Presenter: Dr. Douglas Fleming, Professor, University of Ottawa
Venue: PCN 1306A, Ponderosa Commons North: Oak/Cedar House
To ensure the safety and well-being of our speaker and participants, there will be limited seating capacity for in-person attendees of up to 12 people. Seating will be offered on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will also be additional seating arrangements available in the Multipurpose Room (MPR 2012).
International Second Language Teacher Professional Development:
De-colonial Response-able Research and Teaching Challenges in the Chinese Context
In 2018, 104 experienced English language teachers from the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Gansu attended a three-month professional-development training at the University of Ottawa. The final cohort of a four-year project, these teachers participated in lectures and discussions on theory, small group workshops focused on ESL methodology, language training, public school visits, field trips and conversion practice. I supervised both the teaching and the research associated with the project. In this talk, I place the project into a broader context by first outlining some of the historic, policy and pedagogical contexts of English language teaching in China. I then go into the characteristics of the project before describing the research procedures and findings associated with it. I will highlight the challenges my colleagues and I had as teachers and researchers, especially in terms of de-colonialization. As I will outline, the project was moderately successful in challenging colonialism. However, I will also describe how challenges developed in terms of (1) cause-effects within program evaluation research, (2) objectivity and authenticity of data, and (3) institutional resistance to attempts at de-colonialization. As a result, I recommend an ethics of response-able research (Murris & Bozalek, 2019; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017) that guards against presenting findings as fixed interpretations that perpetuate epistemic dependencies.
Douglas Fleming is a professor/professeur titulaire at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education. HIs research and teaching focus on ESL and critical notions of citizenship that are related to second language immigrant and marginalized populations (esp. in terms of social class, race and gender), critical pedagogy, equity, multilingual communities, language assessment, philosophy (esp. post-structural French theorists such as Deleuze) and qualitative research methods. Prior to graduating from UBC’s LLED on 2007, Douglas worked for 20 years as a public school continuing education teacher and administrator (Toronto and Surrey) while participating in professional, curriculum and material development projects for the federal government, numerous NGO’s, a variety of advisory boards, professional organizations and school districts. Douglas is passionate about his family, politics, amateur astronomy and fishing.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).