Thursday, June 1, 2023
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Patel Center, Room 136
FEATURED BREAKOUT SESSION
11:00 – 11:15 a.m.
“Effective Early Mother Tongue Literacy Instruction in African Languages: A Curriculum Design and Research Collaboration across Continents and Institutions“
The work of Funda Wande, an NGO located in Cape Town, South Africa, is on prioritizing, thinking through and testing interventions that will lead to all children learning to read for meaning and to calculate with confidence by age 10 by 2030.
The Funda Wande instructional design and assessment teams have developed research-based early literacy curricula (Foundation Phase through Grade 3) in the mother tongues of isiXhosa, Sepedi, and Afrikaans. These curricula have been implemented in schools in the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape, and Limpopo and evaluated using RCT design. The Funda Wande team has collaborated with the Literacy and Languages faculty at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Dr. Pamela Mason and Dr. Catherine Snow, on research-based early literacy curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher support through coaching. Their study of the Grade 1 and 2 curriculum resulted in modifications to address 1) the expansion of vocabulary and rich use of language, (2) increasing the opportunities for practicing handwriting and (3) including assessments with a variety of cognitive levels.
In this session we will present the design principles of mother tongue instruction, the modifications in the teaching materials and monitoring, and the results of the RCT. We will discuss the cross linguistic challenges of designing mother tongue instruction and the support provided to Foundation Phase teachers to effectively implement mother tongue instruction. Challenges to the effective learning and teaching of early literacy, such as low resourced schools, learner attendance, and teacher preparation and on-going professional learning, will be interrogated.
11:20 – 11:35 a.m.
The workshop approach is often used as professional training to prepare curriculum officers to translate curriculum standards into curriculum packages and implement them in the school context (Little, 1993). It was suggested to offer participants opportunities for inquiry and collaboration, strategies to reflect on their questions and concerns, and access to successful models of curriculum development and implementation (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995). In this presentation, we will examine the above suggestions using our experiences in offering the reformed workshop to 76 curriculum officers, school principals, and lead teachers from different Eastern Caribbean Islands. We will identify what participants have achieved in developing curriculum packages and implementation plans by analyzing our experiences designing and offering the above workshop and participants’ curriculum packages and implementation plans. We will also discuss the challenges we face in designing and implementing the workshop as outsiders of Eastern Caribbean States with limited knowledge of the curriculum standards, specific content knowledge, and local contexts of school, teaching, and students. Additionally, we will analyze various challenges participants faced in understanding and using curriculum standards and incorporating their subject content knowledge and relevant contextual understanding in developing curriculum packages and implementation plans. Finally, we will conclude the presentation with implications for future workshop design for such curriculum development and implementation.
Dr. Jian Wang
11:40 – 11:55 a.m.
“From Repairing the Word to Repairing the World: Expanding Teacher Language Ideologies through Narrative Inquiry”
NARATE (Narrative Analysis of Repair and Teacher English Learner Expertise) is a research project that examines corrective feedback and repair practices in classroom environments with multilingual learners. Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning, narrative analysis, and language ideologies (Razfar 2012), this comparative study aims to critically examine how language ideologies mediate corrective practices of teachers by examining their personal and in-class narratives of being corrected and/or correcting learners. Our data corpus consists of two groups of teachers. The first is a cohort of teachers who participated in university based professional development program for more than 2 years with an explicit orientation towards sociocultural principles of language and learning as well as an explicit focus on developing critical language awareness and/or ideologies. They worked as a cohort and conducted action research in their own classrooms. The second group (control) did not have such a professional development experience. In a mixed method format, narratives were analyzed to synthesize how educators make in the moment decisions about corrective feedback and repairs. Emergent findings demonstrate that control group educators have little to no awareness of how language ideologies mediate learning, classroom activities, and instruction; whereas teachers from the professional development program have a more clear understanding between language ideologies and their pedagogical practice. Furthermore, teachers relied on their past, personal educational experiences as how to mediate corrective feedback and repair within their classroom. In addition, they tended to focus on narrow and reductive conceptions of language, literacy, and learning. In contrast, teachers who participated in the university school partnership made clear connections to research and displayed more egalitarian and expansive language ideologies when it came to how to support multilingual learners in the classroom.
