Experiences as Teacher-Designer-Researcher

Summer 2007: Created Course: 797 Special Topics
Methods and Issues in Post-Secondary World Language Instruction
This course was developed in response to a need expressed by the World Language Department at Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC). In the last several years, NVCC has noted that a growing number of their adjunct instructors are coming to the field from other professions. And, it seems that there has been a rather high turnover rate of these faculty members. It is believed that novice instructors are leaving the field after a short time because they become frustrated as they try to meet the needs of today's diverse learners in the fast-paced post-secondary environment. To address this issue, NVCC had informally asked Dr. Haley to develop a course that would address the diverse needs of post-secondary world language learners by offering instructors a systematic examination of instructional and assessment approaches, strategies and techniques. I gratefully welcomed the opportunity to fulfill this request.

With NVCC's objectives in mind, I carefully selected journal articles that would comprise a course reading packet. The articles covered current topics such as the use of alternative assessments, the use of technology, the challenges of teaching target language cultures, and the challenges of multi-level classrooms with heritage language learners. I have included a link to the bibliography for the course packet. I chose these topics based on my own teaching experiences and because they would help me to convey a constructivist approach to teaching and learning. In addition to the reading materials, I thought about how I might integrate what I had learned in the Ways of Knowing course as I designed the course projects. I decided that for the first project, the instructors would write a personal biography of their own language learning experiences. So often, the way that we teach others is based on our own learning experiences. The problem is that our students bring their own experiences and expectations to the classroom, many of which are quite different from our own. To address the diverse needs, experiences, and expectations of today's language learners, I had planned two additional projects: a teaching demonstration, and an evaluation of current post-secondary textbooks and course materials. Finally I had planned to use Blackboard or Web CT to facilitate discussions on the course readings and other topics as they surfaced.

Unfortunately, this course did not have sufficient enrollment and was ultimately canceled. I believe there are a number of reasons why the enrollment may have been so low. First, it is possible that part-time novice adjunct faculty are not interested in taking a traditional graduate level methods course with projects and research paper requirements. It is also possible that I could have increased enrollment by expanding the course's appeal to more than post-secondary instructors who teach world languages. My goal is to re-package this course (perhaps next year) to reflect these changes with the hope of attracting more students.

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Teaching in the CIFL Program: Spring 2008 / Summer 2008 / Spring 2009
Professional Teaching Experiences and My Development as a Researcher
My teaching experiences in the CIFL program have contributed to my thinking as a teacher-designer-researcher. At about the same time I began teaching licensure courses in the spring 2008, I became interested in how culture is taught in FL/WL classrooms. The first time this topic surfaced in my coursework was during the fall of 2007--Seminar in Bilingualism and SLA Research. I co-authored a paper with Dr. Haley that connected sociocultural theory and culturally responsive pedagogy in FL/WL teacher preparation programs. Later, I looked at these connections through different lenses during The Achievement Gap and World Perspectives in Teacher Education. Reflecting back on my teaching experiences in the licensure program, I began to wonder how my students think about culture. Would their cultural lessons provide their students with opportunities to think critically about world language cultures? I had hoped that their class projects would demonstrate cultural lessons that reach beyond the typical trivia that is covered in FL/WL textbooks. Although there was some evidence in the students' projects, papers, and teacing demonstrations, in reality there was much less than I had expected.

How have these experiences influenced my thinking? I have made specific mention in my Professional Experiences, that there were many questions that surfaced as I continued to teach in the licensure program. What target language cultures do FL/WL teachers value? Will heritage language learners from Nepal feel like their language and culture are valued in a Mandarin Chinese course? Will students from Senegal be encouraged to read the work of Senegalese authors in their French class? As I think about these questions, I reflect on the pre-service teachers and in-service teachers who have filled the seats in my methods classes.

As a teacher educator, I had focused on the importance of valuing the cultural, linguistic, and cognitive diversity of today's language learners by modeling differentiated instructional and assessment practices. But, I have since wondered if this is enough to promote the teaching for social justice and intercultural communicative competence. As a researcher, I read recent studies by Fox and Greenberg (2006) and Lies Sercu (2007), and wondered if the licensure candidates in my courses possessed the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that would allow them to serve as cultural mediators in their own classrooms. As a teacher-designer, I thought about the changes I wanted to make in the course readings, project exemplars, and classroom discussions on issues such as social capital, hegemony, and the role of power and authority in the language classroom. Lastly, as researcher-designer, I thought about my dissertation research and how the design of my study would allow me to investigate these questions.

I mention these experiences here because I believe that to demonstrate my analytical and interpretive thinking, I must do more than show that I can analyze and synthesize products from my coursework. I must also show that I have been able to connect my teaching experiences to my research interests. I have learned that my actions as a teacher educator and as a researcher should not occur in isolation. To grow as both a teacher-designer and researcher-designer, I must continue to think critically through my reflective practices.

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Research Products

Fall 2006: Updating and Editing the Student Teacher Internship Manual (STIM) for Foreign/World Languages
Graduate School of Education
George Mason University
This research project/product began during the fall semester of 2006. Working as Dr. Haley's graduate research assistant, I helped to re-design the Student-Teaching Internship Manual for World Languages. Having used the original version during my own student-teaching, I was excited to contribute to the project by offering changes that I believed would enhance the usefulness of the manual to future interns.

Aligning the manual to NCATE standards required the collaboration of many, including the incorporation of new portfolio guidelines provided by Dr. Rebecca Fox. Because the changes to the manual, and particularly the portfolio section, have been so significant, Dr. Haley and I have been collecting data on the the opinions and attitudes of the interns via surveys and video interviews. We look forward to presenting our findings this November (2007) at the national conference of the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

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Spring/Summer 2007: Published Article
"When Levees Break--Pedagogical Implications for Teachers and Learners: What do we do now?"
Co-Authored with Dr. Marjorie Hall Haley
Complete details of this article are provided in the Academic and Professional Growth section of this portfolio. I have also included this article here because I believe is shows my ability to integrate what I have learned in courses such as EDUC 800--Ways of Knowing and EDRS 810-- Methods in Educational Research. I would specifically like to address the work I did on the methodology section and the section for epistemological foundations.

The original version of the article did not contain a formal methods section. The reason was that Dr. Haley did not set out to conduct research when she began communicating with the teachers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Yet, what she had learned through their stories clearly had pedagogical implications that needed to be shared with the rest of the field. Nevertheless, the review panel at the Journal of Race and Policy had requested that we incorporate some type of methods section. To do so, I used what I had learned in Dr. Mastropieri's Methods course. I provided a brief background on qualitative research and then I included tables that listed the interview questions and the research questions that later served as a foundation for our discussion of the pedagogical implications.

To demonstrate that the research questions had epistemological foundations, I drew upon what I had learned in Dr. Wong's Ways of Knowing course. I chose references that included Luis Moll's concept of "funds of knowledge" as well as Gloria Ladson-Billings' writings regarding "deficit models" in education. Both of these authors have written extensively on how our schools often focus on what students lack instead of the positive attributes (or non-traditional funds of knowledge) that they bring to the classroom. My goal was to join Dr. Haley's original call for changes in teacher education programs for the inclusion of these concepts in their multicultural education courses. If teachers are to become "facilitators of learning", then they will need to re-examine and re-define traditional beliefs and perceptions of what constitutes knowledge. They will need to question "whose knowledge is valuable?" if they are to recognize what has been ignored or deemed unworthy for far too long.

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Qualitative Study: Design Map, Interview Protocol, and Data Matrix
Fall 2008: EDRS 812: Qualitative Methods in Educational Research
"Teaching Intercultural Communicative Competence in the World Language Classroom and the Role of Technology: Are Teachers Ready, Willing and Able?"
Developing my skills as a qualitative researcher were more challenging than I had anticipated. I have discussed these challenges at length as part of my Course Reflections for EDRS 812, and in my entry "Reflections of a Novice Qualitative Researcher" on my Dissertation Planning page. I found that when reading qualitative research papers, one is often unaware of the research created by the researcher to facilitate the collection and analysis of data.

For my qualitative study in 812, I created several research tools. A full-version of my final paper is available here. As a reminder, in this study, I interviewed five of my former graduate students who were either in their first-year of teaching or were doing their semester-long student-teaching internship. The purpose of the study was to gain an understanding of their beliefs about teaching culture and their use of technology to do so. I began by developing a design map of for my study using Dr. Maxwell's (2005) template. Before conducting the interviews, I created an interview protocol, The questions that I listed on this protocol were intended to draw information from my participants that would help me to answer my research questions. As the study progressed, I found myself struggling to make sense of the data,

Analyzing qualitative data is a skill. Coding and categorizing can be etic (from the researcher's point of view) or emic (from the participants own words). I have heard others say that qualitative researchers look over their data until codes and categories emerge. In reality, codes and categories do not emege from pages of transcrips on their own. The qualitative researcher develops these codes by reading interview transcripts and field notes over and over, each time bringing his/her assumptions, prior experiences, and knowledge of the topic to the process. For me, creating etic codes was easier than creating emic codes. However, I found that over time, the words of my participants became lost in those etic codes, forcing me to go back and identify emic codes. After creating a list of emic codes, I was stuck, once again. What was I supposed to make of these codes? After one of our class meetings on data analysis tools (and the Miles and Huberman text)I created a data matrix . In the matrix, I listed my participants on a vertical axis and the emic codes on the horizontal axis. I then cut and pasted evidence of these emic codes from the actual interview transcrips. found this matrix to be extremely helpful in analyzing the data as it allowed a new story emerge for each individual.

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Designing A Pilot and Gaining HSRB Approval: Spring 2009
EDUC 897: Independent Study with Dr. Debra Sprague
"Technology Integration in Foreign/World Language Standards-based Instruction:
The Effects of the ACTFL Video Podcast Contest"
Although I had practiced doing parts of the HSRB application in EDRS 810 and EDRS 812 and I had helped to write pieces of the HSRB application for the Spanish Blog Project, I had not designed a study, created all the documents for the HSRB protocol application, and written a full proposal for a real study on my own until the pilot. Under Dr. Sprague's guidance, I created all of the following research documents:

1. Pilot Study Design Map
2. HSRB Protocol Application (Approved April 6, 2009)
3. Initial Email to Recruit Participants (Sent by Marty Abbot of ACTFL)
4. General Information (Attached to Initial Email to Recruit Participants)
5. General Consent Email (Sent by me to teachers who responded to Initial Email to Recruit Participants)
6. The Language Educator Consent Request Email (Sent by Melissa after interview is complete)
7. Link to the survey (please see email for password): http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=TGUA3E1U5j_2f9hK6TwiDv5Q_3d_3d
8. Pilot Study Proposal Paper

The urge to do a pilot study grew after the fall 2008 semester. I felt strongly about getting more research experience by doing an actual pilot study prior to doing my dissertation. It was important for me to continue my thinking on the subject of teaching culture and using technology to facilitate the process of educating global citizens. During my qualitative study in EDRS 812, and my re-analysis of the data in EDUC 853, I learned that I needed to gain a better understanding of the types of technology that language teachers are currently using in their instructional practices and how these practices reflect the Standards for Foreign Language Learning. Through reflection, I realized that I had placed too much emphasis on the cultural standard. As a result, I was missing a broader picture that might better explain how cultural lessons and technology are integrated in other areas of instruction. Also, I believe that taking an integrative mixed methods approach where I could engage both qualitative data and quantitative data in a dialogue would allow me to understand what was going by examining "the whole forest" as well as "the individual trees." I was anxious to do a follow up study that would allow me to build on these prior experiences.

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Intersection of Areas of Research

Summer/Fall 2007: Weblog Project: Beginning Spanish Program
Department of Modern and Classical Languages
George Mason University
This project is currently in its nascent stage, however I believe it is an example of how I plan to integrate the field of Multilingual / Multicultural Education with the field of Instructional Technology.

Initially, I presented the idea of using blogs, linguifolios, and culture portfolios to the Director of the Basic Spanish Program at GMU in early 2007. I have been teaching with this program for a few years and it is quite clear that the use of technology in 100-200 level Spanish courses needs to be enhanced. After reading the research on the use of blogs and portfolios with beginning world language learners, (i.e. Ducate & Lomicka, 2005 on Weblogs; Allen, 2004 on Culture Portfolios;and Spodark, 2005 on Technoconstructivism in the FL Classroom) I realized that our current program may not be meeting the needs of today's diverse language learners. Recognizing the cognitive, linguistic and cultural diversity of our students means understanding that a "one size fits all" syllabus will no longer suffice. If we are to engage today's diverse learners, who are now considered the "i-generation", in a meaningful language learning process, then we have to look at how technology can help us to develop those processes. However, these types of changes often require a change in one's philosophy of teaching and learning--from a one-way flow of information from teacher to learner, to a multi-directional flow of knowledge sharing between and among the teacher and the learners. Acknowledging how difficult it is for one to change his or her beliefs and perspectives, it is important for us to slowly incorporate the use of technology while providing ample support to all the stakeholders (students, instructors, and administrators) involved. After presenting these ideas to the Director, the foundation for the "The Weblog Project" was laid.

Since the initial conversations in early 2007, one of the Instructors (who is also an Assistant Director) with the Beginning Spanish Program has been awarded a TAC grant to develop the blogging activities. Currently, I am working on an Instructional Design prototype that will facilitate the implementation of these activities. The prototype is also a course requirement for EDIT 705. Working closely with the Assistant Director (who is designing the actual blog site), this prototype will be used by students enrolled in a 100 level beginning Spanish course this fall. Our goal is to use the blog activities as a trial study with one class in order to collect quantitative data (writing grades) and qualitative data (attitudes and opinions) from both the instructor and the students. If all goes as planned, we will implement the use of weblogs with all 100-200 level Spanish courses by the Summer 2008.

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Spring 2008: The Achievement Gap
Making Connections Between ELLs and HLLs: Implications for My Research
My interest in the achievement of minority students in world languages began in the Ways of Knowing course. By the end of that course, I found myself asking questions like whose languages and cultures are valued in our classrooms, schools, and communities. Later on in my program, during the "refining of my lenses" in the fall of 2007, I created a digital story project for Dr. Sprague's Technology and Diversity course (EDIT 725). I began this project by searching various statistics on the achievement gap using the National Center for Education Statistics. What I found was not encouraging. Historically, the study of foreign/world languages had been reserved for the academically gifted, which often excluded minority student populations. In the last decade, world language education has slowly begun to open its doors to all students.  In light of this change, one would assume an increase in the achievement of minority students in the world language classroom. This has not been the case. The data from NCES indicate that the gaps in enrollment and degrees conferred at the post-secondary level by minority student populations are not closing. How can we explain what is happening at the post-secondary level? In my individual study of the achievement gap in Dr. Nicola Williams Achievement Gap course, I took a closer look at K-12 foreign language education. Specifically, I looked at the possible connections between heritage language learners in the FL/WL classroom and English language learners in general education courses.

ELLs enter our school system expected to divest themselves of their heritage language and culture in order to master English, the language of U.S. education. The achievement gaps between ELLs and their White middle-class counterparts has been widely studied by several researcher/scholars, including Sandra Mercuri, Luis Moll, Kris Guittierez, and Jim Cummins. But there is less research on ELLs in the FL/WL classroom, where they are re-classified as heritage language learners (HLLs). Using sociocultural theory and culturally responsive pedagogy to frame my review of the literature, I focused my attention on deficit models (Gloria Ladson-Billings), social capital (Pierre Bourdieu), and teacher perceptions of minority students (John Ogbu and Lisa Delpit) and particularly in the world language classrooms (Jim Cummins, Timothy Reagan, and Terry Osborn). I became especially interested in the work of Reagan and Osborn that has explored the role of power and authority in FL/WL classrooms. I learned that in addition to controlling the content being taught, language teachers have also, conciously or subconciously, controlled the language of instruction. This control has been challenge by Heritage language learners in a number of ways. In some cases, HLLs possess better language skills than their teachers, posing a threat to the teacher's control over the language of instruction. In other cases, HLLs may speak a different dialect, using different words and phrases that are unfamiliar to the teacher. This poses a threat to the teacher's control over the language content being taught. The result is often a clash between the HLL and the FL/WL teacher and a de-valuing of the HLL's language and culture in the FL/WL classroom.

During the same semester that I was working on my final paper for EDUC 874--The Achievement Gap, I was also teaching EDRD 620--Teaching Reading and Writing in Foreign/World Languages. I wondered how developing the literacy skills of FL/WL students would particularly help HLLs, some of whom may be life-long ELLs. By studying the work of Yvonne and David Freeman, Kris Gutierrez and Elizabeth Moje, I wondered how the of power and authority between student and teacher has negatively affected the student's identity and has thus contributed to the achievement gap. Shouldn't a language class be the place where minority language learners feel like they belong, where they can reconnect with their heritage language and culture? How can I as a teacher educator influence FL/WL teachers perceptions so that they see the presence of HLLs as an asset to their classrooms, instead of a challenge to their power and authority?

As I finished the semester of teaching EDRD 620, working as an intern at ACTFL, and taking the AG class, I began to think about the role of culture and technology in FL/WL education as possible vehicles for narrowing the achievement gap in FL/WLs. I became anxious to explore these dimensions in my last semester of coursework.

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Fall 2008: The Big Picture: Getting an International Perspective
The big picture came during the Fall 2008. The literature review/synthesis paper that I wrote for the Achievement Gap course the previous semester, as with many of the papers that I have written throughout my studies, left me with more questions than answers. After that paper, I wanted to explore the role of culture and technology as possible vehicles for narrowing the achievement gap. Even though the digital divide is yet another example of the inequitable distribution of wealth and power in our educational system, I believe that it should not be used as an excuse to avoid research in this area. So, I set my sights on a qualitative research study for EDRS 812 where I would ask newly practicing FL/WL teachers to share their beliefs about teaching culture and using technology to do so. At the same time, I was taking EDUC 853--World Perspectives in Teacher Education. In one of the early readings for that course, I rediscovered the work of Michael Byram and Anwei Feng, that I had previously read in EDUC 882--Seminar in Bilingualism and SLA Research. Very interested in Byram and Feng's (2005) definition and application of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in FL/WL education, I continued my study of ICC by reading Byram's latest book, From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship (2008), and Lies Sercu's (2006) international study that used Byram's model for ICC to determine if the cultural lessons of language teachers delved beyond typical trivia to the development of ICC.

The Sercu study struck a chord with me because like Fox and Greenberg (2006) she sought to determine if the teachers' cultural lessons included opportunities for their students to gain the knowledge, skills and dispositions to serve as cultural mediators. However, one of her findings was that some of the teachers in her study were still developing the very ICC dispositions that they were being asked to model in their cultural lessons. Other findings from the Sercu study included additional factors that affect how and why FL/WL teachers teach culture-such as the current focus on communicative skills, rather than intercultural communicative competence. If curriculum developers, textbook authors, department chairs, and parents are focused more on the development of speaking and listening skills, then how can teachers justify spending valuable class time to teach culture for ICC? As I wrote the literature review for my final paper in EDUC 853, I also wondered if the Standards for Foreign Language Learning, that were written a decade ago, might be in need of a revision to include such terms as global citizenship and intercultural communicative competence. As the semester ended, I realized that I needed more practice as a researcher and to refine the focus of my research topic. I had looked at culture and technology, but I felt as though I was missing a bigger picture. I thought back to the question that I had raised at the end of my trip to the Defense Language Institute. In what direction should the field of FL/WL education be going? And, what does this big picture mean as I refine the focus of my dissertation topic?

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Applying Academic, Professional, and Personal Growth: The Pilot Study: Spring 2009
In the fall of 2008, with the exception of my Independent Study with Dr. Sprague, I had finished all of the coursework in my program of study. I ended that semester with a bit of an identity crisis--wondering what kind of educational researcher would I be? I had always like the idea of mixing methods, but what did the "mixing" really involve? I worked through this identity crisis in the spring of 2009 by auditing Joe Maxwell's course Mixed Methods in Educational Research. For more details on my identity crisis please refer back to my Course Reflection for EDRS 797b.

In addition to auditing the Mixed methods class, I used the spring 2009 semester to continue exploring the intersection of technology, teaching culture and FL/WL teacher preparation programs. A reflection of this pilot study and the products I created for it can be found in my earlier reflection on this page and on my Dissertation Planning page.

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The Synthesis of a Journey: Fall 2008 (Updated Spring 2009)
Being able to do my PhD as a full-time student has been a wonderfully rewarding experience. Completing my coursework in just under three years in addition to working on several projects as Dr. Haley's GRA, interning at ACTFL, teaching courses in the licensure program, presenting at local, regional, and national conferences, and co-authoring two articles (one published and one harshly rejected) have all contributed to my development as budding scholar.

In the last few years, I have developed many passions through my academic, professional, and personal experiences. My desire to prepare language teachers to meet the diverse needs of today's language learners has led me to explore how technology, such as web blogs, can help students develop communicative language skills. I have looked at how the brain learns in order to better understand how and why multi-modal, multi-sensory educational activities work in language classrooms. I then spent a semester studying the achievement gap in FL/WL classrooms and the connection between English language learners and heritage language learners (HLLs). I have learned how language teachers have historically used their power and authority in the FL/WL classroom and how that power and authority has recently been challenged by HLLs. I became very interested in how I, as a teacher educator, can better prepare language teachers to see the value that all students bring to their classrooms. During the fall of 2008, I began to develop an international perspective of my research interests. Not only do language teachers need to reach and teach all students, but they also to provide them with opportunities to become global citizens, who not only speak more than one language, but who are capable of serving as cultural mediators.

My goal is be a leading researcher/ teacher educator in my field. My early experiences as a novice researcher have been challenging, yet rewarding. I am hooked. The learning simply never ends. Even as I was developing my ideas for my pilot study, I learned that I must seek research opportunities in unexpected places under unexpected circumstances. My desire to be a leader in FL/WL education reflect my humanistic views of leadership. I believe that to create any type of change, I must create relationships with individuals and ask for their active and creative involvement in the process. This view has also become part of my philosophical and ideological position as a researcher. Lastly, I feel strongly that my research will have to look critically at current practices by implementing research designs that may not conform to the current dominant paradigms. I am willing to argue for new designs that better represent the complexity of educational research.

Writing this synthesis of my journey through the doctoral program has allowed me to trace the development of my thinking and my dissertation topic. As the spring semester comes to a close, I am ready to end my journey as a doctoral student and begin my doctoral candidacy.

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Spring 2009: Building A Design Map for a Doctoral Dissertation
I finished my doctoral coursework with mixed emotions. I have been asking myself, is this really it? Am I really done with my coursework? I believe these feelings of doubt are related to the fact that I have thoroughly enjoyed being a doctoral student. The readings, projects, and class discussions have been some of the richest experiences of my life. Though I will miss being a doctoral student, I am committed to being a life-long learner who is dedicated to collaboration and reflective practice. I have met so many colleagues and have made several friends along the way. On more than one occasion, we have discussed doing collaborative projects post-dissertation. This is very exciting to me as I believe that it is through collaborative efforts and my personal reflections that I will continue to grow as a teacher educator, a researcher, and a scholar.

In the last several weeks I have taken the time to re-visit my doctoral journey. I have been re-reading my class notes from different courses, my projects, papers, and my portfolio reflections. As I went through my papers and projects, I began to sketch a conceptual framework of the researchers and scholars who have greatly influenced my thinking. I reflected once again upon my experiences as a novice researcher which helped me refine the focus of my dissertation. I felt the need to create one final document that synthesized my doctoral journey, while at the same time illustrating the framework of my proposal. My design map for my dissertation proposal will most definitely undergo changes as I write my actual proposal. Nevertheless, I believe it demonstrates my analytical and integrative thinking and my readiness to continue as a doctoral candidate.

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