Libertad de gestión

2 Adam: Agora?

“Now”

3 Tadeu: Yeah, right now. If we have free fucking time. 4 Adam: Eu não tô nem com o livro aqui. Eu não sei(.) Não 5 tô nem com o livro. Não, relaxa.

“I don’t even have the book here. I don’t know (.) No, chill”

6 Tadeu: The book is here.((Points to the book on the

7 bookshelf))

In the analysis, whenever I only refer to participants’ words or phrases in the body of a paragraph, I use double quotes (“get to know each other activity”; “plan for professional development”). In these cases, when they are in Portuguese, I present an English translation in the text and refer to the original in Portuguese in a footnote. Again, an example is probably the best way to refer to it,

Antonio was also a former student teacher who had worked at the program for two years in the first cohort and was an instructor in a private language school at the time of the interview. He was no longer a student teacher in the program but hung out in the teachers’ room all the time and partook in several pedagogical meetings. When I asked him informally if he was still in the program, he told me, “I left the program, but the program didn’t leave me”70_.

Corpus and analytical procedures. After the analytical procedures explained in

the previous paragraphs, I obtained what I call my data corpus, that is, what really counts as data (Erickson, 1990). The corpus revolves around three main categories:

1. A field journal with entries for every observation (64 pages);

2. Transcriptions of observations and interviews (404 pages); 3. Artifacts and photos (384 objects).

Then, after reading the data several times, I proceeded to initial and open coding (Saldaña, 2009). I used the research questions to guide my reading of the observational data and coded interactional events that called my attention as potentially interesting. I read through the data and tagged the events with tentative names (e.g. “microteaching”, “discussing books”, “talking to ETAs”).

First, I analyzed all interviews and identified themes that interviewees related to professional development. These themes consist of interviewees’ understandings of the ways in which they improved as teachers by participating in the community. The themes are recurring in the collection of interviews, meaning that all themes were mentioned by different participants. These themes gave me a direction to elect – in the participant observation corpus – the practices that really mattered for professional development in their own perspective.

Then, I analyzed the participant observation data to identify the practices that related to the themes identified in the interviews. For instance, participants mentioned co- teaching as a practice that helped them develop professionally. In the data, I identified that co-teaching was related to events where participants prepared classes together with ETAs. The same events were also related to “improving proficiency”, as the interviewees considered they had improved their proficiency in English language by interacting with the ETAs. I saturated the data by reading the data multiple times and refining the categories (by eliminating some, creating others, mashing and rearranging data in others).

Finally, I narrowed the practices that cultivate student teacher learning in six well defined, bounded and patterned practices. I kept only the practices that related to the main themes brought up by interviewees. These practices, unsurprisingly, are among the most common in the data (in terms of events associated with them).

By looking at these practices, two categories emerged. Although I did not initially align with the dichotomy formal vs. informal learning, the data suggest that this is the case in the CoP. There are practices which are planned by coordination (meetings, workshops, lectures, feedback sessions, etc.), and other practices which are unplanned and, thus, emerge from participants’ everyday interactions in Informal contexts, chiefly in the teachers’ room.

In addition to that, in order to deal with the practices in the light of PT, I use both the transcripts and the field journal as equally important documents of analysis. In the practices where the minutiae of interaction are essential, I tend to use transcripts more than field journal entries; in the practices in which I do not judge the minutiae of the interaction so important to its description, I tend to use the journal more. At any rate, I constantly use the field journal to contextualize the data I present, for in PT the expansion of the context of interaction is essential for us to understand what is going on in the situated practice. In this sense, the history of the practice and the history of participants is often referred to frame the interactional analysis.

Chapter summary and a look ahead

In this third chapter, I have reviewed the methods of data generation and analysis employed in the present investigation. In the next chapter, I will present the results of the study and answer the research questions.

Chapter 4 Summary of Study

This study, as described earlier, has examined local practices that foster teacher development in a specific community – the LwB’s ELC of a large federal university in the south of Brazil71_{. Aligning to similar studies carried out recently (Merril, 2016; Costa,}

201372_{), I have opted to name such local practices that may foster professional}

development in the CoP as practices of teacher development.

For this research, I have adopted a PT approach (Bourdieu, 1977; Ortner, 1984; Giddens, 1984; Young, 2009) to investigating professional development in the everyday life of the community. According to one of its main proponents, the CoPs perspective locates “learning, not in the head or outside it, but in the relationship between the person and the world, which for human beings is a social person in a social world” (Wenger, 2010, p. 1). Thus, professional development is “a process of realignment between socially defined competence and personal experience—whichever is leading the other” (p. 2). Thus, learning is becoming a certain type of person whose identity reflects their trajectory in and among communities and their universe of participations, practices, artifacts and meanings.

This embracement of PT has conducted to an adoption of: (1) History-in-Person as a metaphor for identity and as a way to understand the ways in which participation in the community led to participants’ current self-perception and self-understanding as EAL teachers; (2) ethnographic methods of data generation and analysis to describe, analyze and elucidate participants’ situated engagement in the practices of teacher development in the community; and (3) the CoP’s perspective to understand the community as a social system that produces professional development in its practices.

Bearing this in mind, this study has triangulated data from two different but intertwined sources: (1) History-in-Person interviews of focal participants; and (2) the

71 _{It is important to clarify that the CoP is not the project itself, but the network of relationships, practices,} meanings and artifacts that emerge from the interactions of a specific group of people with a common goal, in this case, teaching EAL for the university community (students, faculty and staff). The main evidence for this differentiation between project and CoP is the fact that a few project members – student teachers and clerical interns – do not partake in CoP’s interactions, meetings and everyday life in the teachers’ room. On the other hand, there are a few participants, former student teachers, who are not officially members in the program but who do participate in both meetings and everyday life in the teachers’ room.

72 _{The author refers to “Práticas de Formação de Professores”, which I have translated into Practice of} Teacher Development.

practices (Wenger, 1998; 2010; Young, 2009; 2010) observed, described and identified in the participant observation data obtained in the community that, in my interpretation of the data, fostered the self-understandings and self-perceptions of professional development delineated in the History-in-Person interviews. In other words, I first look into interviewees perceptions in the interviews and, then, to how social practice may or may not relate to such perceptions. In this study, thus, there is an attempt to integrate personal and interactional perspectives in order to explain professional development. For this reason, this research has attempted to elucidate the practices of professional development of the community in the triangulation between the themes and practices identified in the interviews and the interactional events identified in the data from participant observation where participants align to these themes and practices. In other words, only the interactional events that were a practice mentioned in the interviews or related to a theme mentioned in the interview were considered relevant for this study. In this sense, only the practices that have resonated in these student teachers’ identities, understood here as history-in-person, were considered relevant for the present study.

For this reason, this qualitative study employed participant observation of the everyday interactions in the multiple spaces of the community – especially in pedagogical meetings and in the teachers’ room everyday life – as well as history-in-person interviews with five focal participants. In the observational component of the study, I generated field notes, made audio recordings, took photographs and collected artifacts that were central to the interactions observed in the field. In the interviews, I videotaped the interviews and I wrote down the main points as well as my main impressions while talking to participants. I then compiled all the data on MaxQda12 and transcribed all audio recordings orthographically73 _{in the same software.}

For the observational component of the study, as stated earlier, I recruited all members of the community (three professors from the English Department, 15 undergraduate student teachers, one graduate student teacher, one former student teacher who is now a graduate student and school teacher, two former student teachers still in the undergraduate level, three Fulbright ETAs, and five clerical interns). In other words, I recruited all people who were ‘officially or unofficially’ engaged in the community. However, as mentioned in chapter 3, not all of them participated in ELCs interactions

(both in the meetings and in the teachers’ room). Some student teachers (and one of the coordinators, who does bureaucratic work) participate quite peripherally and a minority (two) do not appear in the data at all; thus, these participants could not be considered members of the community, or could be considered to participate so peripherally that are irrelevant to the present study. This understanding that not everyone who is officially in the community is actually in the community, and some people who are officially in the community may be actually “outside” is a learning token from this research. In other words, communities such as the one investigated, which have “official members”, cannot be defined in terms of who is officially in, but in terms of who participates actively in the community’s practices. For this reason, belonging to a community – even one that has formal regulation in terms of who can or cannot participate – is dependent on one’s engagement and not on one’s formal status.

As I mentioned earlier, or the interviews I recruited three current student teachers and two former student teachers who are still participants in the community. The criteria for selection of interviewees was described in chapter 3.

This study aimed to answer the following questions:

General question: Do participants develop as teachers by participating in the program?

In what ways?

1. According to interviewees, does their participation in the LwB program contribute to their professional development as teachers?

- In what ways?

2. Is it possible to relate participants’ histories of professional development in the CoP with the events identified in the observational data?

- In what ways?

3. Triangulating questions 1 and 2, what are the practices of professional development in the CoP?

- Where do they happen? - When do they happen? - Who participates?

- What activities (structured routines and pathways that facilitate or regulate actions; rules of appropriacy and eligibility – who does⁄doesn’t, can⁄can’t engage in particular activities) are integral to them?

In this chapter, I will discuss the results of the data collection, using the research questions as a guiding thread and quoting data from the corpus to reconstruct the path that has led to the answers presented. Thus, I will focus on the specific questions, leaving the general question for the conclusion. The chapter is divided into three parts, each of which anchored in and named after one of the research questions. In the first part of the chapter, I summarize the content of the five interviews carried out with five focal student teachers who had proven quite participative during participant observation. In this part, I identify the self-perceptions and self-understanding of the student teachers regarding their professional development in the program. In the second part, I transition from History- in-Person interviews data to participant observation data. I claim that attending to the themes and practices identified in part one gives me a basis to identify in the participant observation data – among the complex landscape of practices described in the corpus – the practices of teacher development that truly mattered to the interviewees. In the third and last part, I describe the practices of teacher development by making use of the field notes and transcriptions of recorded interactional events generated during participant observation. I use PT as a paradigm to describe and elucidate these practices, as I always focus the description on the “what, when, where, who and what for” (Young, 2009) of the practices.

Question 1: According to interviewees’ history-in-person, does their participation in the LwB program contribute to their professional development as teachers? In what ways?

As explained in chapter 3, the interviews had a set of questions that represented topics that interested me as a researcher. However, I did not ask these questions to the participants; they were used as a reminder of things that I wanted to probe them to talk about. In all cases, the interviews started with a general question: “So, can you tell me a little bit about your experience in the program?” and evolved as a conversation with an interest, more a friendly talk than a data-gathering interview.

All interviews happened in the few last days of class before winter break. They happened in the following order: (1) Maria Júlia, at Estevam’s office; (2) Adam, at a coffee shop, after we had had breakfast together; (3) Lucas, at the same coffee shop where I had interviewed Adam; (4) Kelly, at Estevam’s office; and, finally, (5) Antonio, also at

Estevam’s office74_{. Below, I provide a general description of the interviews, often}

referring to their transcripts. In general, I used the interviews to identify recurrent themes that somehow pointed to the ways in which professional development happened in these participants’ perspective.

Maria Julia. She was my first interviewee. As the data from participant observation presented later will corroborate, she was a special participant in the program: a former student teacher who was a very active participant in the CoP. Initially, I did not think of her as a research participant, for she had already left the program; however, early in the data generation I realized she was still an active member in the community. She had worked at the program for two years in the first cohort and, by the time I carried out this investigation, was a schoolteacher in the municipal school system and a master’s student at the Language Studies Program at the same university. She had investigated the program for her final paper in college and was planning to do the same for her master’s thesis. She had quite an impressive CV and was regarded by all academic community as a dedicated and competent individual. In many ways, she was the pedagogical coordinator’s right-hand woman at the CoP: she helped making notes for student teachers’ microteaching report; presented a workshop with one of the current student teachers about how to prepare a lesson plan for a reading class; helped Estevam to give feedback for student teachers after their micro-class; and filled in for Estevam when she could not make it to the feedback meetings.

In her interview, she talked about her previous and current experiences as a teacher. She started teaching two years before the interview, and her first-ever teaching experience was the LwB program. She was quite emphatic about the role of her experience as a LwB student teacher for her professional development. In her words,

the experience I liked the most was the LwB because of the, not only because of the environment, but because I had pedagogical meetings, and my coworkers were really nice, and my students were really motivated, and, well, teaching at the university level is really different from another from other places. And, of course, I think that in LwB I can use English more, because I have less [fewer] students. But in public

74 _{As I mentioned earlier, I also interviewed Antonia, but her material got lost from the drive, so I do not} refer to her in the analysis.

schools, in my public school, I have around twenty-five, thirty students in class, and here I used to have ten, fifteen tops.

During her time at the program, she taught IELTS preparatory courses, general English courses using a course book75 _{to A1 and A2 students, and a conversation course}

for B2 level. Besides, together with her peers she prepared and delivered workshops to prepare students for the TOEFL ITP. This means that she taught the same course more than once, which she evaluated as something positive for her. According to her,

I could notice what happened in the previous one, what I could have developed more, and then [in] the second edition I was much more prepared. And also there was a semester I taught the same course to three groups. So I had general English intermediate groups A, B and C. So I noticed that in group A the things were always, more strange, stranger, and in the other ones the classes went smoothier [sic] than in the first one.

She attributed her improvement from an earlier course to a later one to the experience in class as well as to her participation in pedagogical meetings. According to her, the meetings were a great place to learn from peers, but also “to share things and to share your agonies and the happiness and the things you feel […] and also share materials”.

Maria Julia compares the beginning of the program with how things are now. In the beginning, people were more “withholding” with their things (materials and stories of what they did in class) but now they “share more”. According to her, “nowadays there is like a Dropbox account, and people share their things there, and also in the meetings, people are now more, like, showing what they would do in class. And that could bring ideas, these things could bring ideas to our own class”.

In addition to that, Maria Julia says that co-teaching was important for her professional learning. She co-taught a course with an ETA and thought that this experience was important for her professional development, both pedagogically speaking and concerning proficiency. According to her,

we prepared classes together […] she didn't know much about English teaching, but she had the cultural background that I didn't have. So that was nice to prepare classes, we prepared

the classes here at UFRGS but also in cafeterias, in our houses. So for me this was nice because I could have more integration