Preservice language teacher education: growth and development through the professional standards.

Moloney, Robyn

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Preservice student teachers are engaged in developing a critical perspective on the profession they are about to join. They are assessing the way the profession presents itself and its values, they are keen to see the opportunities it may offer for growth, and they are curious as to how their particular personal backgrounds and talents will fit into this new context (Kagan, 1992; Trotman & Kerr, 2001).

While the Professional Standards Project Languages (PSP) is conceptualised for practising teachers, I have successfully embedded aspects of the PSP in my methodology courses for preservice language teachers in the Teacher Education Program in the Department of Education at Macquarie University. The learning outcomes achieved by my 2009 students through the use of the Professional standards for accomplished teaching of languages and cultures (DEST, 2005 --hereafter the Standards), the language-specific annotations, and the published PSP module materials (Scarino, Liddicoat, Crichton, Curnow, Kohler, Loechel, Mercurio, Morgan, Papademetre, & Scrimgeour, 2008), demonstrate that they are important tools for developing skills and understandings in preservice language teacher education.

   What students learn in teacher
   education programs can have an
   enormous impact on the attitude and
   practices that teachers bring with
   them to schools where they work, if
   they undergo a process of personal
   transformation based on their own
   identities and experiences. (Nieto,
   2000, p. 186)

The structured discussion of the Standards has been a catalyst for self-reflection and for identifying areas for development in my preservice students. In what follows, I provide some general comments from my students that illustrate the value of the PSP to my students in terms of their emerging professional identity.

PSP AND PRESERVICE TEACHER IDENTITY

Dominique is a talented, young, preservice teacher of Japanese with an equal passion for technology. In her own words, the PSP 'has changed the way I think about professional improvement--I think a big part of professional development is to be able to bring yourself into your teaching, with your strengths. What skills do you have? What are your interests and passions? Bring that into your teaching'.

Ilona, a preservice teacher of primary Italian, said at the end of her PSP project (see below) that she had found 'her new crowd'. I understood this as a strong statement of her identification of a professional milieu that she found attractive, a club she was happy to join.

APPLYING THE PSP TO PRESERVICE LANGUAGES TEACHER EDUCATION

As a teacher educator, I use the PSP materials in four ways.

1. To provide an introduction to the professional community

Membership of a new community involves developing an understanding of its discourse, an empathy for its aspirations and values, and respect for the integrity of its self-understanding. The PSP materials are a rich resource for discussion and critical reflection in all of these areas and an effective way to introduce the professional context into which students are moving (Rosaen & Schram, 1998; Pachler, Barnes, & Field, 2009).

2. To stimulate intercultural development in preservice teachers

The language-specific annotations are a valuable identification of the individual characteristics and richness of each language and culture. The annotations provided fertile ground for students to identify and critically evaluate their own intercultural development and the modelling they will provide to school learners (Moloney, 2008; Sercu, 2006). Additionally, they promoted a wide range of interesting discussions and reflections on the limitations of student knowledge. For instance, Bianca reported that 'I thought, just by being an Italian Australian, that I knew everything about Italy. I realise I know very little'.

3. To model learning through inquiry and collaboration

Preservice teacher education strives to model good teaching practice, an important aspect of which is generating deeper learning through collaboration. The PSP materials present, alongside the statements relating to each of the standards, a range of effective questions that interrogate responses to the respective standards. These questions make the PSP documentation a valuable document for stimulating group discussions. Grappling with the demanding questions uncovers where students are 'at' in their development. The nature of the questions implies positive forward directions for future growth. Preservice teacher education is a unique time for subversively challenging perceptions, for sharing intercultural experiences of 'otherness' through narratives of upbringing, travel, culture and language. Mayer, Luke and Luke (2008) refer to the recognition and valuing of teacher 'intercultural capital' in the 21st century. Discussion of the Standards is an ideal forum for the development and recognition of such capital. Howard and Denning del Rosario (2000) confirm that 'only through on-going reflection, inquiry and examination of their changing patterns of thought and practice will new pedagogical practices begin in teachers work' (Howard & Denning del Rosario, 2000, p. 136).

4. To promote initiative in personal development projects

The PSP for practising teachers involved the individual design of a personal investigation to be carried out by each participant, with the aim of enhancing some aspect of their language teaching practice. This concept is readily transferable, albeit on a smaller scale, to preservice education. To this end, I designed a six week PSP project in the following format. After reading the relevant language-specific annotations in detail, and thinking about their specific needs, my students each designed a six week project. This involved identifying a specific aspect of their language teaching practice or knowledge to improve, and designing a strategy to address this development. The students presented the results of their projects at the end of semester, each expressing significant personal satisfaction. The outcomes were varied as shown by the following sample:

* Dominique used her IT literacy to build an improvised interactive whiteboard for language classroom use, with a Wii remote, a laptop with bluetooth, data projector, and an infrared light pen.

* Aidan interviewed Japanese youth in Sydney to update his knowledge of Japanese attitudes and values relating to employment and the financial crisis. The insights he communicated to the class engendered a discussion of how this valuable material could be integrated into intercultural strategies in class, and be used to enrich student skills in interpretive listening and reading.

* Jill took the PSP challenge to enrol in an extension French course to extend her language skills. She enjoyed it so much that she said, 'I would like to be able to focus on one element every six months to continue to improve'.

* Bianca, in light of her perception that she needed to enhance her knowledge of Italian culture, constructed for personal use, a one year Italian culture calendar of events. She plans to continue her research and integrate materials about each event into classroom lessons.

* Claudia, after decades in Australia, set about re-discovering her Germanness and improving her language skills. Gina spent time researching websites with French resources, and shared the results with the student group.

* Several other students set about consciously identifying and acquiring the language they would need to conduct most of their lesson in the target language, to 'break the mental habit of English'.

CONCLUSION

While the scope of the PSP did not necessarily encompass the preservice context, I would suggest that it provides an excellent foundation for quality language teacher education. This was confirmed by the enthusiastic uptake of PSP activities on the part of my students. With the addition of Stream C, and its focus on assessment, the PSP is sure to play a continuing role in the education of preservice languages teachers.

REFERENCES

DEST. 2005. Professional standards for accomplished teaching of languages and cultures. Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training.

Howard, T.C. & Denning del Rosario, C. 2000. Talking race in teacher education: the need for racial dialogue in teacher education programs. Action in Teacher Education, 21, 127-137.

Kagan, D. 1992. Professional growth among preservice and beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research, 62, 2, 129-169.

Mayer D., Luke C., & Luke, A. 2008. Teachers, national regulation and cosmopolitanism. In A. Phelan & J. Sumsion (Eds), Critical readings in teacher education: provoking absences, 79-98. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Moloney, R. 2008. You just want to be like that: teacher modelling and intercultural competence in young language learners. Babel, 42, 3, 10-16.

Nieto, S. 2000. Placing equity front and centre: some thoughts on transforming teacher education for a new century. Journal of Teacher Education, 51, 3, 180-187.

Pachler, N., Barnes, A., & Field, K. 2009. Learning to teach modern foreign languages in the secondary school. London: Routledge.

Rosaen, C.L. & Schram, P. 1998. Becoming a member of the teaching profession: learning a language of possibility. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14, 3, 283-303.

Scarino, A., Liddicoat, A.J., Crichton, J., Curnow, T.J., Kohler, M., Loechel, K., Mercurio, N., Morgan, A-M., Papademetre, L., & Scrimgeour, A. 2008. Professional Standards Project Languages--Professional Learning Program. Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Reltaions. Retrieved 31 May 2009 from http://www.pspl.unisa.edu.au/doclib/ guidelines_investigations.pdf

Sercu, L. 2006. The foreign language and intercultural competence teacher: the acquisition of a new professional identity. Intercultural Education, 17, 1, 55-72.

Trotman J. & Kerr, T. 2001. Making the personal professional: preservice teacher education and personal histories. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 7, 2, 157-171.

Robyn Moloney teaches in the Department of Education at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research interests include intercultural language learning development, use of ICTs in language education, and heritage language learners. She has taught Japanese, French, and German in schools. She can be contacted at robyn.moloney@mq.edu.au