‘We are more than EFL teachers – we are educators’: emancipating EFL student-teachers through photovoice

Abstract

The prevailing pedagogical orientations of EFL education in Spain oppress learners intellectually in ways that are counterproductive to their learning. As a reaction to this, 129 EFL student-teachers (STs) took part during the 2013-14, 2014-15, and 2015-16 academic years in a workshop which drew on the methodology of participatory action research and on photovoice as a data creating strategy, in order to emancipate these STs intellectually, boost their EFL development, and offer an alternative critical model for their future EFL teaching.The research was assessed collectively through a variety of qualitative strategies. Results showed that the photovoice workshop created a rich and meaningful context for EFL learning, one which enabled the STs to fully actualize their intellectual potential by producing knowledge collectively, setting thereby a memorable educational example for their own future teaching.Keywords: photovoice; participatory action research; EFL education; pedagogical oppression; intellectual emancipation; critical teacher education Intellectual oppression and pedagogical emancipation in ELTIt was not so much that theories and practices of ELT were developed in Britain (with a strong European influence) and then exported to the Empire, but rather that the Empire became the crucial context of development of ELT, from where theories and practices were often imported into Britain.[…] this has had profound and often pernicious effects on ELT. (Pennycook, 2007, pp. 16-7) The colonial origins of English language teaching (ELT) that Pennycook hypothesizes above may explain a phenomenon that I noticed very early on in the course of my research and lecturing on ELT at the University of X (Spain), when I was struck by the resemblance between the negative educational effects that often oppressed Spanish learners at elementary, secondary and even university levels of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education, on the one hand, and those which, on the other, encumbered English as a Second Language (ESL) learners (mainly immigrant or minority language users) who attended mainstream classrooms in societies where English was the majority language. Despite the differences existing between the two social and educational contexts pointed above, it seemed to me that in both cases "students' learning opportunities, and ultimately their life potentials, Radically different contexts and causes thus accounted for two kinds of educational oppression, socioeconomic on the one hand, and pedagogical on the other.Yet I believed that their resulting effects in the classroom were comparable, that it only took inadequate pedagogical decisions for EFL teachers to reproduce in their classrooms the same negative educational effects that, in other circumstances, were created by profound socioeconomic factors. Clearly, a failed pedagogical approach universalized educational oppression, to the extent that students who had the chance to connect to education in other school contexts and subjects were forced to feel like foreig...

Encountered imagery: An English for academic purposes photovoice project

“…The images students captured represented elements of the local community that the students found unexpected or surprising. It put the viewpoints of the students into the centre of the process (Villacañas de Castro, 2017). What was interesting was that the images students captured were often images that the instructors were not expecting the students to find unfamiliar.…”

“…Participants take photographs of assigned themes and write descriptions to accompany their photos. Photovoice can have a pedagogical and a research purpose by supporting learning outcomes as well as inquiry in educational settings (Villacañas de Castro, 2017). In contexts with international students, examples of this approach include identifying international students’ food choices through students taking photographs of what they eat and then captioning those photographs during one week (Corcoran, 2018) and exploring international students’ adaptations to new academic and cultural experiences through rounds of photo taking (Q.Wang & Hannes, 2014).…”

Photographic Elicitation and Narration in Teachers Education and Development

“…In this pre-service training literature we find a notable interest in identifying the potential of photo-elicitation-it has been used to investigate teachers' cognition, their theories, ideas, beliefs and values, providing knowledge that enables awareness and reflection, influencing their development or modification and, consequently, in decision-making in educational action Caielli et al, 2018;DiCicco, 2015;Graziano, 2011;Johnson & Smagorinsky, 2013;Mathews & Crew, 2016;McCartney & Harris, 2014;Sinclair & Thornton, 2018;Varea & Pang, 2018;White & Murray, 2016). Likewise, the teacher's understanding and thinking are enhanced through photo-elicitation, and several studies have reported that this technique has a positive impact on their professional identity (Allen & Labbo, 2001;Da Cunha et al, 2014;Mitchell et al, 2010;Salazar et al, 2016;Savva & Erakleous, 2018;Seow, 2016;Villacanas de Castro, 2017;White & Murray, 2016). This technique has been used in various subjects during pre-service teacher training, but most studies have focussed on Physical education and English (Da Cunha et al, 2014;Langdon et al, 2014;Legge & Smith, 2014;Sinclair & Thornton, 2018;Varea & Pang, 2018;Walker et al, 2017; for the second, Caielli et al, 2018;Dicicco, 2015;Graziano, 2011;Johnson & Smagorinsky, 2013;Villacanas de Castro, 2017;White & Murray, 2016), while two have dealt with photo-elicitation in social studies (Garrett & Matthews, 2014;Mathews & Crew, 2016).…”

Preparing Practice-Based Researchers for Diverse Classrooms: A Pathway for Teacher Education

“…Eight studies in this category were designed with the intention of using research to prepare preservice teachers for work in urban schools with racially diverse learners [16,23,24,27,40,49,80,97]. Others were designed to support groups of students such as English Learners who primarily spoke other languages [18,31,52,54,70,87] or low-socioeconomic-status rural students [64]. In some studies, the political dimensions of teaching were accessed through research involving caregivers.…”