Puzzling, and puzzling about puzzle development

Abstract

This paper has two roles in this collection. First, it illustrates Exploratory Practice (EP) in action, with two classroom investigations. Secondly, it goes further, and throws light on the key mechanism of EP (see Allwright, this issue, Sections III.1(d) and IV.2) - puzzlement. It thus presents two different puzzling processes, the EP process as set out in the introductory paper to this issue, and a meta-process of puzzling about our own puzzlement processes. First, we carried out separate research studies as EP practitioners, with one of us investigating the puzzle, ‘does the dictionary really help our students to understand the text?’, and the other investigating the puzzle, ‘why do my students translate words even when they’ve already understood their meanings in English?’ Then we puzzled about the process of puzzle development itself. This further investigation contributed, we believe, to a better understanding about how intra and inter puzzlement processes can be integrated. Our emerging understandings led us to suggest that we mentally operate in a puzzlement zone while working with our puzzles. Drawing on a possible parallel with Vygotsky’s (1984) notion of ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) and on the ZPD’s levels of development (actual development level and level of potential development), we hypothesize that we mentally act at similar levels - the actual understanding level and the level of potential understanding - while working with our puzzles in this puzzlement zone. We present our work together as one way of incorporating EP into research at Master’s level.

From Teaching Points to Learning Opportunities and beyond

“…I have developed my argument for practitioner research at length elsewhere and so will not pursue it here (see Allwright, 2003aAllwright, , 2003b except to say that it fundamentally underlies the notion of Exploratory Practice, a principled framework for practitioner research in the language classroom. 1 Exploratory Practice has arisen out of my concern, and especially that of Miller and colleagues (see, e.g., Cunha, 2004;Kuschnir & Machado, 2003;Lyra, Fish Braga, & Gomes Braga, 2003;Miller, 2003;Miller & Bannell, 1998) in Rio de Janeiro for teacher and learner development. Exploratory Practice was developed out of two ethical concerns: (a) the damaging split between researchers and teachers, and (b) the high risk of burnout associated with current proposals for teacher-based classroom research.…”

From research-as-practice to exploratory practice-as-research in language teaching and beyond

“…Exploring the fused elements of practice and theory through puzzling has been connected to a Vygotskyan approach. The Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) was reconceived as a ‘Puzzlement Zone’ (Kuschnir & Machado, 2003, p. 174) activating practitioner curiosity. Positioning learners and teachers as co-researchers extends to include teacher educators (Miller, 2012; Miller and Cunha, 2017) curriculum designers (Smith, 2009; Biçer, 2018; Doğdu & Arca, 2018) educational psychologists (Apolinário, 2015, 2017), and family members (Silva & Braga, 2009).…”

Trainee teachers' understanding of content/language connections

“…I decided to take an EP stance to the project -investigating not only what the trainees learned and understood but also investigating how I taught the project, and what I understood that to mean. I also felt that a puzzlement approach (Kuschnir & Machado, 2003) rather than a problem-solving one was appropriate, allowing me to consider what the trainees saw and understood as crucial language-content links, rather than wonder how I could get them to see what I saw or push them to understand as I understood.…”