Becoming a language teacher: Exploring the transformative potential of blogs

Multimodal postcards to future selves: exploring pre-service language teachers’ process of transformative learning during one-year teacher education programme

“…In accompanying written texts to the visual representations in the postcards, the trainees often described the type of language teacher that they would like to become and described their feelings (Taylor 2009) at the onset of the TEP. In the analysis of the written texts, we concentrated on feelings hinting at disorienting dilemmas, because negative feelings can be understood as a trigger for transformation (Mezirow 1978(Mezirow , 1991Arshavskaya 2017). Table 3 shows the distribution of the disorienting dilemmas mentioned by the pre-service teachers (N = 51) at the onset of the TEP.…”

“…The theory of transformative learning was initially used mainly to analyse holistic adult learning processes (Cranton 2009). Subsequently, the theory has been adapted into different contexts, for instance, in the context of teacher education (Weinberg et al 2020) and language teacher education (Arshavskaya 2017). As an example, Arshavskaya (2017) conducted case studies of two prospective language teachers who maintained blogs over the course of one academic semester (15 weeks).…”

“…In general, at all stages of their careers, teachers benefit from writing as a reflective practice. Several studies have demonstrated that reflective writing is beneficial when language teachers are learning how to teach (Burton 2009;Johnson and Golombek 2011) and to observe their transformative learning process (Arshavskaya 2017). Reflective writing mostly manifests as the writing of learning diaries and journals.…”

Social media in second and foreign language teaching and learning: Blogs, wikis, and social networking

“…Analysis of language use that indexed identity and positioning showed learners were very self-conscious of their inexperience as academic writing novices, questioning their own competence, but finding inspiration in provided narratives by non-native English speaking TESL professionals. Also exploring teacher identity development, Arshavskaya (2017) found that transformative learning can occur when teacher trainees reflect on triggering episodes and their future identities through blog-enhanced tasks, although some learners may respond better to discussion and more interactive mentorship styles that blogs do not support.…”

“…While methodologically rigorous, the facts that Bloch (2007) and Gebhard et al (2011) presented single case studies and that Sun & Chang's (2012) and Arshavskaya's (2017) participants were teacher trainees and thus perhaps self-selected do not necessarily make the case for wide-scale application of blog-enhanced L2 pedagogy. Still, they are quite rigorous methodologically and serve to inform practice in relatable situations.…”