Preparing Pre-Service Teachers for an Undergraduate Conference: A Department Wide Collaborative Autoethnography

Anaç A., Avara H., Baş M., Duran A., Erdem Coşgun G., Mutlu B., ...More

AELTE 2024 3rd Conference, Amasya, Turkey, 18 - 19 October 2024, pp.30, (Summary Text)

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Summary Text
  • City: Amasya
  • Country: Turkey
  • Page Numbers: pp.30
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

Abstract

Pre-service teacher education (PSTE) is a site for prospective teachers to learn about and practice several aspects of teaching such as language teaching theory and methodology, classroom management, and material development. Within the last couple of decades, teacher-initiated research too has been added to the list as a tool to aid teachers’ practical problems and inform academic literature through action

research, reflective practice and so on. However, even though this efficient mechanism has been featured in MoNE’s and CoHE’s teacher competences documents, there is a dearth of studies examining the affordances of research education in/for PSTE education contexts. To address this gap, our study aims to ethnographically examine the process during which teacher educators acted as advisors of undergraduate students who planned and carried out research and then presented the results in an undergraduate ELT conference. The participants were 11 undergraduate student-researchers in six groups/pairs/solos, 6 advisors and two coordinators one of whom also advised a pair. In a collaborative analytic autoethnographic design, we employed thematic analysis to examine the guided retrospective reflections of the teacher educators to capture their perspectives toward the whole process. Preliminary results show that preparing pre-service teachers for hands-on research is a demanding yet rewarding process for teacher educators; mainly, students’ willingness increases advisor motivation, advisor- student interaction requires a lot of effort and time, a needs analysis and pre-training is much needed, and advisors’ hectic schedules must be taken into consideration in planning the studies. These results demonstrate that well-planned research programs have the potential to train pre-service teachers for teacher-friendly research practices such as action research and facilitate practitioners’ involvement in science communication.


Keywords

Undergraduate conferences, teacher educators, pre-service teachers, collaborative autoethnography.