Case Analysis

In our course, teachers are invited to analyse at least two narratives of autonomy-oriented classroom experiences carried out by language teachers from previous editions of the programme, produced within case construction as described below.¹ The first stage of analysis is rather unstructured, focusing on what teachers find most relevant in the experience they read about and how it resonates with their own teaching. The second stage is based on theoretical input related to pedagogy for autonomy, involving re-interpretations of the narrative or parts of it. One or more inputs can be provided and used sequentially for each narrative, depending on the time available (e.g., full texts, excerpts of texts, and reflective tools). In seeking to relate a particular theoretical framework with the narrative at hand, teachers discuss their own understandings of the framework and its connection with practice, and opportunities for clarifying and expanding theoretical concepts arise. Figure 1 illustrates a task for case analysis. Teachers are asked to analyse the narrative of an experience where a group of English teachers tried to make homework activities more learner-centred.² In focusing on learner and teacher roles, teachers should answer the question: to what extent can you say that the narrative illustrates a case of pedagogy for autonomy? These tasks are complemented by recommended readings that may be done before or after task completion.

Figure 1: Example of Task for Case Analysis

During case analysis, creating a conversational, non-judgemental atmosphere is of the utmost importance so that teachers feel free to present and confront points of view. My main role as teacher educator is to facilitate collaborative reflection. Rather than seeking consensus, I try to promote divergent thinking and the confrontation of perspectives.

Narratives used for case analysis illustrate autonomy-oriented inquiry and prepare teachers for case construction, whereby they become authors of their own autonomy stories. This means that those narratives must be inspiring examples of how teachers might engage in classroom inquiry to enhance and evaluate learner-centred teaching.

Case Construction

Case construction is the major component of the course and takes place after at least one narrative has been analysed. It combines the development of small-scale action research projects in schools with the production of narratives of classroom-based inquiry, where teachers document and interpret their efforts to enact pedagogical change. Action research plans are ideally designed in small groups to enhance collaborative reflection, and even though all teachers in the group are free to carry out the plan, adapting it to their own teaching contexts, only one of the experiences is considered for in-depth analysis and narrative writing. This means that each group decides who the “experimenter teacher” is, and his/her experience is accompanied by the other group members through lesson observation whenever possible and in group meetings. The group is responsible for designing, analysing, and narrating their case, which prevents bias through the negotiation of perspectives.

Teachers start by reflecting on pedagogical problems they would like to surpass so as to identify a topic of inquiry. A planning grid is provided where they register decisions regarding the issue they want to tackle and why, the context and objectives of the intervention, the classroom procedures and materials, and the data collection strategies to evaluate the experience (e.g., learner questionnaires and self-evaluation checklists, learning and teaching journals, lesson observation, analysis of learner performance). I accompany the planning stage and help teachers design teaching and data collection materials. Each experience is then conducted in three to four language lessons. Finally, they write a narrative to describe and interpret the experience. In order to support narrative writing, some guiding questions are provided:

• Does the narrative have an appealing title?

• Is it divided into sections that make its presentation clear?

• Does it present the topic, the objectives, and the context of the experience?

• Are the innovative features of the experience pointed out?

• Is the relation between the experience and learner autonomy clear?

• Are the stages of the experience described?

• Are the materials used presented?

• Are the data collected presented?

• Is the experience interpreted in light of data and theoretical input?

• Are learner and teacher gains pointed out?

• Are future practices suggested on the basis of evaluation?

Teachers are encouraged to develop a “language of experience” (Larrosa Bondía, 2010), a hybrid language that combines creativity with rigour, personal insights and interpretations with a critical standpoint based on data collection and theoretical input. As Golombek and Johnson (2017) suggest, narrative writing should help teachers “externalize” their understandings and feelings regarding their experience, but also “verbalize” academic concepts that they use “to re-examine, rename, and reorient their everyday experiences” (p. 18). Therefore, writing becomes a form of talking from the self rather than about the self (Contreras & Pérez de Lara, 2010), which prevents excessive subjectivity and makes narratives potentially useful for other teachers to build on. Writing should enhance critical thinking through the integration of experience, theory, and practical wisdom (Lunenberg & Korthagen, 2009).

During the process of writing, I choose not to give feedback on the teachers’ provisional texts. I explain that writing should be experienced as a (self)discovery process of inquiry (Van Manen, 1990), that they need to struggle with so as to make sense of practice and find an appropriate language as authors of autonomy stories. Therefore, I provide feedback only on the final version of the narratives, which are used for course assessment. Narrative assessment is based on four general criteria discussed at the beginning of the course: ability to innovate by reshaping previous teaching practices and using strategies to promote learner autonomy; articulating theory and practice by using theoretical knowledge to justify choices and analyse the experience; articulating teaching and research by using data collection strategies and analysing the experience on the basis of data and theoretical input; and formal correction at the level of language, textual organization, and bibliographic references. I provide constructive feedback on the teachers’ narratives, and I ask groups to revise them as an optional task so that I can use them with other teachers for case analysis. Over the years, I have gathered a bank of cases, and in 2014 I edited a book with six narratives (Vieira, 2014). I will draw upon them in the following section so as to illustrate how autonomy-oriented pedagogical inquiry is developed by teachers.³

Teachers’ Narratives of Autonomy-Oriented Inquiry

The potential value of the approach proposed above can be understood by looking at teachers’ narratives. As Johnson and Golombek (2002) point out, “teachers’ stories of inquiry are not only about professional development; they are professional development. Narrative inquiry becomes a means through which teachers actualize their ways of knowing and growing that nourish and sustain their professional development throughout their careers” (p. 6).

The six narratives were written by 21 experienced English teachers, all female, who worked in groups to design small-scale action research projects carried out by one teacher in each group, in one of her classes, in three to four lessons. The projects were developed in Portuguese regular state schools, in classes with 11 to 27 students from grades 9 (five cases) and 10 (one case). Table 1 summarises the didactic topics, perceived problems, purposes, and strategies of inquiry. All the projects account for the adoption of learner-centred teaching as a central feature of pedagogy for autonomy, emerging from concerns with learning and reshaping teaching so as to enhance learning. The teachers designed tasks and materials that fostered both language and learning competences. Questionnaires and self/peer assessment checklists were built to raise students’ awareness of and participation in the teaching-learning process, and allowed teachers to collect invaluable data to interpret, readjust, and evaluate their approach.

Table 1: Teacher Inquiry: Topics, Problems, Purposes, and Strategies

Although class time used in these projects is short, pedagogical tasks and roles are significantly reshaped. For example, the teachers who explored homework (Brandão, Monteiro, & Costa, 2014) realised “the need to question its goals and nature, and fight back feelings of dissatisfaction from students and teachers” (p. 52). They were concerned that their homework assignments were mostly aimed at reinforcing language learned in class and students were not motivated to do them. In a questionnaire to students, they found that many associated homework with the ideas of obligation, routine, and boredom. In order to change this situation, they decided to make homework more learner-centred by enhancing learner creativity and self-direction. The teacher who implemented the project had been teaching her students how to write a summary, and the students were invited to imagine a story for a book or a film, write a summary of the story, and produce the front and back covers of the book or the movie CD-ROM, where they had to include the summary, metadata, and an illustration. They were also involved in self/peer-assessment of this task on the basis of criteria regarding the adequacy of the summary and the verbal and visual information provided. This approach led to a new understanding of homework as an activity that can be engaging and promote both language and learning competences.

Moving towards learner-centred pedagogies entailed the enactment of principles of pedagogy for autonomy. This is illustrated here in the case of improving oral presentations in class (S. Ferreira, Ribeiro, & Pereira, 2014). The teachers felt that students often failed to prepare and present their assignments properly, and they decided to reinforce teacher support and independent work. In their narrative, they present a table comparing previous routines to the new approach. Pedagogical changes indicated in italics in the right-hand column of Table 2 (adapted from S. Ferreira et al., 2014, p. 116) show how previous practices were reshaped through integrating the principles of autonomy support, responsibility and choice, self-regulation, and assessment for learning. According to Jiménez Raya et al. (2017), “autonomy support” entails helping learners develop their ability to learn and make informed choices, which in this case consisted of indicating learning resources they might consult, clarifying criteria for assessing oral performance, and supporting them during the preparation for oral presentations; promoting “responsibility and choice” means allowing students to make decisions regarding what and how they learn, in this case by letting them choose a topic and thus enhance peer negotiation through cooperative learning; fostering “self-regulation” implies creating opportunities for students to plan, monitor, and evaluate learning, which was accomplished by giving them some freedom regarding topics and how they were to be approached, and by promoting self/peer-assessment of oral performance based on the criteria set, through direct observation and listening to audiotapes of oral presentations; as regards “assessment for learning”, that is, formative assessment that contributes to enhancing learning, assessment procedures involved the students’ reflection on what oral presentations require and how they could assess and improve their own performance according to the criteria used.

Table 2: Reshaping Pedagogical Practice: Oral Presentations

Note T = Teacher, Ss = Students. Adapted from S. Ferreira et al. (2014), p. 116.

A central aspect of learner-centred pedagogies is learners’ engagement in reflections on learning for developing metacognitive knowledge about themselves as learners (person knowledge), about the nature of specific learning tasks (task knowledge), and about learning strategies (strategy knowledge). Although metacognitive knowledge may be acquired consciously or unconsciously, bringing it to consciousness and talking about it will enhance its development and support autonomy (Wenden, 1999). This is well expressed by the teachers who explored oral interaction in class (Costa & Barreiro, 2014) when they write that learning to talk for communicative purposes is important, yet not enough: “Talking to learn is also necessary, because it is necessary to talk about what one learns and how one learns, to talk to learn to negotiate and make decisions” (p. 90). These teachers devised a role play activity to be performed in pairs-“an appointment with the doctor”. The students had to prepare for the interaction and self-assess their communicative ability before and after the role play as regards language functions they needed to fulfil (e.g., ask/tell about a health problem). They were also taught a number of communication strategies they might use in case of communication breakdowns (e.g., rephrasing, asking for clarification), and they reflected on the strategies used during the role play. Therefore, they not only developed interaction skills but also skills to reflect and talk about interaction itself.

As illustrated by the previous cases, learning how to learn through metacognitive awareness-raising was always connected with the enhancement of language competences. Another example is the narrative on oral reading (Teixeira, Neves, Serdoura, & Monteiro, 2014), which shows how learning about and assessing oral reading was successfully linked to developing oral reading skills. The teachers devised a plan that started with the oral reading of a short play with no previous preparation, intentionally reproducing a mainstream classroom procedure that often results in poor, meaningless readings. Students were then led to brainstorm the difficulties they felt and why, which was the basis for agreeing on what oral reading entails (performance criteria) and how it can be improved (learning strategies). They were subsequently asked to prepare for the oral reading of the same play in groups, and they could tape-record their readings for analysing and solving problems. After enacting the play before the class, they self-assessed their performance in a questionnaire where they compared the first and final oral readings, that is, reading without and with preparation. Table 3 (Teixeira et al., 2014, p. 142) presents data from students’ self-assessment and their perceptions of progress regarding the performance criteria discussed before: intonation and expressive reading, rhythm and punctuation, pronunciation, fluency, and comprehension. For each of these aspects, the questionnaire indicated the problems that were initially brainstormed with the teacher’s support, which shows how self-assessment instruments can be built from students’ ideas, potentially enhancing their understanding of and involvement in metacognitive development processes.

Table 3: Students’ Self-Assessment: Oral Reading (n = 11)

Note √ = I felt this problem a lot, ? = I felt this problem a little, X = I did not feel this problem at all.

Table 4 presents a summary of metacognitive knowledge developed across the six experiences through various kinds of strategies: initial and final questionnaires, pre/post-task self-assessment checklists, and conversations and input about learning. Initial questionnaires were aimed at getting to know the students’ opinions and experiences regarding language learning and the project topics, which was the starting point for raising learning awareness and for devising tasks that were appropriate for the class; self-assessment checklists allowed the students to monitor their performance in specific language tasks and evaluate their educational value, which raised their awareness of progress and difficulties, and also of task rationales; classroom conversations, namely when clarifying task demands and purposes, or when discussing results from questionnaires and checklists, were an opportunity to negotiate understandings on how students might better improve learning.

Table 4: Developing Students’ Metacognitive Knowledge

In developing their projects, teachers created new learning environments where students could expand their voice, take some control over their learning, and influence the course of teaching. In the case on reading comprehension (P. Ferreira, Precioso, Vilela, Barros, & Azevedo, 2014), the teachers write about how school cultures are often built “towards silencing the students’ voice”, and how students “appear to be moulded to act according to that condition as their self is conditioned so as to not seeing beyond what they usually do” (p. 88). Their experience involved making students more active readers by engaging them in exploring and reflecting on reading strategies. Their intention is well expressed in their narrative title, which is also a summary of their answer to the question “What is this a case of?”: Breaking Routines - Reading with Seeing Eyes? Seeing with Reading Eyes! Helping students “see with reading eyes” involved: promoting awareness of reading strategies, creating conditions for meaningful reading, and fostering collaborative reflection on reading processes in class. In order to accomplish this, they devised two reading comprehension tasks with similar texts and a set of similar reading questions to be answered in writing, but in one of the tasks both the questions and the students’ replies were written in their mother tongue, which was a completely unfamiliar approach. The students were asked to reflect on their performance in both tasks, namely on whether the use of the mother tongue had helped them to better understand and reply to the questions, rather than copying chunks from the text as they often did when they did not understand the questions well or when they had problems in writing. The teachers and the students realised that this experiment allowed them to disclose reading problems and strategies, opening up new paths for exploring and assessing reading comprehension skills. The teachers felt that in seeking “to navigate towards the democratisation of the construction of knowledge, searching for a pedagogy for autonomy, the students’ voices broke the silence” (P. Ferreira et al., 2014, p. 83).

The metaphor of the journey is often found in teachers’ narratives to express the exploratory nature of their experiences. This metaphor is extensively used in the case on cooperative learning (Vasconcelos, Costa, & Gonçalves, 2014), described by the teachers as “a journey through seas never navigated before” (p. 145). These teachers had given up using group work in their teaching mostly due to negative experiences related to students’ inefficiency and their own inability to monitor students’ work. They saw this as a limitation of their practice and decided to learn about cooperative learning. They devised cooperative tasks that promoted the students’ interdependence, social skills, and self-assessment of group work. Moreover, they also decided to engage in collaborative journal writing among themselves, which was also a new experience for them. When referring to the motto “swim or sink together” used by Johnson and Johnson (1994) regarding cooperative learning, they state that “together in the boat of knowledge, teachers and students can surpass the small shipwrecks” (p. 165), thus stressing the educational value of co-constructed pedagogies where teacher and learner autonomy develop in tandem.

In their narratives, teachers refer to the limited scope and impact of their innovations given the short duration of the experiences, but they also acknowledge significant changes in how pedagogical encounters were designed and carried out, with positive implications for students and for themselves as professionals. As Benson (1996) points out, steps towards learner autonomy necessarily reshape roles and power relations in the classroom:

Because steps towards autonomy invariably problematize roles and power-relations, autonomization is necessarily a transformation of the learner as a social individual. In other words, autonomy not only transforms individuals, it also transforms the social situations and structures in which they are participants. (p. 34)

In their journeys across the interspace between reality and ideals, teachers developed their professional autonomy by challenging established routines and carrying out practices that were more in tune with democratic values and with their own aspirations as educators. As expressed by the group that explored reading comprehension, inquiry played “a crucial role for understanding the oppressive forces that mould our mind, which, from a critical constructivist perspective, is essential to make informed decisions about who we want to be” (P. Ferreira et al., 2014, p. 82).