School and social educational vulnerability in Chile: experiences and preparedness of novice teachers of English

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Sen’s notion of social justice in the Capability Approach, this paper examines the experiences of a group of novice teachers from English teacher education programmes working in marginalised schools in Chile. Through open-ended surveys and interviews, I investigated how new teachers navigate their first teaching years in contexts of educational vulnerability, how they perceive their teacher education programs and preparation to work in such school contexts, and how they balance the interplay between unfreedoms and the exercise of freedoms to teach students at social risk. The findings reveal the impact of contextless English teacher education programs and how these trigger future teacher motivation to develop a deeper understanding of educational vulnerability and their freedom to move away from language teaching issues to accommodate their teaching based on their care and commitment to their students. This paper closes by making a call for the importance of a grassroots approach in the development of English teacher education programs designed with members of marginalised communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Novice teacher of english
• social justice
• educational vulnerability
• English teacher education programs
• Capability Approach

Disclosure statement

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

Ethical Statement

The manuscript has not been submitted or published elsewhere. The data presented in this study was collected after receiving approval from the Office of Research Ethics and Integrity from the University of Ottawa, Canada. Ethical procedures were followed throughout the study - participants signed consent forms, were informed that their participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw from the study at any time, and their identities remained anonymous to secure confidentiality and anonymity. The data is not available in any repository because I do not have ethics clearance from the OREI to do that. The study presented here is part of my doctoral study sponsored by Becas Chile from the Government of Chile. There are no conflict of interest to disclosure.