Blurring the borders between research and practice: video as a tool to develop knowledge about language and empower (student) teachers in multilingual pre-school classrooms

ABSTRACT

This paper presents data collected within the context of a teacher education course designed to raise student teachers’ critical language awareness. Firstly, we describe the process of selecting, editing and constructing a bank of thematic extracts of filmed classroom interactions and interviews for use in teacher education. Secondly, we explore the impact of these materials on students’ willingness and desire to reflect on issues concerning language and consider the ways in which these resources were most effective in fostering student teachers’ empathy and knowledge about language. The data analysis reveals that the use of the filmed extracts, in combination with theoretical readings and discussion, was highly instrumental in helping student teachers to develop a deeper understanding of the issues and the theory behind linguistically inclusive pedagogical practices and in empowering them to act as agents of change.

KEYWORDS:

• Initial teacher education
• linguistic and cultural diversity
• knowledge about language
• participatory research
• video

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the staff, parents and children of the Dieppe preschool and in particular Sylvie Birot-Freyburger, co-researcher and teacher of the pre-school class in which the research was conducted, the INSPÉ (Faculty of Education and Lifelong Learning), University of Strasbourg for their technical and financial support of the project, Ohne Smeets, student at the Paris-Descartes University for her help in logging the raw data, Sefa Demir and Guluzar Saglamer Aydin, Masters students at the University of Strasbourg for their translations from Turkish to French, Béatrice Zimmer, member of the French Education Inspectorate and Jim Cummins, professor emeritus at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) at the University of Toronto for their insightful observations, interviews and time.

Disclosure statement

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