Profile: Issues in Teachers' Professional Development

Place for Teacher Education

Place is more than a geographical representation. It is “a useful framing for politics” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 30). Place shapes, and is shaped by, power, history, culture, and relationships; ergo, it is deeply tied to colonial histories and present-day power dynamics (i.e., who controls it, who belongs to it, who is excluded from it). This study approaches place politically, viewing it as lived, felt, and contested; a space imbued with meaning, memory, and identity rather than mere coordinates.

Although this perspective resonates with critical perspectives in which “place-conscious education must go beyond simply connecting curriculum to place through active student engagement” (Kelly & Pelech, 2019, p. 734), it also distances from them as place is not just a mere bridge of content for curricular design; instead, here “place becomes an event rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in notions of authentic” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, pp. 34-35; i.e., place as something that is always in motion, created in the moment through relationships, actions, and histories). This distancing makes place a relational opportunity that can help teacher education at the practicum level (re)think how place is experienced and transformed into knowledge(s).

Rurality[ies] in Colombia

Ruralities, which are diverse and dynamic (e.g., agrarian, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and post-extractive), have been deeply affected in Colombia by the armed conflict. As Aristizábal and Ávila (2024) observe, “violence has undermined educational conditions, disproportionately affecting [rural communities]” (p. 3). Within this sociopolitical landscape, ruralities are often territorially stigmatized (Beach, 2018), framed as deficient or dangerous. These constructions have subjected ruralities to academic representations that impose urban ways of being, thinking, and knowing through policies, assessments, and digital initiatives. In fact, while perspectives on rural education have evolved, recognizing the territorial, cultural, and social diversity of contexts has helped move beyond the homogeneous, urban-centric models that once shaped rural education (López Ramírez, 2006). Table 1 summarizes these perspectives.

Theoretical and policy approaches to rural education highlight a critical dimension that must also be considered in teacher education: the importance of place as a complex, situated, and dynamic scenario for teaching practice. The perspectives of endogenous development, cultural contextualization, territorial differentiation, and rurality as social constructs collectively indicate that teaching is never neutral but is deeply tied to local realities, histories, and aspirations. For English student-teachers, the practicum is more than a site to apply pre-designed strategies; it requires engaging with rural students’ cultural repertoires and lived experiences. Thus, rural schools become complex pedagogical spaces rather than mere sites of implementation.

Moreover, models such as multigrade education and policies like the Special Plan for Rural Education reveal how structural conditions (i.e., low enrollment, population dispersion, infrastructural limitations, and historical marginalization) shape the teaching and learning process. For teacher education, this highlights the need to prepare student-teachers not only in disciplinary and methodological knowledge but also in pedagogical sensibilities that view place as a possibility rather than a constraint.

A Place-Bound Teaching Practicum

A place-bound teaching practicum emphasizes place as pedagogy. Not only does it resist the deficit narrative that rural education is lacking, but it also positions rural communities as places of rich knowledge(s), resilience, and innovation, allowing student-teachers to work with, rather than on, rural spaces. Similarly, it promotes “de-emphasizing the institutional-then-colonial discourse that frames language teaching and learning in particular normative ways” (Ubaque-Casallas et al., 2025, p. 6). Ergo, a place-bound teaching practicum centers the community over academic institutions (e.g., universities) and their logic (e.g., rationality and accountability). However, the perspective of the community I am referring to here, echoing Escobar (2025), is “theorized as a deeply historical, heterogeneous, and power-driven entity” (p. 106). This conceptualization diverges from idealized visions of the community as a harmonious, stable, and homogeneous entity, and presents it as a historically situated, plural, and contested space, where power not only operates but also shapes internal and external relations.

This said, a place-bound teaching practicum challenges views of the practicum that continue to impose instrumentality and technicality as driving principles (see Coronado-Rodríguez et al., 2022). Rather, it takes a step forward, since a place-bound perspective does not simply seek to “incorporate knowledge of local communities as resources for language teaching and learning during the practicum” (Quintero & Clavijo Olarte, 2023, p. 1). This approach may benefit from further examination because when local knowledges are incorporated into English teaching curricula, they are often reframed to fit pre-existing curricular structures (e.g., objectives and assessments). In doing so, knowledge(s) deeply rooted in specific relationships, histories, and ways of living risk being reduced to surface-level cultural references, classroom topics, or vocabulary themes.

Place-Bound Pedagogies

PBPs are understood as relational pedagogies. Since, as Tuck and McKenzie (2015) argue, places are active sites of practice and inherently shaped by practices, PBPs emphasize the dynamic interactions among people, land, history, and more-than-human entities (e.g., animals, plants, ecosystems). However, PBPs are characterized by the diverse ways they challenge classroom-centric education, particularly by centering local knowledges and marginalized voices. PBPs understand places as sites shaped by colonial violence, displacement, and resilience. For this reason, they do more than simply contest colonial legacies; these legacies actively fuel and energize their pedagogical orientations, allocating energy to the political intentions of “living beings [who] bring forth their worlds by what they do” (Escobar et al., 2020, p. 61) and in so doing engage in actions of world-making (Deumert & Makoni, 2023).

By adjectivizing pedagogies, I argue that “consciousness and meaning are the property of all living beings” (Escobar, 2018, p. 142), suggesting that a bond to place is inherently pedagogical, as it is woven through the encounters, conflicts, and solidarities of humans and non-humans who inhabit and shape it. In this study, place is not a passive container but a dynamic nexus where personal and contextual histories intersect, and where knowledges emerge through collective struggle, memory, and everyday practice. To teach or learn bound to place is to engage with these relational tensions and to advance a relational political ontology¹ in which it is possible to bring forth more relational modes of being-teaching-learning.

Participant: Angely

Angely is a female student-teacher who volunteered to participate in the Viva la Escuela program, as it aligns with her research interest in English teaching in rural Colombia. Her interest was informed by Duque Salazar et al. (2024), who examined the panorama of interculturality in rural contexts of bilingual education in Latin America. Her curiosity also stems from her childhood in Pereira, the capital of Risaralda, and the fact that she and her family were forced to move to Bogotá due to social pressures. Our interests overlapped, since I was already compiling experiences in rural English teaching in Colombia (Ubaque-Casallas et al., 2025); experiences that somehow prompted my interest in shifting from pedagogy-based to place-bound pedagogies.

Angely’s participation did not follow any sampling method; it arose from our encounter during her practicum, in which I served as her mentor. Angely’s role in this study extended beyond that of an informant. Our relationship was reciprocal, as she gained access to my experiences and knowledge(s) just as I did to hers. Following Varela et al. (2016), any knowledge gained from our collaboration and encounters was groundless; that is, our knowing arose from a more immediate, lived, and direct engagement. It was not knowledge about something, but knowledge through our beings-in-relation.

Narrative Network Analysis

Entry 1⁵

When I arrived at the vereda,⁶ I carried a notebook in my backpack filled with lesson plans, rubrics, and objectives focused on pronunciation and language skills. I had prepared activities for students to practice speaking and listening, thinking that my greatest contribution would be to bring them closer to a “useful” English for work and future opportunities. In my mind, the goal was clear: to improve their level so that they could “compete” in a globalized world.

Figure 1: Visual Map 1

The network shown in Figure 1 places Angely at the center of the map, surrounded by human and non-human actants encountered upon arriving in the rural community. Although the strongest ties appear to connect her to pre-prepared materials, language skills, and a globalized view of English learning, this reflects how most academic discourses and practices in the practicum have been normalized, structured around curricular objectives rather than local, lived interactions.

The network reflects that Angely’s arrival was initially anchored in a logic of projected outcomes. Her suitcase is more than a container of teaching materials; it is a symbolic actant carrying the institution’s expectations, standardized objectives, and an implicit alignment with discourses of English as a tool for global competition and development (i.e., neoliberal ideology; Shah et al., 2024). The edges in the network trace a movement from materials to linguistic skills and onward to employability, mirroring a trajectory in which place is initially absent from the shaping of pedagogical praxis, or at least from pedagogical positioning. In fact, non-human actants dominate this configuration, mediating the interaction between Angely and her students, reinforcing a teacher-centered, externally oriented approach.

However, this configuration also suggests an evident fragility. The network shows few reciprocal or entangled connections as if knowledge(s) flew outward from Angely’s expertise. They seem not to circulate through exchanges with the local environment. The absence of strong place-bound actants at this stage hints at potential shifts once Angely engages more directly with the community. Nevertheless, it is in those yet-to-be-formed connections, currently invisible in the network, that the possibility of reorienting teaching toward lived PBPs resides.

Entry 2

But as the days went by, I realized that my students’ questions were not about how to say “How are you?” or how to pronounce the “th” correctly, but about how to prepare the land for planting potatoes, how to negotiate with a neighbor who has crossed over the fence, or how to organize the community party without fights breaking out. The classroom extended beyond the walls: it was in the coffee grove, in the vegetable garden, in the village store. There, I learned that, for them, English was not urgent; their urgency was life itself and how to sustain it in community.

Figure 2: Visual Map 2

The network shown in Figure 2 centers Angely’s students as key actants. There are some branching connections to practical, place-bound concerns rather than linguistic forms. Non-human actants represent agricultural work, social negotiations, and community events, showing the classroom’s expansion into everyday life. The structure reflects a shift from formal, curriculum relationships to lived, context-driven interactions.

Angely’s teaching space began to dissolve its institutional frame. Entry 2 reveals a network in which the most urgent learning needs were woven into the rhythms and concerns of the rural area. Interesting, instead of phonetics drills or formulaic dialogues, which tend to normalize learning (Roach, 2009), students sought to understand how to prepare soil for planting, negotiate with a neighbor, or coordinate a peaceful community gathering. Each question was not only a request for knowledge but also an anchor to a lived reality, where language was just one of many tools for maintaining relationships and ensuring collective well-being.

By following these threads, Angely began to inhabit a pedagogy that was less about delivering a predetermined curriculum and more about dwelling on a web of relationships extending beyond the classroom walls. The coffee plantation, vegetable garden, and vereda store became not “extensions” of the school, but sites where learning was already happening. The map’s connections reveal a reorientation in which teaching is no longer about inserting English into students’ lives but about allowing the community’s life to shape what English can mean. This, I argue, marks the turning point where pedagogy shifts from a curricular imposition to a process of co-construction. English is reframed as generated relationally, as an act of ontological translation (i.e., a process through which different ways of being, knowing, and sensing come into relation without one subsuming or erasing the other). Such translation then enacts a different ethics where realities meet through a(e)ffective, bodily, and historical entanglements.

Entry 3

One morning in class, one student said to me: “Profe, let’s go outside, the weather is nice today.” At first, I thought it was just an excuse to avoid working, but I agreed. We walked toward the coffee fields behind the school. I almost never left the classroom, so it felt strange to be there, surrounded by the smells of coffee and damp soil. The students pointed out the plants to me, explaining which ones were ready to harvest and how they could tell if a plant was sick. I realized they knew an incredible amount about their surroundings, far more than I could have imagined.

Figure 3: Visual Map 3

The network presented in Figure 3 positions the students as knowledge holders, branching into agricultural expertise and environmental awareness. Non-human actants (e.g., coffee plants, weather, and harvest readiness) are embedded within the learning process. The network illustrates a role reversal, with students guiding Angely’s learning through place-bound knowledge. Classroom boundaries dissolve when a student’s invitation to go outside leads Angely to the coffee plantations. What initially seemed like a distraction, as often occurs in urban settings, turns out to be an entry point into the community’s life. In this network, expertise flows from the students to Angely, reconfiguring the direction of knowledge. Here, non-human actants are central participants in shaping what and how learning occurs. Following these threads, Angely stepped into a notion of pedagogy where not only her presence but also that of others outweighed predetermined lesson plans. In this reoriented network, teaching is no longer about inserting English into pre-structured content (i.e., curriculum based on the community) but about letting the life of the place reorganize the meaning and role of language. The map captures this inversion of roles.

Entry 4

On the way, we ran into Don Efraín, a farmer who was pulping coffee. He showed us how he did it and why it was important to take care of the shade so the bean could grow well. Right there, it occurred to me to teach them some English words about what we were seeing: leaf, shadow, and seed. They repeated them and, at the same time, corrected me on things about farming that I didn’t know. That walk made me realize that being with them wasn’t just about giving lessons, but about sharing spaces and learning together.

Figure 4: Visual Map 4

Figure 4 shows a network centered on the collective presence of Angely and her students, connecting to human and non-human actants encountered during the walk. Non-human elements (e.g., coffee pulping, shade care, and agricultural vocabulary) are integrated into reciprocal teaching moments. The structure reflects a co-learning dynamic in which expertise flows in multiple directions.

In this entry, Angely’s walk through the coffee fields becomes a moment of mutual teaching and learning. For example, meeting Don Efraín introduced non-disciplinary knowledge, such as coffee pulping and shade care, which was immediately integrated into the lesson through English vocabulary. Learning was not one-directional: while Angely offered English terms to connect the language to students’ realities, the students corrected her on agricultural facts, demonstrating their expertise. The network shows a balanced exchange, with human and non-human actants equally contributing to the co-creation of meaning.

In this reconfigured space, teaching is inseparable from shared experience. The coffee plant, its shade, and the pulping process are not just content but actants that shape the interaction and guide Angely’s pedagogy. Since the map illustrates how the place itself orchestrates the lesson, the encounter with Don Efraín is more than a passing event; it marks a pedagogical shift in which being-with in their environment transforms English learning into a collaborative act.

Entry 5

Since then, I stopped thinking of class as something that only happened within the walls of the classroom. I began planning activities that stepped outside the book and connected with what was happening in the students’ daily lives: coffee plants, animals, and the town’s stories. English started to become part of those experiences, not an isolated goal. Walking with them taught me that teaching is also about being present, listening, and letting what surrounds us become part of what we learn.

Figure 5: Visual Map 5

The map shown in Figure 5 centers Angely as the primary actant, radiating into shifts in perspective, activity planning, and integration of English with local life. Non-human actants (i.e., coffee, animals, town stories) are linked through activities that emerge from the community’s lived experience. The structure reflects a pedagogical redefinition where place and presence shape the curriculum.

Entry 5 marks another turning point, where Angely’s conception of teaching expands beyond the classroom’s physical and conceptual boundaries. The network extends into activities rooted in local realities (e.g., coffee production, animal care, community narratives), moving beyond book-based lessons. English is no longer treated as an isolated subject but is woven into experiences already rich with meaning. Importantly, this shift recognizes that learning occurs as much through walking, observing, and conversing as through formal instruction.

By re-centering place and shared practice, Angely steps into a pedagogy of presence, where teaching becomes an act of listening, adapting, and letting the surrounding environment co-author her preconceived ideas around the curriculum. The map’s connections reveal a network where non-human actants carry as much pedagogical weight as human ones.

Entry 6

One day, everything changed suddenly. There was a guerrilla attack in a small hamlet half an hour from the school. Although nothing happened directly in the vereda, threats arrived, and we had to lock ourselves inside our houses for three days. There were no in-person classes, and the atmosphere was tense. That fear wasn’t in any curriculum plan or any standard, but it was there, lodged inside all of us: in the children, in the parents, in me.

Figure 6: Visual Map 6

The map in Figure 6 centers on the community members, linking them to events and conditions that disrupt daily life. Non-human actants (i.e., threats, houses, fear, and halted classes) intertwine with human actors such as the guerrilla and affected families. The structure reveals a network dominated by external violence, where fear permeates all relationships.

Entry 6 is distinctive, capturing a rupture in the community’s social fabric triggered by a guerrilla attack in a nearby vereda. Although the violence did not directly affect Angely’s location, threats forced residents into confinement for three days, suspending in-person classes. The map reveals how fear became an actant, shaping the actions of students, parents, and Angely as much as any human decision. Unlike previous entries, the network here emphasizes relational constraints imposed by social and historical insecurity in rural Pereira rather than collaborative learning.

This episode underscores how the practicum was not only nurtured by the life of a community but also disrupted by the conditions in which that life unfolds. Fear, absent from ELT and teacher education curricular plans or official standards, became central to Angely’s lived experience of teaching and learning. The map’s connections reveal how external violence reorganized the network. In these moments, pedagogy shifts from expansion and exploration toward protection and survival, reminding us that place is as much shaped by conflict and threat as it is by care and shared practice; a reminder that canonical notions of curriculum barely take into consideration.

Entry 7

Feeling that fear was terrible. It wasn’t just the worry of “what’s going to happen,” but the physical sensation of being imprisoned. Three days without going out, listening to rumors, phone calls from relatives, and that strange silence that lingers when everyone is confined. In Bogotá, I had never felt anything like this; insecurity there is different, more fleeting. Here, it was a weight that hung in the air, as if everything were on pause, but the danger hadn’t gone away.

Figure 7: Visual Map 7

The map in Figure 7 places Angely at the center, with branches to affective and environmental actants (i.e., fear, silence, confinement, and comparative insecurity), showing how place reconfigures her teaching experience. Non-human actants dominate (e.g., fear, rumors, silence, durations, urban/rural insecurity), indicating that what shapes learning here is not curriculum but atmosphere and threat. The structure visualizes a point of stasis that, compared with Bogotá, reframes the event as a distinct, lingering rural weight.

Entry 7 traces the embodied aftermath of violence, portraying it as pedagogy’s silent antagonist. Fear becomes a tangible actant. The map shows how this atmosphere structures action: three days indoors, classes suspended, and speech reduced to whispers. Rather than a discrete event, insecurity settles like the weather. Angely’s comparison to Bogotá highlights a temporal contrast: urban danger feels fleeting there, whereas here it lingers, saturating space and pacing time, turning the vereda into a classroom of waiting.

This configuration reorients pedagogy from exploration to endurance. English, if present, would trail behind these urgencies. The yet-unmapped ties (i.e., neighbors checking in, silent care networks) suggest relational threads that could later reshape teaching toward collective recovery. The visual network thus captures a suspended pedagogy, held by fear, but also hints at the relational capacities through which the community might reclaim motion and meaning.

Entry 8

Amid all that, I also began to feel the distance from academia. The mentoring sessions were important and offered a space for reflection, but they always felt far away. It was as if the conversation stayed on another plane, never fully touching what was happening here. The real needs of the classroom, the fear of an attack, and the children’s anxiety couldn’t be explained solely with statistics or academic language.

Figure 8: Visual Map 8

The map in Figure 8 places Angely at the center, linking to both reflective structures (e.g., mentorship sessions) and points of disconnection (i.e., academic conversations, statistics, and academic language). The structure highlights a tension between institutional support and its inability to address on-the-ground realities.

Entry 8 exposes the gap between academic frameworks and the lived demands of teaching in a tense, rural context. While mentorship sessions offered a space for reflection, they existed in a separate orbit, removed from the urgency of fear, children’s anxiety, and shifting classroom needs. The map’s links show that the most pressing realities could not be translated into the language of abstract pedagogical discourse. This disconnection was not about irrelevance but about an incompatibility of tempos (hers and mine). With this, I mean that academic reflection moved slowly and analytically, while local events demanded immediate, embodied responses.

The map underscores that teaching is deeply shaped by context-specific urgencies that resist standardization. As a matter of fact, the actants of “fear,” “classroom needs,” and “children’s anxiety” carry a weight that academic categories struggle to hold. This misalignment, I think, suggests that meaningful support must be situated within the same relational web as the local community; a type of support close enough to feel its rhythms, silences, and disruptions.

Entry 9

Walking through the vereda became one of my most important ways of thinking about classes. On those walks, I got to know more people from the community: parents, grandparents, neighbors who always had a story to tell that could become classroom material. I not only listened to their stories about the harvest, the rain, or the festivities, but also came to better understand the families’ priorities and concerns. Every greeting, every conversation along the way, gave me clues to design activities that started from their reality, not from what the textbook dictated.

Figure 9: Visual Map 9

Angely is at the center of the map shown in Figure 9, linking human acts (i.e., community members) and non-human actants (i.e., walking practice, stories, conversations) that serve as bridges to classroom planning. The structure shows a relational pedagogy in which knowledge flows through informal encounters rather than formalized lessons.

Entry 9 illustrates a pedagogy grounded in movement and encounter, where walking the vereda becomes an active form of curricular design. The map reveals a dense web of relations among Angely, the community, and the stories collected along the way. Parents, grandparents, and neighbors act as co-educators, providing narratives about harvests, weather, and festivities that become classroom material. These exchanges position everyday life as the primary curriculum, reversing the typical flow from book to classroom.

In this last network, it is clear how Angely identifies themes that resonate with the students’ lived realities. The map reflects a shift from a static, classroom-centered approach to one where planning is co-authored with the community’s concerns. In this arrangement, English learning is not an imported structure, but a language woven into the existing fabric of the community; in other words, what is taught is inseparable from where and with whom it is learned.