Contending with crises: L1 education in transition
Submitted by:
Scott Bulfin
Abstract:
It seems that there is always a new crisis to contend with—pandemics, climate and biocrisis, mass forced migration, the rise of authoritarianism and extremism, post-truth and a crisis of expertise, and disruptive digital and platform technologies shaping how we live and work. Personal, social, professional and political lives are now regularly defined by instability, disruption and crisis comprising altogether a state of polycrisis (Lawrence et al., 2022). These crises provoke, disturb and move us to action, but they are also sources of fear and anxiety. We are encouraged to ‘not look away’ and to witness, yet ongoing and constant exposure to instability and change, crises and crisis discourses can produce challenging responses and reactions. The contemporary politics of crises are indeed complex.
This symposium engages questions of how L1 teachers respond and adapt to periods of crisis, instability and transition, and how L1 subjects are being reconfigured through and in response to such periods (cf Green & Erixon, 2020). The L1 subjects, as traditionally conceived, and those that shape, teach and participate in them, are under pressure at both local and global scales. In particular, the symposium papers discuss case studies of how L1 teachers worked during the COVID-19 pandemic in a range of national contexts (Greece, Sweden, Denmark and Australia). These cases, while focused on the particular crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, seek to illuminate how L1 subjects and teaching are being shaped by periods of transition and intense change more generally. The symposium takes up a critical perspective on the idea of crisis, attempting to interrogate its effects as discourse and in practice. The idea of crisis can be seen in more productive ways, as both a warning and an incitement for challenging conventional thinking and conventional systems.
The symposium papers arise out of an international collaboration ongoing since 2020 and out of current work towards a book project which engages with a broader crisis landscape and its relationship to L1 education. Data was generated mainly through interviews with L1 teachers. Working in dialogue across national contexts enabled the research team to develop insights into how L1 teachers worked with common practices and discourses as they adapted their teaching across remote and face to face teaching and learning, but also how common and shared practices and discourses are changing.
Key questions for the symposium papers and the larger project include:
How are L1 subjects and teaching being shaped by periods of transition and intense change? What becomes of the practice histories of L1 teaching in different contexts and across contexts?
What methodological approaches enable analytical purchase and hold in times of instability and uncertainty?
How can working in dialogue across national contexts enable different insights into how L1 teachers work, their common practices and discourses, but also how common and shared practices and discourses are changing?
Keywords: crisis, instability, COVID, continuity and change
References
Green, B., & Erixon, P.-O. (Eds.). (2020). Rethinking L1 education in a global era: Understanding the (post-)national L1 subjects in new and difficult times. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55997-7.
Lawrence, M., Janzwood, S., & Homer-Dixon, T. (2022). ‘What Is a Global Polycrisis?’ Version 2.0. Discussion Paper 2022-4. Cascade Institute. Downloaded from https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/what-is-a-global-polycrisis/ 29 November 2023.
- Dimitrios Koutsogiannis & Nikolaj F. Elf & Scott Bulfin
It seems that a deep contradiction exists in contemporary social and educational research. On the one hand, it is generally accepted that the world is in a period of instability and polycrisis across many areas of life (Lawrence et al. 2022): in environment, geopolitics, economy, health, the social order, as well as, we would add, in language and literacy. The wide use of prefixes such as multi- (multiliteracies, multimodality), plural- (eg plurilingualism), trans- (eg translanguaging), poly- (eg polylingualism) encapsulates quite well the spirit of the contemporary instability in language and language education issues. On the other hand, the dominant way of doing research, including L1 research, is often to follow a well-worn logic of three typical moves: (1) establishing a (research) territory, (2) establishing a niche and (3) finally, occupying the niche (Swales, 1990). In this reality there is an ontological contradiction: in a world acknowledged as being in a state of constant instability and change, theoretical and methodological approaches often assume stability.
This paper aims to explore how to bridge, or rather rethink, this ontological contradiction in a more dynamic ethico-epistemological direction, asking more specifically how international L1 relevant research can be conducted which doesn’t assume theoretical and methodological homogeneity, but instead considers difference as the norm and seeks to find commonalities by exploiting differences. Emphasis will be given to a transdisciplinary theoretical framework, combining current theoretical trends—socio-material perspectives (Toohey 2019), complexity theory (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008) and nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004)—while considering their relation with already established theoretical traditions, including phenomenology and social semiotics (Kress 2010).
This theoretical endeavour is illuminated through reflection on the indicative case of the COVID-19 pandemic and its outflow. Our aim is to highlight the kind of "assemblages" and “entanglements” that emerged in teaching during the pandemic in different educational contexts, but also to identify factors across contexts that led to what emerged. This connection of the local to the global and vice-versa is one wider concern of the paper.
References
Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.
Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems in applied linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Lawrence, M., Janzwood, S., & Homer-Dixon, T. (2022). ‘What Is a Global Polycrisis?’ Version 2.0. Discussion Paper 2022-4. Cascade Institute. Downloaded from https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/what-is-a-global-polycrisis/ 29 November 2023.
Scollon, R. & Scollon, S. (2004). Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. Routledge.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge UP.
Toohey, K. (2019). The Onto-Epistemologies of New Materialism: Implications for Applied Linguistics Pedagogies and Research. Applied Linguistics 2019: 40/6: 937–956.
- Anna-Lena Godhe
This presentation explores how infrastructures for teachers’ work are in crisis and what is needed for these infrastructures to support teachers’ work in times of instability and change. In Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) work on infrastructures, they argue for the need to ask when an infrastructure supports practice, rather than what an infrastructure entails. They also, helpfully, broaden the notion of infrastructure. According to them, organisational, social, and technological aspects need to be considered in an analysis of how various infrastructures support practice. Gurybie (2015) added the idea of pedagogical infrastructures as key in educational settings to understand how teachers' pedagogical choices and beliefs come into play and interact with organisational, social, and technological aspects. The presentation aims to explore the question of how these various infrastructures mediate the work practices of L1 teachers in a time of crisis.
The analysis of examples from teachers in Swedish and Australian contexts aims to highlight what L1 teachers regarded as emerging during the pandemic and how these emergent factors relate to L1-teaching in past, present and future. Some indicative examples will be used to highlight:
-how institutional infrastructures shape, or reshape, L1 teaching
-similarities and differences in technological infrastructures in different contexts and how prominent they are how social infrastructures of teaching are affected in times of social distancing and online teaching
-how pedagogical infrastructures are recontextualized in online teaching and which ontological and epistemological theories are taken as points of departure.
In similar analyses (Godhe, 2023a, b) with teachers of different subjects, conclusions are made emphasising the need to give attention to social and pedagogical infrastructures in particular to understand how teachers’ work can be supported. In this presentation, the focus is on the subject of L1 and the extent to which the subject affects what teachers talk about as important. Comparing the different contexts of Sweden and Australia illuminates similarities and differences in L1 teaching in times of crisis.
References
Godhe, A-L. (2023). Swedish teachers’ digital competence – infrastructures for teaching and working. I Willermark, S., Olofsson, A. & Fransson, O (Red.), Digitalization and Digital Competence in Educational Work: A Nordic Perspective from Policy to Practice. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003355694-19
Godhe, A-L. (2023). Teachers’ experience of the breakdown of infrastructures during the pandemic. Education and Information Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12027-6
Guribye, F. (2015). From artifacts to infrastructures in studies of learning practices. Mind, Culture and Activity, 22(2), 184–198. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2015.1021358.
Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.7.1.111.
- Fleur Diamond & Scott Bulfin
Practice histories of L1 English teaching connect it to a range of ideals about the subject, including progressive orientations to ‘personal growth’ pedagogies, as well as traditional emphases on the acquisition of literacy skills and engagement with literary texts (Locke, 2006). These ideals about L1 English teaching are linked to the specific professional knowledges and the ‘knowledge project’ of subject English (Green, 2014). Meanwhile, there has been considerable pressure brought to bear on these practice histories and associated professional identities of L1 English teachers. Discourses of crisis in teacher education and teacher professionalism have been used to provide the rationale for a more technical understanding of teaching as comprising proficiency in teaching strategies and the application of ‘evidence based’ practices in classrooms (Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2019). Additionally, the move to remote schooling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic instigated a fresh round of disruptions and crises to L1 teachers’ practices, sense of their professional knowledge, and their identities. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study that engaged 10 teachers in semi-structured interviews about their work teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Faced with this crisis, the teachers in the study made decisions about what constitutes ‘core knowledge’ in subject English, that was to form the heart of their practice during the lockdowns. We inquired into how times of crisis throw into sharp relief the resources of professional disciplinary knowledge and subject-specific pedagogies that these teachers drew upon to sustain them in a time of crisis. The study participants engaged in what we call ‘emergency pedagogies’. We pose the question of how discourses and conditions of crisis become a mediating influence on how L1 teacher professional knowledge and professional identity are practised and understood. How does crisis work to reconstitute what counts as L1 teacher professional knowledge?
References
Green, B. (2014). A literacy project of our own? English in Australia, 49(2), 66–74.
Locke, T. (2006). Writing positions and rhetorical spaces. In B. Doecke & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing=learning (pp. 75-95). Wakefield and AATE.
Rowe, E. E. & Skourdoumbis, A. (2019) Calling for ‘urgent national action to improve the quality of initial teacher education’: the reification of evidence and accountability in reform agendas, Journal of Education Policy, 34:1, 44-60, DOI:10.1080/02680939.2017.1410577