Promoviendo el uso de literacidades locales en docentes universitarios de inglés: recursos para conectar currículo y enseñanza

Abstract

This qualitative interpretive study describes the links that four EFL university teachers establish with local resources to connect curriculum and language literacy teaching. Thus, through professional development workshops, the teachers were invited to become enquirers of students’ realities while participating in professional group discussions, conducting asset-mapping with their students, and engaging in curriculum construction by addressing student-led inquiries from the assets identified in their context. Using a grounded theory approach, I analyzed the data that emerged from the discussions, curricular units, semi-structured interviews and class observation.Findings revealed that teachers use local literacies for curriculum and teaching when they rethink the sources of curriculum with their students (getting out of their comfort zone, and engaging in innovative pedagogical practices) to promote situated literacies, through an exploration and interaction with community resources and members. They valued students’ voices, encouraging them to question, propose, and engage in text production using insights from their professional fields as local assets.Moreover, the teachers situated local literacies within students’ professional fields in ELT by renovating a skill-based curriculum for one that was founded on local inquiry, including both the linguistic and social needs of the learners. The institutional standards served as the assessment criteria. Therefore, teachers viewed evaluation as reflecting the teaching and learning processes that represented students’ reality. Finally, the teachers promoted interaction with the outside community, in order to take action from the academic community by potentiating individual capacity to work towards desired solutions to community issues.