrop that the classroom-based study took place.

For this phase of the research, three classes A, B, C, with their teacher, Victor (pseudonym), participated in a classroom-based experience of innovation in wiki

150 writing, an innovation that was initiated by me. Together with three other classes, they were the final classes that Victor was teaching in this semester before he left for Australia in 2012 for his PhD study. The three participating classes were all studying English Academic Writing 5 for third year students, who were not only from the English Department but also from other departments in the college. Those students had a year to go at the college (four years in total) before graduation. Some of them were majoring in English teaching, the division they chose from their first year based on their university entrance exam results. Some other students were majoring in translation and interpretation, tourism, or general English. However, a small proportion still could not identify a major until the end of their third year, when the average academic result would help them make the decision. It was revealing from questionnaires (used for collecting their general information) that very many students were not pleased with their chosen majors of English teaching and/or wanted to change them, and the trend was that the students ideally wanted to be staff in Vietnam’s foreign companies involving English use, working as tour guides, interpreters, or businesspeople.

I first visited one of the classes on a rainy morning. It was around a quarter to nine o’clock, and most students were hurriedly moving between classes. In the classroom on the third floor, the teacher, Victor, introduced me to the whole class, and I, standing in front of them, was feeling like a known stranger, especially happy to see a few students who had studied in my classes before I went to New Zealand. I chatted with some students after the class and had a nice time over coffee with Victor at the refectory. A quick glance at the campus, together with the chat with Victor and the students, left me with a strong impression of these early years of our seven year-old college, from the bare landscape, young trees, new buildings, to new chairs and tables, and one new desktop computer with Wi-Fi at the teacher table in each classroom; returning from New Zealand with my researcher eyes I was learning anew about the environment in which the college, its teachers and students, were working.

With the same teacher, the three classes took place on three different days: class A every Monday afternoon 2:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m., class B every Tuesday morning 8:50 a.m. - 10:50 a.m., and class C every Wednesday afternoon 2:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.: these classes in the afternoon were the final ones of the day for the students. In all the three classes, Victor often conducted the wiki tutorials during the last thirty minutes, and the class finish time depended on the tutorial. However, tutorials did not take place on

151 every class day but on the first few days of the semester, during which time wikis were new to the class. Thus the purpose of the tutorials was for Victor to provide the whole class with basic technical instructions about wikis, which he did from the teacher’s computer shown to the class through the overhead projector. I came to the college to visit every tutorial until all were done.

Pbworks was another place we could meet, when we accessed the site at our own time and place outside the class. In the early stage, when the students had been oriented to Pbworks through the class tutorials, the site began to host many students and witness a range of posting activities, from a short sentence as a chat on the FrontPage to a full draft of a writing assignment. On Pbworks in the early stage, Victor helped some students fix their wrongly placed posts or responded to some students’ requests for help, and I helped with arranging some files and folders. During the peak time of the student’s posting papers and comments, Victor was no longer present as a teacher on the workspace. At this stage, student interactions became richer, deeper, and denser. The presence of the English language speakers that I had invited to act as commenters on Pbworks helped make the environment of the workspace more lively and student interactions more diverse. Towards the end of the semester, when the class programme was almost finished, the students were busy with their exams, and their marks for the writings had been recorded by the teacher, Pbworks became ‘quiet’ and less visited. The classroom-based experience of innovation in wiki writing concluded at the end of the semester.