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Christopher Hale
Christopher Hale
Akita International University
Fumi Takegami
Fumi Takegami
Prefectural University of Kumamoto
Educating the Educators: Exploring the Experiences of Teachers Enrolled in an American TESOL Program in Japan
Educating the Educators: Exploring the Experiences of Teachers Enrolled in an American TESOL Program in Japan
Reconceptualizing Practice:
Reconceptualizing Practice:
Implications for Teacher Development
Implications for Teacher Development
Language-teacher education in Japan has gone through a number of changes over the years in order to keep up with current theories and pedagogies. Not surprisingly, the pull towards communicative language teaching (CLT) has been met with confusion and resistance in Japan, where it is regarded as an “American Import” and perhaps less applicable here than it is in other countries. With the Ministry of Education (MEXT) now actively promoting CLT, Japanese teachers of English are feeling the pressure to adapt to an approach they know little about, let alone how to apply it in their classrooms. The gap between “traditional” and “progressive” approaches to education has led many teachers to feel trapped between two pedagogical worlds: The progressive one in which they have come to believe in through their American teacher-education, and the reality of the traditional one in which they live and work. This presentation will first outline the presenter’s own journey to becoming a teacher educator, then explore the experiences of in-service teachers enrolled in an American MA TESOL program and how they find ways to “negotiate” between these two worlds.
Chris Carl Hale, EdD is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Global Communication and Language at Akita International University, Japan and formerly the Academic Director of the Tokyo Center of the New York University (NYU) School of Professional Studies (SPS). He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses related to language acquisition in the United States and in Japan for over 20 years at universities such as City University of New York (CUNY), Queens College, Teachers College Columbia University, and International Christian University, Tokyo. He is also a teacher trainer, currently providing professional development opportunities for Japanese teachers of English through a U.S. Department of State grant administered through the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. His articles have appeared in Language Testing in Asia, TESOL International, and Teachers College Columbia University Journal of TESOL and Applied Linguistics. He is also an avid DJ and techno music producer.
This plenary will address the conference theme that recognizes ongoing professional teacher development as an embodiment of a teacher’s journey. The talk will emphasize personal, practical and theoretical influences on my own professional development. Relative to the talk is Gee’s theory of a secondary discourse (in the case of teachers, an acquired professional discourse), which has a personal and social identity dimension; a way of being, thinking, talking and acting appropriately within the communities of which one is a member. Donald Freeman, a major scholar in the field of TESOL, claims that by acquiring a secondary discourse through professional development, such as in postgraduate programs, teacher development or change occurs as teachers are “renaming experience/reconstructing practice”, which leads to conceptualizations of teaching that better inform practice. Outcomes of research that I carried out in a high school English class reveal how reconceptualizations of instruction grounded in thirty years of personal pedagogical knowledge were further enriched through professional knowledge gained in postgraduate study. Results from student feedback show the success of the lesson to support the direction I am now taking in my self-directed professional development. At university, I am now applying my reconceptualizations of practice in courses to help pre-service teachers to begin to develop their professional secondary discourse to better inform their teaching approaches.
Fumi Takegami is in the Department of English Language and Literature, at Prefectural University of Kumamoto. Her teaching journey first began 30 years ago as an elementary school teacher. Soon after, her professional career shifted to junior and senior high school. Fumi’s belief in the need for teachers to continuously pursue professional development brought her to Kumamoto University, Faculty of Letters and Science where she received a MA TESOL degree and a PhD in Applied Linguistics. Fumi is a teacher researcher. In both her MA thesis and PhD dissertation she conducted classroom-based research. In her dissertation, she did a case study exploring and documenting the development of three young teachers as they went through series of praxis designed lesson study (jugyokenkyu) cycles in which she played a participatory role as a teacher educator to meet MEXT’s policy goal to teach English in English. Presently and appropriately, Fumi’s teacher journey, culminating in years of experience coupled with classroom-based research, has brought her to teaching at university, where she designs and teaches education courses in language development and preparing students to attain a teacher license.
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