Teacher educators’ cognitions during the implementation of an innovative pre-service English teaching programme in Chile

This thesis explores teacher educators’ cognitions in the context of a new five-year-long undergraduate English Language teaching programme at a private university in Chile. This programme is called Integrated Curriculum since its main principle is to teach all its curricular strands, i.e. integrated English language (IEL), methodology, education and school internships in an integrated fashion, enabling the content and teaching/learning processes of each strand to feed into and draw from the others. The Integrated Curriculum is inspired by the principles of critical pedagogy and social justice.

This case study followed a qualitative research design, within a critical theory paradigm. The data generation consisted of semi-structured interviews and classroom observations of four teacher educators teaching at the IEL strand. The IEL strand concentrates 60% of the teaching hours of the integrated curriculum, and most teacher educators work on this area. Interviews also included the programme leaders, and twenty-six student teachers.

The findings showed that teacher educators are very committed to the programme. However, the complex organisational system hinders their opportunities for reflection, on-going improvement, and addressing student-teachers’ teaching and learning needs. The programme leaders are aware of the difficulties that teacher educators face while implementing it. Student teachers seem to have a limited perspective of the integrated curriculum and appear to struggle to understand the innovative language teaching approach promoted by the IEL.

This study demonstrates that complex curriculum change takes time and resources. In this case, despite being well intended, the speed of the change, the lack of forward planning, and existing models to refer to, have limited the IC achievements. Findings suggest that changes in teacher education require a close connection with the school contexts to gauge the feasibility of the innovation in reality, to inform teacher educators and student teachers to teach and learn in mainly unchanged educational contexts.