Historias de maestras de primaría acerca de la enseñanza del inglés en un colegio público

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the conversations between nineteen female preschool and primary homeroom teachers of a public school located in Ciudad Bolívar in southern of Bogotá, Colombia and me. We discussed childhood, teenage, education, and work having as a main topic English, its learning, and its teaching. Our pair conversations were recorded, transcribed, converted into stories, and compiled to make a book called ¡El inglés entre nos…! Interpretation focused on the stories’ content (Barkhuizen, 2011; Bolívar, 2012) about English. Our stories represent both the source of data and the sites of co-theorization where thinking other-wise (Dussel, 2012; Fals Borda, 2017; Guerrero Arias, 2010; Meyer, 2013; Palermo, 2015; Suárez, 2011) were the lenses of interpretation. A decolonial option (Mignolo, 2011) was adopted to conduct this research to trace back our learning and working trajectories related to English to understand our being, knowing, and doing of the teaching of the language in our school. We share multiple ways of knowing that coexist (Santos, 2010). Therefore, the theoretical pillars to comprehend our stories rely on the coloniality in primary public schools’ quotidian lives, neoliberalism that denies the other in public schools, coloniality, and neoliberalism that institutionalizes the subjugation of public kindergarten and primary school teachers. Then, I use the hypogeum called our stories, as a metaphor to depict how our learning and working trajectories regarding English intertwine to generate epistemologies about English teaching in a public school. Our stories unveiled that having English lessons in primary school was a privilege; memorizing and cheating to pass exams were common practices in high school; English subject was a requirement in tertiary education; and English tests became barriers to continuing graduate studies. Similarly, our employment trajectories had three moments: firstly, it was found that some institutions pretended to offer bilingual education; secondly, prior to the schools’ merge, when teachers’ pleas were ignored and classes were distributed keeping in mind friendship and teachers’ talents, instead of working loads; the third moment showed that the teaching of this language provokes fear of making pronunciation mistakes, teaching poorly, and/or not being excellent teachers. The analysis evinced how we teach English to preschoolers, first and second graders, but we tend to avoid third, fourth, and fifth grades. Our learning and teaching trajectories allowed us to share our own epistemologies at five different levels: (i) we know our needs to teach and learn this language; (ii) we highlight the teachers’ qualities who are dedicated to teaching English to children; (iii) we question the state policies regarding teaching methodologies despite our own doubts about the matter; (iv) we recognize the barrier of language proficiency exams for accessing to graduate courses or transfers; (v) we could review the curriculum, design lessons and create meaningful spaces to practice listening and speaking in English. Finally, I advocate for policy makers and educators in B.Ed. or graduated programs targeted at teachers of children to broaden their views about English teaching in preschool and primary education of the public sector.