ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on online educational sessions of a continuing teacher education programme. The aim of this programme is to give a contribution to the continuing education of teachers of English as critical professionals, aware of discursive classroom practices, able to analyze them in the light of objectives to be reached and knowledge to be constructed. The paper gives a detailed account of how teachers deal with central issues in face to face reflective sessions and online interactive discussions and shows the results of a pilot intervention aiming at helping teachers develop more reflective and critical perspectives. Maria Antonieta Alba Celani and Heloisa Collins The research problem in the context of online interactionsClose observation of asynchronous discussions in the online component of the program has shown that a large majority of contributions are directed to the teacher only, do not show explicit connections with other messages and focus on the exchange of shared information and reiteration of common problems and dilemmas. This is considered to be an inadequate development of the program that included, among its aims, to promote mutual collaboration among participants to foster new teaching ideas and professional solutions, to encourage reflective discussions about those issues and to support close social ties and the formation of an online learning community.This kind of problem situation has also been reported by other researchers that have been involved in mapping the possibilities and limitations of asynchronous conferencing for the development of critical thinking in higher education (Garrison et al. 2003, Pawan et al. 2003, Gunawardena et al. 1998and Kanuka and Anderson 1998. In fact, asynchronous online discussions potentially seem to offer the ideal conditions for intense reflective discussions.Asynchronicity allows participants to elaborate their thinking at their own pace, to plan and structure their contributions carefully, to review their writing for appropriateness of content and structure before they make it available to other people, to estimate the relevance of their own contribution in the context of other people's and to participate freely, without the constraints of face-to-face competitions to take the floor. Besides, since all communication is registered by the system, remains available and can be retrieved in different forms of organization (by date, by communicative thread, by author and by subject), asynchronicity makes it possible for participants to revisit their own messages and raise their awareness about how efficiently they can define or understand a problem or an issue. In other words, evaluation of ones' own performance, or other people's in complex activities, for example, connection of ideas and synthesis, can be made more helpful and efficient.Connectivity, in turn, allows for quick delivery of contributions to the forum and offers all participants full access to the complete set of messages previously sent, to the last minute. This allows for feelings of belong...

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The aim of this paper is to discuss to what extent reflective sessions can become a tool for teacher empowerment when included as a component of a reflective teacher education in-service course, and understood as a classroom activity which provides the possibility for a new type of discursive organisation to emerge. The discussion will be of a twofold nature: on the one hand it will focus on the need to provide Brazilian state school teachers of English involved in a continuing education programme with a context conducive to reflective practice and, on the other hand, it will focus on the effectiveness of organizing that context as discussion dyads, so as to create a collaborative set up for participants to examine their classes critically. The aim set for the participants is learning how to evaluate each other's classroom practice by looking at it as a locus of investigation and of theory (de)construction. The paper discusses the educational process evolving from the discussions by analysing the dyads' discourses (Bronckart, 1999), i.e., the linguistic discursive choices that reveal their motives when acting with a pair in order to evaluate their classroom practices critically. This will also shed some light on the level of effectiveness of the tool itself

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