Third International Symposium on
Academic Writing and Critical Thinking
Measuring the Outcomes of Critical Teacher Education through Concept Maps
Kyle Nuske
Nagoya University
This text summarizes an in-progress study on critical teacher education in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). An intervention encouraged novice teachers to engage with the concept that the teaching of English is an ideological act, and it can either subvert or reproduce unequal relations of power in society, depending on the principles and practices that guide it. Much of the intervention was centered on the imperatives to disrupt systems of native speaker (NS) privilege and empower speakers of English as an Additional Language (EAL) while simultaneously validating multilingual practice. I begin by establishing the theoretical framework of the study and then proceed to describe my methodology, which was centered on the comparison of concept maps novices created to illustrate their understandings of Critical Language Teaching (CLT) before and after the intervention. Subsequently, I discuss preliminary findings and their implications. The intervention was successful in prompting broader understandings of CLT, though the component concepts novices associated with it were not necessarily more accurate, with many of the items listed on the maps carrying ambiguous connotations. The text concludes with comments on issues to be resolved as the study moves forward.
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