Embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education in teacher education

Description

This paper presents a study – conducted at the class teacher education program at Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU) in Finland – from the research project Embodied Learning through the Arts (2021–2024). The backdrop of the study is grounded in suggestions posed by researchers who have stressed that teacher education can act as a catalyst in bringing new perspectives on teaching languages and literacies to school practices. The new perspectives addressed in the current study are embodied learning and arts integration, which have recently gained increased attention in research.
The study builds on a workshop series about embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education, implemented at ÅAU’s class teacher education program for primary education (grades 1–6) in Finland. Theoretically engaging with posthumanist and rhizomatic theories, the study aims to explore becoming-teachers’ diffractions of opportunities and challenges in using embodied and arts-integrated teaching approaches in languages and literacies education. The methodological approach used is arts-based research, specifically creating poems with data as an analytical approach. Altogether, 59 becoming-teachers participated in the study.
The results showcased that various opportunities and challenges created friction in-between each other and became intertwined as opportunities-and-challenges. Hence, the becoming-teachers simultaneously recognized the value of and adopted a critical perspective on the introduced teaching approaches. Showcased with four poems, the analysis indicates that the becoming-teachers’ engagement with the teaching approaches set in motion thoughts about opportunities-and-challenges concerning (un)learning conceptions of teaching and learning languages and literacies; balancing pedagogical acts and realities; the friction of differentiating the teaching; and a mixture of (un)certainties regarding future teaching practices. The results have implications for languages and literacies education as well as teacher education, which will be discussed in the paper presentation.

Period	14 May 2024
Event title	LITUM symposium: Literacy in teacher education
Event type	Symposium
Conference number	10
Location	Umeå, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International