Empowering student teachers in class teacher education to implement arts-integrated language pedagogies

Description

Teacher education holds a critical role in preparing and promoting student teachers to teach language in new ways. This paper builds on a subproject of the Embodied Language Learning through the Arts (2021–2024) research project, embedded in language and arts educational courses in class teacher education at Åbo Akademi University during the spring of 2023. The paper explores how student teachers can feel empowered to use arts-based teaching approaches to language education. By focusing on significant moments experienced by students and teacher-researchers, we unfold the opportunities and challenges such teaching approaches give rise to. Theoretically, the paper adopts an embodied view on learning and language learning and teaching, emphasizing the embodied basis for language processing. About 70 student teachers participated in three workshops held by multi-professional teams of teacher educators, researchers, and dance artists. The generated data include students’ reflective texts, a survey, photographs of the workshops, the multi-professional teams’ participatory observations and reflective discussions based on experiences of the workshops. These data are analyzed through hermeneutic phenomenological analysis. A preliminary analysis points towards the themes of play, relationships, and ambivalence in the student teachers’ personal engagement in these teaching approaches as well as the student teachers’ recognition of potentials and concerns as important for understanding how they can be empowered to implement such teaching with children in school. This paper presents the study’s preliminary results and discusses the implications for teacher education and the student teachers’ future teaching practices.

Period	16 May 2023
Event title	Linguapeda 2023 Conference: Multilingualism, diversity and multiliteracy skills: language education in a changing world.
Event type	Conference
Location	Jyväskylä, FinlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National