Reconceptualizing the "world" in World Language Education: Mediating student teacher's learning to teach World Languages through the lens of social justice.
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Liang, Di
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 16, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Mari Haneda, Major Field Member
Karen Johnson, Outside Unit & Field Member
Matthew Poehner, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Kimberly Powell, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Fran Arbaugh, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- World Languages
Social Justice
Sociocultural Theory
Teacher Education - Abstract:
- Recent events around the world have led to renewed calls for World Language (WL) education to adopt a more overtly social justice-orientation (Osborn, 2006; Reagan & Osborn, 2020; Glynn & Wassell, 2022). For this to occur, teachers themselves must gain awareness of how social justice can be addressed within – and perhaps necessarily is implicated by – WL education practices. The present paper reports results of a study in which social justice was introduced into a WL ED teacher preparation program at a large U. S. university. The study was organized according to principles of Vygotsky’s (2012) Sociocultural Theory (SCT). As an account of the development of human consciousness, SCT emphasizes the centrality of mediation, that is, the interposing of signs in human activity that come to be used as resources for regulating psychological actions, including reasoning, planning, and reflecting. Two features of SCT that were especially relevant to the design of this study are the use of abstract concepts as tools for thinking and the importance of an individual’s history of lived experiences for understanding how they will engage with and respond to social environments (Karabanova, 2010; Veresov, 2017). Following these ideas, two forms of mediation were introduced to promote student teachers’ understanding of a social justice orientation to WL education. Material mediation (e.g., course readings, lectures, PowerPoint slides, etc.) illuminated how current approaches to language teaching are complicit in perpetuating social injustices and prompted critical examination of the meaning of “world” in WLs. Material mediation was enhanced by dialogic mediation (e.g., instructional interactions involving reading responses and reflections) in which the instructor drew upon the student teachers’ personal narratives of their lived experiences to create connections with social justice topics. This study adopts a case study approach and analyzes these mediational processes by focusing on the experiences of three student teachers of WLs. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2012) of student teachers’ multimodal narratives (e.g., personal journal, Discussion Board post, in-class sharing), engagement with mediation, and resultant learning artifacts (lesson plan, lesson reflection) reveal that they demonstrated agency to conceptualize their personal histories and lived experiences into pedagogical ideas and managed to bring these into their teaching practices. Implications for structuring a social justice-oriented teaching methods course and theorizing how narrative-informed mediation may leverage an individual’s subjectivity to support development of a social justice orientation to WL education are discussed.