World changes affect economic, political, communicative, technological, and relational areas in society (Gómez-Francisco, 2010). These changes affect people’s thoughts, perceptions, knowledge, and reactions to those dynamics (Vaillant, 2007). Also, people bi-directionally influence culture, family, society, educational settings, and relationships, which are historically located, diverse, and versatile (López-Rupérez, 1997). This “changeism” (Hill-Jackson & Lewis, 2010, p. xxi) affects education, given its socio-political and institutionalized nature (Morante & Gómez, 2007). For this reason, education is of great importance for societies (Ministerio de Educación Nacional [MEN], 2013; Rubiano, 2013) if they are to understand change and advance, progress and improve living and relational conditions of human beings. Therefore, it is important to inform education from perspectives that can take account of its bidirectional relationships with society and that recognize its inherent complexity.

Within a climate of constant change, teachers are fundamental agents in nations’ achievement of their intended goals (García-Jaramillo et al., 2014; Schuck et al., 2018). Teachers’ quality has been considered a key factor to assure that forthcoming generations maintain and upgrade their social and living conditions to their fullest. As scholarship shows (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Hattie, 2008; McLean Davies et al., 2015; Vezub, 2007), teachers are crucial in guaranteeing students’ improvement in the educational system provided other factors are also developed (Cochran-Smith et al., 2017; Morante & Gómez, 2007) .

Global societal changes demand the alignment of education and teacher education (TE) to new visions. Societies need TE programs developed from perspectives that prepare teachers to respond to the increasing demands of educational settings (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Schuck et al., 2018; Vaillant, 2007). Programs are designed to equip teachers with knowledge, skills, and understandings so they can deal with changing realities. Therefore, English language teacher education (ELTE) configurations should recognize TE is a complex phenomenon and use that understanding to include knowledge derived from other sciences, which have advanced in their comprehension of how such complex phenomena function. Programs should, for instance, demonstrate in their designs how multiple factors interconnect to influence teachers’ learning thus ultimately affecting teacher quality. Therefore, we propose that ELTE should attempt to integrate complexity epistemologies into their proposals to allow both teacher educators and preservice teachers to develop the knowledge skills and understandings to face variant, diverse, unique, and intricate phenomena (Vaillant, 2007) that surface in their classrooms.

In line with this, this paper aims at highlighting the need for current ELTE theoretical approaches to recognize and act upon the understanding that TE is a complex phenomenon. We suggest that teacher educators and designers should start thinking of language teachers’ preparation using those considerations. We pose that ELTE programs should be distanced from a simplicity paradigm, which focuses on content knowledge over other highly influential factors. These factors are frequently addressed in relevant research, but they are far from being integrated into theoretical underpinnings of ELTE programs. ELTE needs to be informed by knowledge areas able to explain how a complex phenomenon such as English language teachers’ learning really emerges. Joint efforts to improve their quality can be made in this direction. Such efforts would better equip prospective English language teachers to face challenging realities in educational settings and would eventually improve students’ learning and development, an outcome every stakeholder is aiming at.

The concept of paradigm has two main characteristics: a certain way to conceive and interpret reality and a shared world vision by a group of people (Sandin, 2003, p. 28). The scientific classical paradigm is grounded in positivist-rationalist perspectives and entails procedures that separate phenomena into their parts to make them understandable and tractable for human beings. This implies fragmentation, simplification, reduction, and determination of such phenomena to be able to comprehend them. Most known phenomena have been studied under this paradigm. This “classical” paradigm has had a strong influence on three major aspects in education: theoretical, epistemological, and methodological. At this point, most of the ELTE configurations have grounded their theoretical foundations on the classical paradigm (also found in the literature as positivist, rationalist, and empiricist), which usually translates into models of transmission of knowledge. This is what counts as valid knowledge, which in turn is able to explain educational phenomena (Arellano, 2016). However, teaching and learning in education and in ELTE cannot be explained merely on the bases of the classical paradigm (Davis & Sumara, 2012; Gómez-Francisco, 2010; Roa-Acosta, 2006; Tello, 2004) as we argue in this reflection.

As mentioned, our current paradigmatic comprehension of education has derived from the classical paradigm, and therefore our understandings of how knowledge should be taught and learned result from it. This may have an incidence in the crisis we are living these days, which the World Development Report (WDR) has labelled as a “learning crisis” (World Bank, 2018). The WDR notes the crisis is happening in developing countries and further underlines the lack of recognition from the educational agents: “The learning crisis is real, but too often education systems operate as if it is not” (p. 83). Part of this crisis derives from ignoring that TE is a complex phenomenon and to improve it we first need to understand it better.

Scholarship in education has gradually started to establish more complex relations among teaching and learning processes; however, only until recently, the analysis of theoretical reflections in ELTE models has started to shift. There is a slow movement from traditional paradigms where knowledge transmission is equated to learning, to perspectives that integrate into the equation other interconnected factors such as reflection on teacher’s classroom actions. Recent perspectives resonate with constructivist and socio-critical underpinnings as well as humanistic theoretical foundations (for a review of models, see Fandiño-Parra et al., 2016). The paradigmatic stance taken by ELTE influences how teaching and learning are instantiated in the programs. As follows, we will illustrate this point introducing conceptual orientations that have been traced in various reviews.

Feiman-Nemser (1990) indicates five conceptual orientations from her review of theoretical perspectives in TE. The author defines conceptual orientation as “a coherent perspective on teaching, learning, and learning to teach that gives direction to the practical activities of educating teachers” (p. 6). The first one is academic orientation understood as terms of transmission of knowledge and development of understanding. The teacher is considered an “intellectual leader, scholar, subject matter specialist” (p. 7). The second is personal orientation, in which the student teacher is the core of the teaching and learning process and the focus is on learning, instead of teaching: “Learning to teach is construed as a process of learning to understand, develop, and use oneself effectively” (p. 8). The third is critical orientation, which emphasizes the power of education in creating a fairer and more democratic society. The fourth is technological orientation, which centers on the idea that teachers are consumers of research in order to use principles and practices. The fifth is practical orientation; it revolves around “knowledge about teaching and a means of learning to teach” (p. 15). In this regard, Vieira and Moreira (2008, as cited in Fandiño-Parra et al., 2016) point out that ELTE still tells teachers what and how to do things. Even though these orientations have marked ELTE configurations and made great contributions to the field, they have done so from a fragmenting view, thus falling short in preparing teachers from stances that recognize the multidimensionality of ELTE.

When TE is looked at from a diachronic historical perspective, one can say that it has transitioned from conceptions based on behaviorism and constructivism to humanistic and socio-historical views of teaching and learning. The underlying conception defines the main components of ELTE; therefore, ELTE has shifted from aiming that teachers exhibit desirable behaviors producing good teaching to focusing on their gaining awareness of the assumptions, beliefs, and perceptions that influence their classroom practices and promote effective teaching; to helping teachers design and experience practices that respond to local contexts and needs (Ell et al., 2017).

An illustration of such shifts is provided as follows. As has been explained frequently, the behaviorist view of learning translates into as a series of learned “skills, tasks, routines, and strategies” (Stuart & Tatto, 2000, p. 500) that student teachers need to put into action in the classroom. Instances of “what works best” in teaching can be seen in this conception (Richards, 1998). This understanding assumes traditional models isolated from contexts or classroom situations, “and despite this, prospective teachers are expected to reproduce what they learned in a ‘cascade’ or replica effect, in a kind of contagion of what they have learned” (determinism; Salas, 2006, as cited in Rodríguez & Alamilla, 2018, p. 16).

The constructivist view in ELTE entails that student teachers develop an understanding of subject matter and pedagogy with the purpose of reflecting and creating instances of theory and practice in context. The humanistic approach to ELTE considers that teaching is based on the interactions of human beings, highlighting that learning is a human experience (Iannone & Carline, 1971). This approach aims at meeting preservice teachers’ human needs and at preparing them to encounter students with a wide range of intellectual and humanistic needs. The ultimate goal is supporting human growth. Those conceptions have given support to different models which emphasize cores of intellectual, social (K. E. Johnson, 2009; Nguyen, 2016), humanistic, or technical stances (see Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Fandiño-Parra et al., 2016; Feiman-Nemser, 1990; Freeman, 2006; Wallace, 1991) or more integrative ELTE proposals (Kumaravadivelu, 2012). This shows a gradual shift that acknowledges ELTE as a complex endeavor aimed at uncovering the relationship of the multiplicity of components that affect teachers’ learning.

Morin (2005) remarks that to acknowledge a complexity perspective we first have to acknowledge the existence of a simplicity one. A simplicity or classical paradigm explains phenomena in terms of linear cause-effect, fragmentation, determinism,¹ and mechanism by separating their parts, in the understanding that to study the whole implies studying the sum of its parts. This paradigm is grounded on “evidence, fragmentation, lineal causality, exhaustivity, immutability, irrefragability, universality, and reversibility” (Roa-Acosta, 2006, p. 151).

To illustrate the linearity, we can consider the theory and practice dichotomy. This follows a cause-effect relationship, where teachers receive knowledge (the empty vessel concept) and consequently they will know how to apply it in class. In other words, the cascade effect: “A certain and linear process within which knowledge is transmitted more or less directly from teacher to student by following a fixed and scientifically predetermined sequence of instructions” (Cochran-Smith, 2003, p. 97).

Fragmentation, in this context could be exemplified with the series of discrete components commonly found in ELTE programs, suggesting that separated learning components (or parts) will lead to effective preservice teacher learning and practice (the whole). Furthermore, ELTE and specifically, initial ELTE, in many contexts, have focused on training, which emphasizes the hierarchy of instructional methods as the priority of most programs’ rationale. Fragmentation has resulted in the profession being instrumentalized or infused with a technical vision (Cárdenas et al., 2010; Schön, 1987). As Zemelman (1998, as cited in Tello, 2004) states, this represents a constraint since we simultaneously “have to ask ourselves the question about how to stimulate the willingness to think, especially when what is privileged is simply the ability of how to do” (p. 7).

We suggest that ELTE configurations have been fragmented and therefore instrumentalized. To overcome this, Aoki (as cited in Pinar & Irwin, 2004) proposes a movement towards a multidimensional curriculum and suggests that “we need to seek out new orientations that allow us to free ourselves of the tunnel vision effect of mono-dimensionality” (p. 1). Aoki advises the design and implementation of TE based on “human experiences within the classroom situation” (p. 3) allowing this way that preservice teachers “theorize from their practice and practice what they theorize” (Kumaravadivelu, 2012, p. 15), contributing to a more multidimensional orientation in ELTE.

Aoki (as cited in Pinar & Irwin, 2004) also recommends those experiences be undertaken on the basis of reflection. Being a teacher means more than performing skills and delivering content. He highlights the issue of curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived in the “in between” that emerges from these two perspectives, which call for “an understanding of our own being as teachers” (p. 15). He indicates that attention has been focused on the outcomes of teaching (the what and how to) instead of on the “understanding of teaching” (p. 17) (the whys). Within the outcome orientation, effective teaching has been reduced to views of “doing,” sidelining that teaching “may have more to do with the being of teacher-who a teacher is” (p. 17) than with outcomes. In our reflection, we subscribe to Aoki’s view. In his interpretations of curriculum-as-lived, this author has connected the complexity of the classroom to the teaching world: multiplicity, layers, spaces of difference, in a more humanized frame for understanding teaching and teachers, thus moving away from an understanding of teaching and teachers as means: a complex view of ELTE.

ELTE programs should acknowledge advances deriving from complexity perspectives and incorporate what is pertinent from these advances into their theoretical approaches to infuse curricular plans, methodologies, and didactics (Roa-Acosta, 2006). Current ELTE theoretical perspectives recognize some components which are instantiated in subjects related to instructional methods, pedagogy, disciplinary matters, and theories of education; other components related to English language teachers’ learning are not easy to grasp and evidence such as teachers’ beliefs, assumptions, reflections, learning experiences, and personal values, to name just a few. These components seem to be interrelated, enriched, and affected by the interactions of teachers, students, educational policy, curriculum (as agents), as well as the environment (context and setting dynamic conditions; society and culture). These interactions are complex and affect TE, teacher development, and practices. So, efforts should be made to understand the complexity of ELTE. This raises the question of what a complex system is, what complexity is, and how these concepts relate to teacher education.

In terms of conceptualization of teacher preparation, the Colombian Ministry of Education (MEN, 2013) gave its first steps by acknowledging that TE needs to be recognized as a complex system. This stance presents TE as a complex system in its general structure, recognizing it as an organization with its inherent dynamics. According to the MEN (2013), this system consists of three interrelated units that connect in different ways: initial TE, in-service education, and professional teacher development. Within this system, there are three recognized articulation axes: pedagogy, research, and evaluation (p. 59).

Accordingly, the MEN (2013) considers it important to highlight the purposes that the Sistema Nacional de Formación de Educadores (National System of Teacher Education) proposed in the 1996-2016 ten-year educational development plan, namely, teacher education and initial and ongoing integral development as key factors to guarantee the quality of education. However, the MEN claims these components do not function in isolation and quality should be articulated with the education system, policies, and other areas such as labor, infrastructure, and supplies.

The document also states that teachers are agents who should recognize their role in constructing quality in three dimensions: personal, social, and professional. Teachers are considered social agents, with knowledge and pedagogical experiences, in relation to their socio-cultural contexts and are able to build innovation through their own praxis with a great role in social transformation (MEN, 2013, p. 44). However, Decree 18583, enacted in 2017, does not deepen in these instances.

The MEN document defines the importance of teachers as social agents seeking for social transformation. The document presents teachers as embedded in four types of learning: doing, knowing, living, and being; these learnings happen through teachers’ pedagogical experiences, not in isolation but in a given socio-cultural context (p. 44). The MEN document puts forward a complexity perspective for teacher preparation in order to improve teachers’ human development from the very initial phases (MEN, 2013):

Global challenges and national societal demands call for ELTE configurations from a complex view to tackle the complexities of ELTE itself; as well as to respond to the different and diverse educational settings claiming for social transformation in our context. The MEN has kept in mind that teacher quality requires the coordinated process of different stakeholders with the intention of improving education in the nation. Within this context, the MEN recognized the complexity of systems as a way to respond to the rapid changes of transformations in the knowledge society; these demand the reorganization of the processes of teacher qualification and education. “Therefore, teacher education goes beyond enabling professional and labor function for the educational system; it aims at an integral teacher’s formation: of being, knowing, doing, and living with others” (MEN, 2013, p. 46).

This multidimensionality requires assuming a different conceptual stance that acknowledges other interconnected aspects. The MEN (2013) also recognizes that due to its nature, TE should be approached from a complexity view, “supported in social and cultural dynamics, which in turn also demand its transformation” (p. 46).

At this point, ELTE, approached under a complex perspective, may reveal some components which are invisible in ELTE configurations, their interrelations, and operation, and how they affect preservice teachers’ growth and learning such as “personal beliefs and values as strong influences” (Ell et al., 2017, p. 341). Consequently, research to help identify and recognize invisible components, their influences, interactions, and emergence in teachers’ formation is essential.