English Language Student-Teachers Developing Agency Through Community-Based Pedagogy Projects

Abstract

This paper presents a narrative inquiry study on agency development in student-teachers of an English language teacher program at a public university in the south of Colombia. Our goal was to understand how student-teachers develop agency when narratively inquiring their community by planning and conducting community-based pedagogy projects on issues they found pertinent to investigate. The data were gathered through semi-structured focus group interviews, individual journal entries, and video-recorded talks about their inquiries. As a conclusion, we acknowledge that certain social and narrative practices such as interacting within their inquiry groups, interacting with their communities, voicing their communities’ necessities, and acting upon the inquired necessities facilitated developing agency and contributed to rethinking their roles as transformative members of their communities.

A Review of The Concept of Agency: An Eye-Opening Term Involved in Educational Research

“…For instance, the word agency can be found in many research articles. A good example are Hernández and Gutiérrez (2020) and Gallagher (2019) who address this concept for their research purposes and lead readers and researchers to an analysis of the word itself.…”

“…Similarly, Hernández and Gutiérrez (2020), in their research article, tackled the term agency as a way of developing through community-based pedagogies. In relation to this, agency is taken as a state of being that appears with giving conditions.…”

“…In other words, their article suggests developing agency by means of implementing communitybased pedagogies; thus, combining both approaches serve to generate the right conditions to promote the state of being and the attitude of agency. Moreover, community-based pedagogies allow Hernández and Gutiérrez (2020) to stimulate agency in students through the development of different projects in which their awareness took place, accompanied by the sense of taking action towards social situations. A feature that stands out here is the fact that agency can be linked with many terms and approaches, but keeping a similar perspective regarding awareness, identity, action, change, reflection, among others.…”

EFL Teachers’ Professional Identity: A Narrative Study With Colombian Graduate Students

“…We specifically searched for articles revolving around the themes of "identity, " "language teacher identity, " and "language teacher identity in Colombia. " This task led us to conclude that research studies in Colombia have explored LTI in diverse scenarios, that is, the intersection between LTI and undergraduate education (Hernández-Varona & Gutiérrez-Álvarez, 2020;Macías-Villegas et al, 2020); queer LTI (Lander, 2018;Ubaque-Casallas & Castañeda-Peña, 2021); LTI negotiation within the context of deterritorialized spaces (Guerrero & Meadows, 2015); the identity of indigenous English language teachers (Arias-Cepeda, 2020); and the intersection between LTI and autoethnography (Castañeda-Trujillo, 2020). These studies contribute to a wider understanding of how LTI has been integrated into the field of language education in the Colombian context.…”

Enacting Agency and Valuing Rural Identity by Exploring Local Communities in the English Class

“…Teachers can draw on community-based pedagogies (cbp) which are grounded in critical pedagogies that transform their daily realities into possible pedagogical sources for teaching and learning. Critical pedagogy has been central for teachers who want to promote changes in students and their communities (Hernández-Varona & Gutiérrez-Álvarez, 2020). According to Wink (2009), "critical pedagogy is a process that enables teachers and learners to join together in asking fundamental questions about knowledge, justice, and equity in their own classroom, school, family, and community" (p. 71).…”