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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Collaborative classroom research through the Exploratory Practice framework

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Photo credit: Middle school Spanish class by flickr user woodleywonderworks Creative Commons License

Editor’s note: the following is an excerpt from “Exploratory practice: a way of opening up access to research by classroom teachers and learners” by Assia Slimani-Rolls in the book “New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom”, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This chapter shows how teachers can integrate research into their teaching in a straightforward and feasible way with the Exploratory Practice (EP) framework. The author organized a research project with a group of teachers who met together regularly to support each other in their individual exploratory practices. The team’s resulting work demonstrates many facets of open education: experimentation by teachers, support from other teachers, and giving students more agency in the classroom.

It remains relevant for teachers to engage in research in order to contest their tacit understanding and ensure that their classroom practice is not based only on intuition and experience. It is essential to realise that teachers cannot undertake research in the same way academic researchers do because their training and working conditions differ drastically. Exploratory Practice (EP) has put forward a principled framework (Allwright, 2003) to empower teachers and their learners to understand better their practice by investigating teaching puzzles, such as “why do my students make disruptive use of mobile phones during my lessons?”, as Lecumberri’s (2018) study illustrates.

EP believes that asking ‘why’ instead of ‘what’ questions leads to a deeper understanding of complex issues rather than finding solutions which may work in some circumstances but not in others (for more teacher and learner puzzles see Allwright, 2003; Allwright & Hanks, 2009; Dikilitas & Hanks, 2018; Slimani-Rolls & Kiely, 2018).

In the framework of EP, quality of life is prioritised in the classroom because it is believed that it is the search for quality of life that paves the way to quality of work. When teachers and learners feel respected, listened to, and enjoy rather than endure their classroom experiences, then they invest their efforts in developing the quality of their work. Seeking to understand quality of life should come before attempting to bring any change because understanding is “a prerequisite to intelligent decision-making” (Allwright & Hanks, 2009, p. 151).

The principles of collegiality and inclusivity for mutual development are crucial to the research enterprise. Indeed, it is imperative that all those involved in the research are given the opportunity to contribute with their ideas and, by the same token, derive a positive learning experience. In particular, inclusivity of learners as co-partners is essential as EP suggests that learners are an integral part of the classroom environment and that their involvement in the search for its understanding is paramount.

In order to make sense of their practice without getting burnt out, EP recommends that teachers integrate the search for understanding into their teaching routine so that both, teaching and research, get done at the same time. For this purpose, EP proposes that teachers use normal classroom activities as research tools to investigate the teaching puzzles. These activities can include brainstorming sessions, class discussion, pair/group work, reading comprehension texts, surveys, video recording, and any other pedagogic activity that teachers find suitable. Developing expertise in using the tools of their trade as investigative instruments would make the teachers’ search for understanding feasible and sustainable.

  • Read the rest of the chapter, including the description of Lecumberri’s research on the puzzle “why do my students make disruptive use of mobile phones during my lessons?”, and information about where teachers can engage with exploratory practice.

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Dr Assia Slimani-Rolls is Associate Professor at Regent’s University London. She has co-authored a book with Richard Kiely on Exploratory Practice as continuing form of professional development for language teachers and is currently working with Dr Ines Miller and her colleagues on a British Council funded research project (2018-2019) whose main objective is to examine the delayed impact of the principles of Exploratory Practice (EP).

Inspiring case studies of open practices to engage teachers and students

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Editor’s note: the below post is the forward by Carl S. Blyth, COERLL director, to the recently published book New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, edited by Anna Comas-Quinn, Ana Beaven, Barbara Sawhill. The forward carries a CC BY license.  

Today, in the field of foreign language teaching, there is much talk of shifting paradigms. The term paradigm was popularized by the American physicist Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is neither linear nor continuous, but rather subject to abrupt shifts in the consensus of a scientific community. To illustrate this phenomenon, Kuhn cites the well-known shift in astronomy from geocentrism (the belief that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth) to heliocentrism (the belief that the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun). Kuhn stresses that paradigms are defined by contrasting concepts and discourses and, as a result, are largely incommensurable. Kuhn also notes that paradigm shifts are not only a matter of accepting new facts, but of reorganizing those facts into a new worldview. In other words, paradigm shifts entail objective as well as subjective change.

Despite examples of revolutionary change in the sciences, paradigm shifts in the humanities – such as in foreign language education – appear to be more gradual. Most foreign language educators integrate new ideas into their curricular and pedagogical practices in an incremental process of professional development. Personally, I believe that paradigm change in foreign language teaching is largely a matter of educators learning by example from each other. Simply put, there is nothing more powerful than a case study for catalyzing change in our field. And in this book, New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom, foreign language specialists share their stories of personal and professional transformation in the well-known form of a case study. Following the same format, each case study provides the reader with the necessary information to understand and to implement a specific pedagogical or curricular innovation. For example, each case study includes a detailed description of a new project, the intended student outcomes, as well as the tools and resources used in the project.

While many case studies focus on the use of ready-made Open Educational Resources (OERs), others describe how to integrate Open Educational Practices (OEPs) into foreign language classes. Several case studies explain how to implement principles of open pedagogy such as the creation of a Wikipedia page or a translation of a TED Talk by the students themselves. In such cases, students are challenged to follow the editorial guidelines of Wikipedia and TED for the creation of open content. Thus, in the open language classroom, students share their knowledge with the world while, at the same time, improving their proficiency in the target language. In short, each case study described in this book is a beautiful illustration of the creative commons in action. I sincerely hope that foreign language educators who read these case studies will embrace the affordances of openness for themselves and their students and thereby shift the paradigm one classroom at a time.

For an open world.

Looking Back on Four Years of COERLL Projects

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COERLL’s 2014-2018 Title VI national foreign language resource center federal grant, and the projects funded by the grant, will soon be coming to an end.

COERLL and the project teams have learned a lot during this grant about the potential and the challenges of open educational resources. Each project had slightly different goals and a different way of reaching those goals. For every idea you see implemented in these materials, there is another great idea that we just didn’t have time for… but we hope to work on more of these in the future. And perhaps our reflections on these projects can provide some guidance or inspiration for those of you who may be considering creating your own open educational resources.

You can read about each of our projects by clicking the links below. Each of the projects was managed by faculty, created through faculty and graduate student labor, and supported by technical, graphic design, pedagogical, and administrative assistance from COERLL and other centers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Thank you to all of the project teams! It has been wonderful working with you and we are proud to help share your work.

Open Content Means Open Data

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Photo credit: flickr user Tayloright Creative Commons License

When we talk about the importance of open content, there are a few clear advantages that are consistently mentioned including access, cost, and the ability to remix. Often neglected from the discussion is the data created and collected by learners when using online resources. Much in the same way Facebook, Google and Amazon have created business models by providing online resources and then monetizing the data, we should be aware the same model exists in education as well.

This isn’t to say that all open content creators are ignorant of the importance of their data. EdX has made the improvement of online education a central part of their mission. However, we should all take this a step further. First we should very publicly guarantee the privacy of all data created by learners using our projects. Anonymized data will only be given to researchers in accordance with their institution’s research review process and will not be sold under any circumstance. Second, we should be open about the data we are collecting and encourage researchers in the field to make use of our datasets.

For The Mixxer, a social networking site for language learners seeking to language exchanges via Skype, this means providing a clear (and extremely short) privacy policy. I also include an invitation to researchers on the About page and will present the type of data available at IMFLIT, a conference on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), tandem learning, intercultural communication, and foreign language learning.

Compared to many other open education resources, The Mixxer is rather small with between 30 and 40,000 active users per month. However, as a social networking site, I do collect significant data on each user to help them find potential language partners, including their native language(s), language(s) they are studying, and optionally their age and country of residence. Connected to this data is site activity including frequency of visits to the site, number of friend requests, and any writing each user has submitted along with corrections they have received or provided. This data can also be used to send targeted surveys to ask users about their language learning. To get a better idea of the type of data that can be collected, see my paper on FLTMag.

I should also mention the kind of data that I cannot or will not provide. For most users, the exchanges themselves happen separately from site via Skype. While they can message each other on the site, I am not willing to provide the texts of these messages for privacy reasons, and they would not provide examples of negotiation of meaning seen in many research studies. I also do not have any reliable information on the level of proficiency of users in their target language. Potential surveys could ask about level of proficiency, but researchers would either need to rely on self-assessment of users or provide a means of assessment.

Anyone interested in potentially using datasets from the Mixxer website or with questions about using the site as part of the course, please feel free to contact me. I can be reached on Twitter @bryantt.

To learn more about the role of student data in education technology:

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Todd Bryant is the liaison to the foreign language departments for the Academic Technology group at Dickinson College and an adjunct instructor of German. Todd created The Mixxer to help connect language students with native speakers. His interests include the immersive effect of games in service of foreign language learning, such as the use of World of Warcraft to teach German.