Narratives

Narratives on Teaching philosophy, experiences, feelings and beliefs:

The following text is an outcome of an invitation from my TPD tutors in order to “engage in dialogic reflection about my practical and academic paths”, in a first part. Then the request was guided to “the influences that the Education course of studies made me as a person and as a professional”, and finally my teachers asked me to “focus on my daily experience to describe my beliefs about the ‘work’ an English teacher should do and what I do”

I used the language for communicating and working in tourism here in Argentina and traveling around England, France, Spain, Morocco, and Mexico. Then I had some experiences helping some students to study English at home. After that I had some short experiences working as a teacher in rural schools where there were not teachers to cover the hours in this subject, so with these experiences I could see that I liked the job, I enjoyed with the children and I realized that I could use my knowledge to improve it and focus my attention on expanding my understanding of how we learn language and how we can teach it better.

I took the decision of becoming a teacher speaking with my girlfriend about my job and about how much I liked it, I remember that I wanted to find ways to engage students in their English classes and this was a main point for me. So, I begun searching for possibilities in different institutions and finally I choose this institute because of the distance modality.

I always liked to learn and show what I learned, and I also loved to interchange knowledge about different topics with different people.  Then I discovered how much I enjoyed being a mediator or interlocutor in different conversations because I always felt that I could easily feel in the others’ shoes.

In my case being a teacher appeared to me as a possibility for working first, and then improving different aspects for working in classrooms with different people became a main intention and aspiration. So I couldn’t say that I choose the decision of being a teacher; being a teacher came to me as the result of looking for different working possibilities appropriated to my likes and preferences, and then my intentions and aspirations were to improve my own skills for doing my job better.

I studied English since I was nine years old and when I was eighteen I left my town and I went to the city, and from that moment I have worked in different jobs using English to communicate, all this worked as learning experiences to me since in each one of these instances I learned new things and I used language with real intentions for communicating. I also did different courses abroad while I was working in international hotels and restaurants, this gave me the possibility of observing different teachers doing their job and it influenced in my decision of developing me in this profession.

All these experiences are good influences to me since I have always loved to learn about different cultures and their main aspects as languages. Some of them are a good example to follow and some other make me reflect on ways and strategies which I wouldn’t replicate in my own classes.

When I first started teaching I felt me insecure and doubtfully but also happy and enthusiastic. Facing a big class of thirty students coming from different realities with no experience in teaching and trying to make them engage in their learning process made me very anxious at first. But then I realized how important these classes could be for these children to socialize and develop different aspects of their personalities, and I started to administrate my expectations about their learning progress.

In my first teaching experience I remember that the group was used to use a textbook to work in class “The dream team”, so I just opened the book in the page they were and started with the first exercise, I immediately thought that I could do the job because I managed the vocabulary and the target language, and I also could feel a strong connection with students what made me feel great. However, later on I realized that following a textbook and being empathic with children were not enough and I started researching on how to be a better teacher.

I have started studying online 1 year after I had started teaching English. Now that I am finishing my studies, I can consider many aspects of teaching and learning that I could not see before starting my studies. I think that an English teacher should handle first those aspects related to the language itself like its grammar, semantic, phonology, pragmatics, morphology and syntax. Then it is important that a teacher could be well informed about other central features of language learning like those related with human behaviour, psychology, pedagogy, and didactics, among which we can find topics as stages of development, learning strategies, learning styles, approaches to language learning, and theories about learning and teaching.

There is an essential aspect of knowledge and ability that a teacher, in my opinion, should have and this is the capacity of facing different kind of personalities with different realities always open minded in order to keep rapport with students without losing control of the classes.  This is when a teacher must interrelate his/her knowledge of those aspects mentioned above and also some other very important acquired during life like values and emotions from his/her family and personal environment’s history.

I have previous learning experiences in two other teacher training programmes, and I think that these experiences also collaborated in the understanding of main ideas, then deeper explored in this training course.

Regarding my desire of studying online, I decided to take up an online education course of studies because I live in a town where this modality is the most comfortable and convenient, since there are not more possibilities to do a similar course if one doesn’t want to travel several times a week. When thinking about how I felt while being an online student I could say that there have passed a wide variety of feelings and emotions. One of the thought I have had many times in these last years was “Why didn’t I do this training when I had the possibility of doing it without working and having a family at the same time?”, it was a time of exigencies and sometimes it was hard. Beyond that, I enjoyed a lot reading about so many interesting things and discovering so many stimulating techniques and methods. I also think that being an online student kept me in contact with new technology that is very helpful for us, since, as we know, one of the challenges more stimulating for teachers and education is the impact of the communicative and informative new technologies.

Moreover, being an online student influenced my work in each step of my teaching practice, tasks and functions because it gave me a guide on how to use new resources for teaching and learning, and also permitted me to discover and explore functional ways of searching, sightseeing, linking and sharing information in a more modern and updated way that at the same time keeps me in touch with any new and fresh information about teaching and learning.

All these learning experiences and knowledge constructed and helped me in my field experiences for my pre-service practices because I could have all this information and search for new for developing them. The tutors’ support was relevant for this instance because I could review mistakes in my lesson plans and redo those aspects that they mentioned me carrying me to reflect on relevant information existing in theories, methods and approaches seen before in the training course.

As I said before, the academic knowledge explored with the tutors’ guidance and with the virtual student’s community in this course of studies is relevant to be well informed about essential facts for teaching, this vast quantity of theory mixed with years of experience are a great background to keep learning and discovering new data. To me, this knowledge about teaching and learning must also be continuously updated, so a distinctive feature of an English teacher should be the correct use of this information through his/her practices in the classrooms and the continuous desire of keep learning while she/ he works. Another very important distinctive feature it’s the ability to use these knowledges in order to create appropriated context to the learning process, as we have studied language occurs spontaneously and it is learned in a natural way when we learn it in the real life, and this is the way we should teach it, looking and creating appropriate context that makes it alive.

All these knowledges have influenced me first as a person; each experience we live sculpts and polishes our personality and being in contact with tutors, partners, texts and information in the course was a long and strong experience that affects me as a person. I can relate everyday feelings, emotions and experiences with all this data, this gives me the possibility of having a wider and clearer point of view.

They also influenced me as a professional since studying helped me to review important features of language, important facts about human relationship and their implications in the student’s learning process, and gave me a background knowledge on teaching and learning that I can use every day in my working life.

I must say that the training course also permitted me to develop self confidence in the classroom and with my colleges, which at the same time makes me feel more comfortable when doing my job, giving me tools for awaking student’s motivation and making more interesting classes by creating better learning contexts.

I work in a rural secondary school, framed in an alternative programme where the majority of students come from agricultural establishments, live together and study for one week in the school and then go for two weeks to their homes, where they have to complete homework and tasks taken from the school. The school is placed in a fertile area of the Buenos Aires Province called “Pampa Humeda” and families living in the rural area find in this institution the possibility of making their children go to the school without leaving them in a regular school every day.

Thus, I could say that my work is a thirty per cent teaching English and the other seventy is dedicated to many other tasks as looking after students in the breaks, making them do their activities in their coexistence in the school, they also sleep in the school so each teacher working here must sleep with them one night every two weeks, go and visit the families in their homes in the countryside, and many other tasks that depend on the area that each teacher is. In our programme we are considered not just teachers but “Promotores Comunitarios”, the programme is thought to keep hold the local costumes, and to foster the family farming.

Therefor my teaching practice consist on having three or four encounters of approximately one hour in the week that the students are in the school, and depending on what we could work in this week give them tasks/ homework for the following two weeks when they will be working alone in their homes.

As you might imagine teaching English in this circumstances/ settings is an everyday challenge, I use a selection of unities taken from textbooks as the guide for my practices and I try to include as many resources as I can, like role plays, songs, experiments, games, and projects.

I would like to continue polishing my plans using that knowledge and experience kept in my job and in this course; in order to organize my teaching practices in units and/ or projects that consider the given settings, our particular programme, and the curriculum proposals.

Being an English teacher for me is something that has changed a lot from the day I started teaching. In the beginning I thought that I could teach students from my knowledge of what I knew about this language, but I rapidly realized that I had to learn much more about the language itself, didactics, pedagogy, linguistics, pragmatics, psychology and other important aspects about learning and teaching studied in this course.

However I don’t think that being aware about all the concepts, ideas, theories, approaches and other information studied in an English Teaching Learning Course like this is enough for being a good teacher. In my opinion, good teachers make their students feel comfortable and motivated while they learn without knowing they are learning. The real challenge is to generate real situations where students are immersed while they learn.  Being conscious of the theory helps to do this job, but in my opinion it is also very important the kind of relation that teachers have with their students, the emotional aspects of our relationships are imperative for the learning process; hence the importance of the concept seen in our course with the name of “rapport”, when people are in a sympathetic relationship or understanding. This last aspect is not only given by the teachers’ theory background, but, to my mind, it is set by emotions generated by the teacher’s ability to feel empathy with their students.

My expectations about this job is to create those conditions named before so as to make everyone feel more comfortable and relaxed, circumstances that I feel are not only the ideal to learn but also important for our health.

This profession includes functions/ duties/responsibilities that can vary depending on our desires, intentions and becoming as professionals. In my case if I need to mention the most important I could mention planning for English classes, planning for other subjects and instruments in the programme on my charge, being in class with students, looking after students, planning and working on areal and school projects, planning and working with partners and the community in projects and events organized by the institution and community, visiting families, organizing this visits, going to events, study trips, and competitions as the educator in charge, working in the production area of the school with poultry, the rabbit borrow, the pigpen, the orchard, the cattle, participating in meetings and encounters with the municipality and other institutions and actors in the community, being a tutor of some students; guiding and helping them in the elaboration of main projects they have to do in different years, training in different courses given by the Ministry of Education or other sources. I do all these with other colleagues, students or community members.

These entire tasks are set by the programme in which the school is framed that is called C.E.P.T., and some of them like planning for the subjects are also framed by the corresponding curriculum in each course.

There exist in the institution an organization where there are different roles and teachers working in each of them, there is a director, a secretary; there are coordinators and support teachers in each area. Each one of them has different responsibilities in order to accomplish the proposals in the mentioned programme.

There have passed almost ten years working in this school, and each year I feel more comfortable, of course there are instances more difficult than other and some of them get really hard, like in every job, but in general I love this job, I love to be in contact with children and families, in some way or another this contact make me feel more alive.

All the functions and tasks mentioned before have different degrees of priority during the year, I think that the care of the children is one of the most energy demanding, and at the same time it is also the field where I most want to improve because the more tools I find to work with them the better is our interaction and this becomes in a lot of wellness, what makes my work less tiresome.

I believe that the tasks I do always influence me personally and professionally, as I already talked about, I consider that we are a sum of experiences which polish our personality, we are what we do and what we have done. Each day gives us new experiences and many other that are not so new, and that we can relate and analyse making connections, recollecting information and creating new thoughts, ideas, feelings and emotions.