Enhancing pre-service teachers’ projective agency for diverse and multilingual classrooms through a course on curriculum development

ABSTRACT

Framed in teacher research, this article examines on how a group of 220 preservice language teachers’ understandings of teacher agency evolved in a course on second language teaching curriculum. The participants were enrolled on a master’s program on teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), and data were gathered through course activities which included two surveys, reflective blogs, and an essay. Based on inferential statistics and qualitative content analysis, findings show that, with different degrees of confidence, the student-teachers believe that their projective (future) agency was harnessed through the course developing (1) willingness to use teacher agency as a tool for professional development and (2) willingness to use teacher agency as a drive to engage in critical teaching practices for multilingual settings. Drawing on a trans-perspective of language teacher agency, the study advances a model of projective teacher agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Projective agency
• pre-service teachers
• curriculum development
• TESOL
• trans-perspective

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The x-axis shows the percentage of participants’ choices of each category (color-coded) on the Likert scale. The y-axis lists all items ranked by ranked by their scores. Specifically, the item at the top of the list (i.e., “.1 Teaching English”) was the one that students had the most experiences in and gave the highest scores, whereas the item at the bottom of the list (i.e., “6. Creating new programs for teaching English”) had the lowest scores indicating that students had the least amount of experience in the aspect.

² The x-axis shows the percentage of participants’ choices of each category (color-coded) on the Likert scale. The y-axis shows the number of participants who chose a particular category on a particular item. The top row shows the items about students’ general beliefs about teacher agency (Item 1, 3, 7, & 8) and the bottom row shows the items about their specific beliefs (Item 2, 4, 5, & 6).

³ The x-axis shows the percentage of participants’ choices of each category (color-coded) on the Likert scale. The y-axis lists all items ranked by their scores within each perspective (General vs. Specific). Specifically, the items at the top of the list (i.e., Item 3 in the “General” category and Item 2 in the “Specific” category) were the ones that students were most positive about, whereas the items at the bottom of the list (i.e., Item 8 in the “General” category and Item 4 in the “Specific” category) had the lowest scores indicating that students had the most negative beliefs them compared to other items.

⁴ The model summary for the baseline GAM fitted to the ordered categorical belief ratings. The term s(ID) denotes the by-participant random intercepts, S(item) denotes the by-item random intercepts, and S(perspective, ID) denotes the by-participants random slops.