Agenciamiento de los estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera en la exploración del paisaje sociocultural de una universidad pública

Abstract

This Participatory Action Research (PAR) study uses a sociocultural perspective to involve EFL students in developing social inquiries and discourses about the interactions with the university community (individuals and places) to critically analyze the multiple realities of individuals and collectives as a source for students’ learning in the EFL class. Exploring a public university cultural context becomes an opportunity for students to understand the ideological, social, historical, political, and linguistic dimensions of public education and for me as teacher researcher to analyze the ways the inquiry experience they carried out informed their social identities. The PAR study was carried from September 2019 to May 2020 at a public university in Bogotá with a group of young learners enrolled in a six-month English language course. Following grounded theory procedures for data collection and analysis, data were collected from students’ mapping, class discussions about their topics of inquiry, teacher’s field notes, students’ project reports and group interviews. The findings suggest that students’ agentive role as EFL learners and inquirers in the university campus allowed them to perform a critical analysis of different social issues visible in the university landscape. Their written texts and discourses evidenced that they value others’ knowledge, rethink previous assumptions about others and construct their own perceptions and discourses that informed their social identities. This pedagogical project gave me the opportunity as a teacher to reflect upon my own practice through research about university discourses and culture with students.