Embodied and arts-integrated approaches to languages and literacies education: Student teachers’ diffractions of opportunities-and-challenges

Kuvaus

Embodied learning and arts integration – in which languages and/or literacies are integrated with the use of an art form, such as music or dance – have lately gained more attention in research on languages and literacies education (e.g., Johnson & Kontovourki, 2016; Jusslin et al., 2022; Korpinen & Anttila, 2022). Previous research on these topics stresses the important role of teacher education in acting as a catalyst in renewing educational practices (Guerretaz et al., 2022; Jusslin et al., 2022; Møller-Skau & Lindstøl, 2022; Sanz-Camarero et al., 2023). Notably, teacher education has an important role in preparing student teachers to teach languages and literacies and can influence their understandings thereof (e.g., Bomer et al., 2019; Kanakri, 2017; Maloch & Dávila, 2019).

Aiming to integrate teaching and research in teacher education, we introduced embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education in class teacher education for primary education (grades 1–6) at Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU), Finland. We implemented a workshop series – focusing on embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education – across language and arts education courses for student teachers at ÅAU. The student teachers discussed opportunities and challenges in relation to the teaching approaches, which caught our attention. In this study, we explore the opportunities and challenges more in-depth to gain insight into aspects that teacher education needs to address regarding embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education.

This study engages with posthumanist theories (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992), which align with a relational ontology, and stresses how students, educational realities, and knowledges are constantly produced in relations. Posthumanist theories contribute with an understanding that languages and literacies are distributed across humans, spaces, and materials (Toohey et al., 2020) and that languages and literacies are understood as embodied processes (MacLure, 2013a; Toohey et al., 2020). Further, diffraction is a key concept in the current study (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992) and has lately been increasingly used as an alternative to reflection in teacher education (e.g., Lanas et al., 2017; Moxnes & Osgood, 2018). Diffraction focuses on differences and the effects they might have, and can be metaphorically explained as waves of water, sound, or light that “combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading out of waves when they encounter an obstruction” (Barad, 2007, p. 28). In teacher education, diffraction offers ways to read teaching practices through, for example, theories, policies, memories, and sensory responses, acknowledging its emergence from messy, embodied, and material encounters of teaching (Lambert, 2021).

In the workshops, the student teachers’ insights from the embodied participation in the practical workshops, the discussions of theoretical perspectives, their previous personal experiences, and future teaching profession became diffracted, read through one another. Engaging with this theoretical approach, this study aims to explore the student teachers’ diffractions of opportunities and challenges in using embodied and arts-integrated teaching approaches in languages and literacies education. Our analytic questions are: What did engagement in embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education in teacher education set in motion for the student teachers? What opportunities and challenges did such teaching approaches enable student teachers to think?

The study is conducted within the research project Embodied Language Learning through the Arts (ELLA; 2021–2024). The workshop series – held by a multiprofessional team of artists, teacher educators, and researchers – encompassed three practical workshops were then held within mandatory courses in class teacher education. Altogether 59 student teachers gave informed consent to participate in the study. The participating student teachers attended different study programs in the teacher education: class teacher education, language immersion class teacher education, and special education teacher education. Most of the students (52) studied their first year of the five-year teacher education, while the rest (7) studied their second or third year or participated in the courses as part of their master’s studies in education.
The methodological approach of the study is arts-based research (ABR; Leavy, 2018), which recently has attracted increased attention within applied linguistic research (Bradley & Harvey, 2019). We actively used different art forms in both the processes and products of our teaching and research, such as dance and visual arts during the teaching and poetry in our analysis and reporting of the study. The data encompass a written survey, questions that student teachers posed during the workshops, and the researchers’ memory notes and embodied participation and experiences from the workshops. The survey included open-ended questions about various aspects of the teaching approaches; for example, if you put yourself in the role of a student participating in embodied language learning through the arts, what do you think teachers need to consider? At the end of each workshop, students’ questions about teaching languages and literacies through embodied and arts-integrated approaches were documented. The researchers made memory notes based on their participation in the workshops (Gunnarsson & Bodén, 2021). The data are analyzed through creating poetry with data, as an ABR strategy. Creating poetry offers an approach to discovery, analysis, and presenting the analysis in which multiple diffractions are at play. As such, poetry constitutes our analytical process and product of the ABR (Faulkner, 2018; Østern, 2017). The analysis resulted in four poems with related analytical discussions.

The opportunities and challenges, expressed and experienced by the student teachers, created friction in-between each other and became intertwined as opportunities-and-challenges. As such, the student teachers simultaneously recognized the value of and adopted a critical perspective on the teaching approaches. Showcased with four poems, the analysis showcases that the student teachers’ engagement with these 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. As such, the current study particularly contributes knowledge of how participation in embodied and arts-integrated teaching set in motion new conceptions of languages and literacies as embodied processes. It involved processes of (un)learning how languages and literacies can be understood, problematizing a dualistic and hierarchical perspective on mind and body in languages and literacies education (e.g., Toohey et al., 2020). Participation in the workshops also set in motion new conceptions on how languages and literacies can be taught and differentiated. The becoming-teachers wanted to use the new practical tools that were introduced to them but remained particularly uncertain how to assess and evaluate children’s learning because of the open-endedness of the teaching approaches. Also, the becoming-teachers’ consideration of differentiation highlights the opportunities-and-challenges of inclusion in the teaching, both in terms of varying skills and levels in languages and literacies and children using assistive devices. In conclusion, the study discusses implications for languages and literacies education as well as teacher education.

Aikajakso	28 elok. 2024
Tapahtuman otsikko	ECER: Education in an age of uncertainty: memory and hope for the future
Tapahtuman tyyppi	Konferenssi
Konferenssinumero	30
Sijainti	Nicosia, CyprusNäytä kartalla
Tunnustuksen arvo	Kansainvälinen