OER and language teachers professional practices, LORO Eurocall 2011
1. Open Educational Resources and language teachers’ professional practice Anna Comas-Quinn and Tita Beaven Department of Languages, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University Eurocall 2011
A resource I use to help students to practise articulate prepositions
We were also aware that these specific detailed stories might bring out technical and practical elements of reflection but not necessarily enable teachers to focus on the critical (van Manen, 1977, Grushka et al, 2005). The last section of the narrative frame, then, explicitly asked teachers to write about their own teaching practice more generally, in an attempt to capture some of those critical reflections.
In terms of the impact of OER in teaching and learning, the data from the narrative frames shows that teachers consider OER to have an impact in different areas. On the one hand, OER have an impact when they enable reuse. For that, it is important that the materials are reliable, ie of good quality, and that they are flexible and easy to adapt to one’s teaching style.
Secondly, OER have an impact when they enable peer feedback and peer review. This is something that we clearly have not achieved with LORO yet, but we will be addressing this in a number of interventions over the next academic year.
Thirdly, OER also have an impact in how teachers feel about themselves as teachers, and perhaps in providing a sense of community:
Finally, a collection of OER also have the potential to provide opportunities for staff development activities:
When I prepare my tutorials, I often look at other courses’ materials. These help give me ideas which I other copy or develop further. In this case, I have decided to use the idea
This is a resource I have uploaded to LORO. My friend has slightly simplified it and acknowledged me and the OU.
She has then created an exercise using the same technique
… and another, using Google Earth…an idea I want to copy.
Sawyer (2004) explains how teaching has often been thought of as a “creative performance”. Sometimes this is a way to emphasise teacher creativity in a “constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration”, although he warns that is it can also be used to justify scripted instruction that is the complete opposite. Elsewhere, Sawyer (2008) also explains how when a musician is a skilled improviser, the composer doesn’t have to be prescriptive, and can leave some of the score unwritten, relying on the performer to improvise and fill in the gaps. This can start to give us a model for how to look at OER, and the mediating artefacts attached to the resources (such as lesson plans with levels, objectives, activity types and modes of interaction), not as a prescriptive “script”, but as resources that enable the teacher ( i.e. the performer) to improvise in the actual performance of the lesson. Indeed, Sawyer (2004) believes that in order to be truly effective, the “teaching as performance” metaphor must be modified, and he draws on his work on theatrical improvisation to offer the model of teaching as “improvisational performance”, which enables him to highlight “the collaborative and emergent nature of effective classroom practice, helps […] to understand how curriculum materials relate to classroom practice, and shows why teaching is a creative art”. If we understand teaching as “improvisational performance”, and if that is an understanding shared by teachers using a teaching repository, then we can begin to understand why teachers might not be re-uploading their re-versioned OER into the repository. Indeed, some re-versioning of the teaching materials might occur in the planning of a particular lesson, but much of it might actually occur in the actual delivery of the lesson, in the “imporvisational performance” itself. This might actually also be where teachers perceive the site of creativity in their professional practice to reside, so that creativity in teaching is more like acting or playing an instrument rather than writing a play, a musical score or, indeed, producing teaching resources.
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