The role of teacher training in accommodating diversity: security and preparation for a diverse classroom
A student of English is expected to be able to communicate in the language to thus broaden their personal and professional horizons. And this is valid for everyone. What are the challenges of teaching English ensuring inclusion and accommodating diversity?
Observatory for English Language Teaching
Newsroom
Nov. 27, 2020
‘Difference’ is a term which is generally associated by educators with problems to be solved in schools, either related “to deficiency, to cultural deficit or to inequality”. These are the words of researcher, Vera Maria Candau, who is a specialist in interculturality in education (CLICK HERE). “Very few link difference to plural identities that enrich pedagogical processes and that must be recognized and valued”, she adds. How can diversity be linked positively to the English-teaching classroom, accommodating differences and also working with inclusion? How can teacher training engage with this process?
“I was at university for four years and at no point was I alerted to the fact that I could have a student with some kind of deficiency”, recounts the lecturer and researcher Betânia Medrado, of the Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB). In the last 13 years, she has been deepening her understanding of teaching English to blind or partially sighted people. During her time there, she has contributed to the changes the Modern Languages course curriculum at UFPB has gone through: today the course incorporates aspects of inclusive education in all the training disciplines supervised there.
Generally, the discussion about inclusion arose before in the field of education, taking longer to appear in Modern Languages, according to Medrado. “The obligation to teach signing in teaching college, in a sense, brought about this awareness, beyond changes in policies that put deaf students in regular classes”, adds the lecturer and researcher Telma Gimenez, from the Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL).
Addressing teaching for all brings up a wider scope of debate. We need to discuss the inclusion of students with deficiencies and also diversity. “There is diversity in terms of physical characteristics and of social identities”, explains Gimenez. We are talking about classrooms in which students of different races/ethnic groups, genders, ages, religions, and social and cultural backgrounds are found. It is worth pointing out that there are features even within groups that look homogeneous, but are not. The misunderstanding about this occurs especially with deficiency, in the case of blind, partially-sighted or autistic people, for example.
Aparecida de Jesus Ferreira, a lecturer and researcher at the Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa (UEPG), which is a reference in terms of racial questions relative to English teaching, reinforces that teacher training must prepare teachers to deal with diversity in the classroom and with the daily challenges that arise from it. But she argues that, in addition, an attentive look at our own experience may be a starting point. Aparecida explains that she has tried to deal with diversity broadly in her practice, her main focus being the racial question, which is why she does not feel able to speak with the same authority about issues specifically related to the inclusion of students with deficiency. However, she tells what she did when she needed to teach a deaf student: adopting the path of dialogue, she had a meeting with her so that the student herself could express what would be the best way for Aparecida to assist her in her learning process.
Betânia’s involvement in the question of inclusion of people with visual deficiency also began with an unexpected situation. On finishing her doctorate in 2007, she was invited to teach at a model elementary school in João Pessoa. A teacher she worked with there went to Betânia when she needed to teach two blind students and did not know how to assist them best. “This teacher inspired me to do what I have been doing for the last 13 years”, she says. The teacher in question was not a beginner: with 25 years in the classroom, she was about to retire. Just like Betânia, she had not received the right training to deal with diversity in the classroom. The two started, together, putting into practice different actions every day to assist the students, observing what would bring about the best results. From the accumulation of experiences like these, at a certain point in her career, Betânia went on to transform these questions into her research projects.
Training leads to security in the teacher
In Brazil, we have laws that guarantee every student’s access to education. On the other hand, accommodation to the particularities of each student needs to be effectively put into practice in teaching and learning environments. Teacher training may not be able to cope with the breadth that inclusion and diversity involve, but it is important to leave the teacher secure to deal with the varied situations that they may face in the classroom, Aparecida Ferreira explains.
She emphasizes that deficiencies demand quite a specific preparation for inclusion of students to be effective, which includes resources like the presence of classroom mediators to adequately meet the students’ needs. However, she stresses that there are certain fundamental questions when dealing with inclusion in general and her point of view calls to mind the broad accommodation of difference, in the sense of plural identities which Vera Candau refers to. Among the aspects quoted by Aparecida are the concept of racial identity, issues of gender, social class and sexuality. The researcher highlights that the training is, then, precisely the process which can awaken in teachers the essential ideas and concepts that, once taken in, become part of their repertoire as educators and citizens. As a result, they become able to deal with the varied situations that crop up in teachers’ daily life.
Additionally, according to Ferreira, when awareness is raised in terms of diversity, teachers start to become concerned with representativity in such a way that there is no way back, no other way. With this, they begin to bring black writers’ texts to the classroom, for example. They see they can use news from all over the world for contemporary debates. In short, they can be more creative in their teaching, collaborating in accommodating students in their multiplicity. Aparecida stresses another essential point for schools to successfully accommodate diversity: the institution’s administrators must be aware, to be able to identify difficulties, monitoring processes and promoting transdisciplinary projects. After all, questions of diversity go beyond all disciplines.
Available at: https://www.inglesnasescolas.org/en/headline/the-role-of-teacher-training-in-accommodating-diversity-security-and-preparation-for-a-diverse-classroom/. Accessed on January 26, 2021.
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