Abstract
Introduction
ELTE programmes combine opportunities for the holistic development of future teachers’ English language proficiency (e.g. Güngör, 2020), linguistic understanding of English as a system (e.g. Anglada, 2020), and context-responsive English language teaching pedagogies (e.g. Guo, Tao and Gao, 2019) usually within sociocultural perspectives (Nguyen, 2019). Notwithstanding, there is less clarity about what funds of knowledge teacher educators deploy to make such opportunities successful.
Freeman, Coleman Webre and Epperson (2019) discuss that what counts as knowledge in English language teaching (ELT) should be the outcome of the interaction between two groups, the ELT community and ELTE. In this interaction, it is expected that the former informs the latter about what gaps, needs, challenges and opportunities emerge from English language learning settings so that ELTE is calibrated in such a way that future teachers are prepared to engage with and respond to those contextual needs. The authors observe that despite dialogue, participation, and even top-down curriculum implementation, it is teacher educators who select and curate what counts as knowledge in the profession. Hence, understanding teacher educators’ professionalism is central (Trent, 2013). Notwithstanding, little is known about what sources inform such complex and dynamic knowledge. Against this backdrop, the aim of this long-term case study is to identify a group of ELT teacher educators’ funds of knowledge and propose a taxonomy that may help understand and support teacher educators’ professional development.
Funds of Knowledge
Originally coined by Wolf (1966), the term
Over the years, the term has acquired different reconceptualizations to understand other educational actors’ biographies, and many of these may have run the risk of overextending the original concept (Oughton, 2010). According to Hoggs (2011), the concept funds of knowledge may also be interchangeably used as sources or areas of knowledge to capture the foundations that contribute to someone’s life capital and socially situated practices.
The concept has also gravitated to understand the formal and informal knowledge other educational actors hold. For example, in a qualitative study conducted with 10 teachers and their young learners, Hedges (2012) explores teachers’ funds of knowledge, which she defines as ‘the bodies of knowledge (including information, skills and strategies) that underlie the functioning, development and well-being of teachers in curriculum decision-making and interactions with young children in educational settings (13). The author explains that through different funds of knowledge teachers enhance their evidence-based practice. While the author describes both professional or formal (e.g. university courses’ influence) and personal or informal (e.g. personal lived experiences) funds of knowledge, emphasis is placed on the latter as these are usually relegated in university courses but present in continuing professional development initiatives based on reflective practice (e.g. Farrell and Kennedy, 2020). Hedges (2012) proposes the following classification of teachers’ funds of knowledge (Table 1):
Teachers’ funds of knowledge (Hedges, 2012).
Hedge’s (2012) classification of teachers’ funds of knowledge incorporates those areas often included in models of teachers’ professional knowledge (Johnson, 2009; Freeman and Johnson, 1998; Freemanet al., 2019; Wallace, 1991). According to recent discussions around the knowledge base in language teacher education, authors agree that what counts as knowledge should be field-driven and include a thorough contextually situated understanding of five intertwined areas: (a) content (role, features, and nature of English use today), (b) teachers (e.g. teacher identity, emotions, cognitions, agency), (c) learners (their prior experiences, motivations, reasons to study English), (d) pedagogy (how English is taught), and (e) language teacher education pedagogy, which responds to specific contexts and actors (Freeman, 2020; Johnson and Golombek, 2020; Le, 2020). The three funds of knowledge in Hedge’s (2012) classification seem to align themselves with the five areas as these areas benefit from disciplinary, situational, and personal knowledge.
While Hedge’s (2012) classification confirms that demonstrated view that teachers’ knowledge base draws on more than disciplinary knowledge, it details the sources and contexts that inform that knowledge. It should be noted that each classifying term is understood as a context to capture the settings in which teachers’ funds of knowledge develop. Family-based funds of knowledge are funds which teachers develop as a result of their personal and family experiences. In turn, centre-based funds of knowledge include teachers’ beliefs on education influenced by family-based funds of knowledge but which are operationalized and negotiated with other educators within a specific educational setting. Hedges (2012) views these two funds of knowledge as informal because they are based on socially situated personal experiences, which impinge on teachers’ professional practice. In contrast, community-based funds of knowledge include those professional sources that influence teachers’ professional knowledge and practice. In this study, I employ Hedge’s (2012) conceptualization to understand ELT teacher educators’ (rather than teachers’) funds of knowledge as it is a definition that captures educators’ biographies and both professional and personal sources of knowledge that inform their situated practice and understanding of teacher education.
ELT teacher educators’ knowledge base is also built on the five areas of teachers’ knowledge base mentioned above. However, its architecture includes a sophisticated understanding of disciplinary knowledge and language teacher education pedagogy, which are theoretically informed and historically and culturally situated (Peercy et al., 2019; Yuan and Hu, 2018). In relation to language teacher education pedagogy, Johnson and Golombek (2020) emphasize that teacher educators’ culturally responsive professional knowledge and practice must incorporate a self-inquiry dimension that allows them to make explicit their intentions and goals as a way to externalize their expertise and cognitions.
The same scholars mentioned in the preceding paragraph also include other dimensions of professional knowledge. Professional maturity, autonomy (i.e. teachers’ ability to take control of their professional practice and development), ability to support and encourage reflection, development of a self-reflexive attitude, development of emotional connections with student teachers, and a sense of vision and mission of teacher educators also constitute the knowledge that legitimizes their role. What is curated and delivered as knowledge in ELTE comes from the teacher educators’ own repertoire and knowledge accumulated over their career. Hence, understanding teacher educators’ funds of knowledge is pivotal to improve ELTE.
Methodology
The investigation started in 2014 and finished in November 2019. It adopted an interpretivist qualitative approach (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2018) to understand the funds of knowledge of a group of 13 ELT teacher educators working at one specific pre-service ELTE programme in Argentina with the aim of supporting their professional development and practice. The study was conceived as a long-term case study (Duff, 2020) since all the participants worked in the same programme and developed a professional relationship over the years. It is framed as long-term (Motteram, 2006) rather than longitudinal because the investigation did not concentrate on examining how the participants’ funds of knowledge shifted over time.
The programme prepared teachers to deliver ELT in kindergarten, primary and secondary education. It included 33 mandatory modules (Appendix 1), which provided student teachers with disciplinary and situated knowledge in the areas of education, applied linguistics and ELT.
Data were collected from the teacher educators who had an ELT background and led the English-medium modules. Of the 13 participants, 12 were from Argentina, and one was from Great Britain. All the participants held an undergraduate degree as teachers of English. Only two held a master’s degree in education or applied linguistics. At the start of the study, three had more than 20 years as teachers of English in primary and secondary education and five years as teacher educators in previous ELTE programmes. The other 10 had between two and five years of teaching experience in state schools and no experience as teacher educators. Below, the participants are mentioned using pseudonyms according to years of experience:
20 years of teaching experience: Aurelia, Berta, Cecilia
Two–five of teaching experience: Diana, Eugenia, Felicitas, Gabina, Hilda, Indira, Julieta, Karen, Leticia, and Margarita.
Prior to starting the study, each participant signed a written consent form that explained the purpose of the study, their rights as well what was required from them. Ethical procedures included safeguarding the participants’ anonymity, confidentiality and well-being. Given my professional involvement in the context of the study as programme leader, any issues associated with coercion, power-asymmetry or discomfort were discussed with the participants and the institution’s principal. To mitigate potential ethical issues given my dual role, classroom observations, which had been originally considered to explore links between self-reporting and observed practice, were disregarded. All the participants agreed to take part in the study and none of them withdrew from it.
Data were collected through two self-report instruments: individual interviews and significant circles. While these instruments allowed the participants to discuss their beliefs, I am aware of (1) the potential validity issues in using them given my researcher-programme leader role, and (2) the complexities, difficulties and limitations of accessing teacher cognition through self-reporting only (Basturkmen, 2012).
I held one 30–60 minute individual interview at the beginning of each term between 2014 and 2019. In total there were 12 individual interviews with each participant. Each interview started with these questions: What do you do to strengthen your professional knowledge? What sources help you increase your professional knowledge? Drawing on Mann (2011), all individual interviews included in this study were viewed as a co-construction with each participant. While I introduced the initial topic (e.g. sources of knowledge, significant circles), the participants had the agency to develop or introduce other topics that would help them articulate their insights.
In addition, at the end of the 2019 academic year, each participant was asked to draw a significant circle (Esteban-Guitart, 2016) to identify their funds of knowledge. Although this technique has usually been employed to identify participants’ funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart and Moll, 2014), in this study I employed it given the visual dimension and follow-up conversation it generates. In the significant circle, each participant was asked to place the most relevant funds of knowledge in the centre and organize other funds outwardly to illustrate decreasing order of importance. This technique was followed by a one-hour individual interview which allowed the participants to describe their significant circle, justify their beliefs and activity and add examples.
The data were collected primarily in Spanish (the author and participants’ L1); however, the significant circles and interviews exhibited instances of translanguaging (García and Wei, 2014) as the author and the participants resorted to their full linguistic repertoire (i.e. they used English, and in some cases French, alongside Spanish). The interviews were audio-recorded and orthographically transcribed for data analysis purposes. The participants’ significant circles were scanned. However, I redrew them using English for the purpose of consistency and dissemination of findings in the English-speaking community.
While the significant circles were scrutinized through qualitative content analysis (Selvi, 2020), the interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis procedures (Clarke and Braun, 2016). Thematic analysis was utilized as an iterative process that involved reading and re-reading the data sets. Deductive analysis following the categories found in Hedges (2012) was employed to classify the participants’ funds of knowledge. Notwithstanding, I created new codes for funds which did not match Hedges (2012)’s classification. With the aim of ensuring trustworthiness (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) and mitigating confirmability (influence of the researcher’s subjectivity as an insider in data analysis), a colleague external to the programme acted as an inter-rater of 60% of the data collected following a mixture of deductive, i.e. Hedge’s (2012) classification, and inductive coding. Discrepancies were solved through discussion until an inter-rater agreement of 85% was reached, a figure we considered acceptable. To contribute to the co-construction of knowledge, interview transcriptions and analysis were member-checked by the participants. None of the participants suggested data re-analysis, but two participants added clarifying statements to their interview transcriptions.
Findings
The participants’ funds of knowledge were identified through the interviews over the 2014–2019 period and the significant circles at the end of the 2019 academic year. Drawing on thematic analysis and frequency of keywords, the participants exhibited a plethora of funds of knowledge that represented their personal as well as professional contexts (See Appendix 2 for a detailed list).
Drawing on Hedges’ (2012) classification, the three experienced teacher educators’ knowledge derived from professional experience possibly self-assessed as good practice. Their teaching experiences may be subsumed under the centre-based context of funds of knowledge, as they are understood through their own beliefs and values about good practice. The rest of the funds may be associated with community-based funds of knowledge, where the term ‘community’ refers not only to the specific pre-service ELTE programme (e.g. peer teaching, language assistant) but ELTE in a broad sense (self-directed reading, materials from other programmes and courses). On the other hand, the early-career teacher educators, due to their lack of experience, prioritized community-based funds of knowledge such as reading, professional learning programmes (both face-to-face and online) and materials from other programmes.
Despite differences in the sources of knowledge chosen according to experience, there was unanimous agreement that the motivations behind such funds of knowledge were oriented by the teacher educators seeing themselves transitioning and inhabiting a new space (ELTE) and the intellectual challenge and need for self-efficacy in this new role. For instance, in 2015, Eugenia reflected: I think I choose attending conferences, reading, and webinars because I want to be a confident educator who’s good at preparing future teachers. I think I’ve been a good teacher in school, and so, I want to continue doing my best. And because I’ve chosen to be here given the intellectual challenge it brings, then it stands to reason that I continue learning through courses and the literature. (Eugenia, Extract 1)
Extract 1 reveals that despite different trajectories and different ways of finding community-based funds of knowledge, self-efficacy was the main driving factor behind their decisions as their funds were directed to the improvement of disciplinary knowledge (e.g. self-directed reading of volumes connected to the modules the participants led), language teacher education pedagogy (e.g. courses on language teacher education), and English language proficiency (e.g. reading fiction, having a language assistant). Self-efficacy is understood here as teachers’ beliefs and judgement of their competencies to achieve certain goals (Lamb and Wyatt, 2019).
At the end of the 2019 academic year, the participants’ significant circles revealed the most important funds of knowledge. Four significant circles have been selected as they represent the main differences and commonalities between the experienced and the early-career participants. Figure 1 shows Aurelia’s funds of professional knowledge. Aurelia was the most senior member of staff in the programme and she was planning to retire in 2020. She was in charge of the modules on phonetics and phonology.
Aurelia’s significant circle.
During the follow-up interview, Aurelia commented that in 2014 her professional knowledge about how to lead the modules derived from her past experience in a previous programme, her own professional learning and material from other current ELTE programmes. To a lesser extent, planning with colleagues and reflecting on the experience of teaching the same modules year after year provided her with the foundations to make sense of her reading of relevant literature. Hence, Aurelia’s funds of knowledge may represent the three contexts identified in Hedges (2012) (Table 1).
On her significant circle, Aurelia explained: I continue reading and benefiting from videos because it gives me new intellectual energy, and because I love what I teach! I love English and I enjoy helping student teachers improve their pronunciation and giving them tips about how to support others with their pronunciation. Keeping updated is essential, but in ELTE, your experience as a professional, as a person is just as important. We’re dealing with people. We’re preparing them to replace us, imagine! (Aurelia, Extract 2)
Extract 2 thus shows that Aurelia’s funds of knowledge were linked to the intrinsic motivation provided by the educational process itself, the subject matter, and her relatedness to her student teachers.
Figure 2 is the self-representation of Berta’s funds of knowledge. Berta co-led the modules on professional practice and ELT didactics with another participant. Similar to Aurelia, her own professional learning experience (ELTE programme) was important at the start but then became marginal and replaced by courses (e.g. online and blended courses on current issues in ELT), reading academic books about ELT pedagogies as well as general education, and peer teaching. However, her own teaching experience in state primary and secondary schools remained central.
Berta’s significant circle.
Figure 2 shows that community-based funds of knowledge (e.g. courses, experience, ELTE programme) in symbiotic relationship with centre-based funds, such as her own beliefs about reflections about good teaching, were decisive in her role as an ELT teacher educator.
As she described and reflected on her significant circle, Berta stressed: Because I co-lead the modules, which are essentially about teaching, the best knowledge I can bring is my own experience. More than 20 years teaching all kinds of learners, through all kinds of government and curriculum policies. I’ve been through so many reforms and here I am, sharing all that with the future teachers of this town. Though I must say that it’s not just my teaching experience, but my interpretation and reflections on it that I bring to the table when we plan each week. In our case, because the content is pedagogy, our experience is central and so our reflections. It’s not like teaching syntax or literature; here I’m teaching how to teach and that entails the deployment of all my pedagogical experience. (Berta, Extract 3)
Thus, it may be inferred that Berta’s funds of knowledge were directed by her drive to develop her self-efficacy. In her view, her teaching experience and reflective practices legitimized her role as an ELT teacher educator.
At the other end of the spectrum, the early-career teacher educators displayed over the years different sources of professional knowledge. In Figure 3, Eugenia placed reading (e.g. books and articles about discourse analysis as her module was about this area), online short courses on supporting language development, and knowledge from her own undergraduate ELTE programme at a national university. In a marginal position, Eugenia placed researching and reflective teaching on her own practices (in 2018 she became part of an action research study group) as well as her interaction with the US/UK language assistants.
Eugenia’s significant circle.
In the follow-up interview, Eugenia remarked that such sources of professional knowledge were central in her professional practice because they provided her with subject-specific knowledge to teach her module. On this aspect, she commented: If teachers want to be taken as professionals, then they must really know their subject. So, here we have the moral obligation to specialize in the area we teach and offer our student teachers quality and updated input. Besides, I’m passionate about teaching discourse analysis as well as improving my English, so I enjoy reading and taking courses. (Eugenia, Extract 4)
To a certain extent, Julieta’s views were somehow situated between Eugenia and the experienced teacher educators with reference to her selected funds of knowledge (Figure 4).
Julieta’s significant circle.
To Julieta, attending courses and ELT events provided her with pedagogical knowledge for teaching linguistics. She acknowledged that her lack of experience as a teacher educator drove her to take such courses when she joined the programme. However, after she gained some experience, she noticed that her experience both as a teacher and a teacher educator (trainer) informed her practices. In her circle, she also included a fund of knowledge towards which she exhibited negative attitudes: research. On this aspect, Julieta explained: I included it outside the circle because I don’t think that doing or reading primary research is helpful. All those articles are so complicated, always contextualized in affluent societies or universities. What does that have to do with me? And sometimes I read the implications, and again, they include two or three rather vague lines. In my case, or at least for the time being, research is not just unimportant, it’s even counterproductive as it makes feel furious about wasting my time. (Julieta, Extract 5)
Despite differences among the participants, it is clear that their motivation, vocational attitudes, relatedness and interest in the educational process of preparing future teachers (Lamb and Wyatt, 2019), subject matter and English as a language directed their choices of funds of knowledge. Such funds, following Hedges’ (2012) classification, were primarily situated in the community-based context. This behaviour is concomitant not only with the participants’ notion of self-efficacy but also with their teacher autonomy and agency. Their sense and practice of autonomy may also be supported in three interrelated elements: (a) their interest in establishing a community of practice, (b) the positive atmosphere created in the ELTE programme, and (c) their own valuing of peer teaching and collaborative work.
Discussion
According to the findings, ELT teacher educators’ funds of knowledge seem to find traction with what the teacher educators count as knowledge in relation to their sense of self-efficacy, disciplinary knowledge or the content of language teacher education (Johnson, 2009; Freeman, 2020). In addition, the participants made sense of their situated practices, beliefs and disciplinary knowledge through a reflexive disposition (Farrell and Kennedy, 2019).
The participants demonstrated not only awareness of disciplinary knowledge but also dimensions such as reflection to understand the complexity of their situated practice and language teacher education pedagogy (Johnson and Golombek, 2020; Peercy et al., 2019; Yuan and Hu, 2018). Hence, the ELT teacher educators in this study were oriented towards community-based funds of knowledge (except for Aurelia’s reference to her experience as a mother); their funds could be associated with the types of knowledge that usually constitute the knowledge base in ELTE (Johnson, 2009; Le, 2020).
Drawing on Hedge’s (2012) classification of teachers’ funds of knowledge and the funds of knowledge identified among the participating teacher educators in this study, I propose a taxonomy that may help to understand the sources that teacher educators employ to sustain their professional knowledge and practice as they navigate both ELT and ELTE (Table 2).
A taxonomy of teacher educators’ funds of knowledge.
In Table 2, the first type of knowledge, knowledge of ELT, represents the formative-propositional and instrumental knowledge necessary to teacher effectiveness. This type of knowledge, following the participants’ views, comprises English language proficiency and the identity of the ELT teacher educator as a proficient L2 user. The focus on English language proficiency may be particularly important to teacher educators whose L1 is not English or who feel less confident about their English use. Knowledge of English language teaching also encompasses disciplinary knowledge (knowledge about English as a system), and ELT pedagogy that caters for different learners in different contexts in the educational system (Anglada, 2020). In the case of ELT teacher educators, ELT pedagogy plays a pivotal role as they believe that all the modules in the programme should be oriented towards equipping the student teachers with quality context-responsive practices.
As the ELT teacher educators perceive themselves as responsible for offering congruent practices, they seek to exhibit in their own teaching those skills they wish their student teachers to apply, adapt, or transform in their own future teaching. This aspect seems to be particularly found among the teacher educators in charge of modules on ELT approaches, professional practice, and the practicum. In this regard, language teacher education pedagogy becomes an essential element that will help them display their knowledge of ELT. Although reflection, criticality, and research are placed under this type of knowledge as the teacher educators set to examine their own ELTE teaching by creating a self-inquiry dimension (Johnson and Golombek, 2020), it would be more appropriate to say that reflective teaching and criticality cut across all types and funds of knowledge. By choosing certain funds of knowledge and navigating them, the ELT teacher educators select, curate, and make informed decisions which may reveal their reflective and critical orientations towards the profession.
Through the selection and engagement with individual- as well as community-based funds of knowledge for the development of their knowledge of ELT and language teacher education pedagogy, the participating teacher educators seemed to establish links between the ELT community and ELTE. Drawing on the discussion of Freeman et al. (2019) of what counts as knowledge in ELT, the participants’ selected funds and sources of knowledge indicate that the ELT community expects that ELTE programmes prepare future teachers who are proficient L2 users who also possess linguistic knowledge about English and whose practice is contextually situated. Hence, teacher educators’ sense of professionalism (Trent, 2013) is guided by funds of knowledge that help them strengthen interaction between the ELT community and ELTE and enhance their self-perceptions of autonomy and self-efficacy as critical constituents of ELT teacher educators’ professional and social responsibility.
What may be worth noting is that while Hedge’s (2012) classification of teachers’ funds of knowledge comprises primarily personal and, to a lesser extent, professional sources arranged into three contexts (family-, centre-, and community-based), the taxonomy of ELT teacher educators’ funds of knowledge proposed here may depend on teacher educators’ access and manipulation of different opportunities and initiatives according to their autonomy and sense of self-efficacy. Formal sources of knowledge appear to be prioritized by the participants; however, the experienced teacher educators also included family-based funds such as their experience as mothers (Figure 1).
The taxonomy of teacher educators’ funds of knowledge in ELTE shows that individual- as well as community-based funds of knowledge shape teacher educators’ knowledge base, which consists of two intertwined areas: knowledge of ELT and language teacher education pedagogy. The funds included in both areas of knowledge confirm that teacher educators also inform their professionalism through disciplinary as well as personal knowledge gained through reflective practice and lived experiences as educators. Last, the taxonomy reveals that teacher educators’ funds of knowledge seek to narrow the distance between teacher education and practice by drawing on their experience as teachers themselves. The taxonomy poses important implications for supporting teacher educators’ professionalism, motivation, autonomy, and sense of self-efficacy. These are addressed in the following section.
Conclusion
In this six-year study, a group of 13 teacher educators from a pre-service ELTE programme in Argentina described their funds of knowledge by means of interviews and the drawing of a significant circle that represented their retrospective views of what sources informed their professional knowledge.
The study collected data sparingly only through self-reporting and was limited to a small group of teacher educators from one institution. My dual role as programme leader and researcher may have affected the participants’ responses and hence the validity of the two instruments utilized. Despite these limitations, the findings may indicate that teacher educators, in their identity and agency as committed professionals who wish to contribute to the improvement of English language teaching provision, exhibit a wide range of individual- as well as community-based funds as they gain experience and expertise, both in synergy, in ELTE.
In terms of implications, this study highlights the importance that building a professional community in ELTE plays. In this sense, ELTE institutions should support teacher educators by creating conducive conditions that enable them to seek personal as well as collective forms of professional development in ways which are context-responsive and sustainable. As mentioned by the participants, further support to attend courses offered by teacher associations not only allows teacher educators to enhance their professionalism but it helps them become part of and contribute to a professional community of practice through which they can create new bonds with other teacher educators. By extending their professional networks, teacher educators can maximize community-based funds of knowledge such as peer teaching with colleagues based elsewhere or the use of materials from other ELTE programmes.
Another central implication is the necessity to recognize and utilize teacher educators’ knowledge and local knowledge in general as potent sources of educational transformation and growth. By promoting and profiting from local knowledge, teacher educators and their institutions create spaces where individual-based funds of knowledge may become community-based funds for other colleagues.
As our understanding of ELT teacher educators is still in its infancy, future studies should examine how funds of knowledge are connected to identity, agency, and situated practice. Studies which include classroom observation and analysis of teaching and learning artefacts may also help describe how teacher educators’ funds of knowledge influence their pedagogical decisions in terms of, for example, module design, delivery, feedback and assessment.
Footnotes
Funding
ORCID iD
