Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Research in Teaching and Education
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Student-teachers ‘Empowerment and Professional Competencies Development: An Exploratory Case Study
Liliana Valle Zapata, Jasir Martínez Espitia
ABSTRACT:
The ultimate purpose of universities is to educate professionals who might positively impact and transform society. A public Colombian university designed an outreach bilingual program to benefit children at risk in different vulnerable areas of a city. Student- teachers from its ELT Program were the ones who lead the initiative, nonetheless, there was not any systematic evidence that delved into the contributions of the Program to student-teachers’ development and empowerment (Cantoral & Reyes, 2013). This study aimed to explore how the regional bilingualism outreach program called Bilingualism for Peace (B4P) contributes to student-teachers’ professional competencies development, specifically those from the technical-pedagogical field, (Holz-Clause, M. et al. ,2015) and how they empowered during their teaching role. This qualitative research answered the questions: How does the “Bilingualism for Peace” program contribute to student teachers’ technical-pedagogical competences? and how does the “Bilingualism for Peace” program bring about teacher empowerment during the implementation process? Data was collected through a semi-structured interview, questionnaire, observations, and lesson plans reviews and it was examined through a thematic analysis. Findings suggests that the outreach program highly contributes to improve the students-teachers’ development of pedagogical competencies (De Mejía, 2006) such as lesson planning, materials design, evaluation and assessment, while conducting the teaching/learning process. Besides, student-teachers improved their abilities to make decisions, increased their autonomy, and creativity. This research sheds light on the potential contributions that undergraduate students gained after being part of community reach out programs where they embrace in real practice their pedagogical practices connected to contextual realities.
keywords: Bilingualism, outreach program, teacher empowerment, pedagogical competencies, student-teacher