REPORTS FROM RIO

XIII ENCONTRO APIES: EXPLORATORY PRACTICE: WORKING TO UNDERSTAND OUR EVERYDAY CLASSROOM LIVES

Vitória, Espírito Santo 

25 - 27  September, 2003 

Inés Kayon de Miller

EXPLORATORY PRACTICE:

WORKING TO UNDERSTAND OUR EVERYDAY CLASSROOM LIVES 

This plenary will offer combined ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ opportunities for understanding the basic principles of Exploratory Practice. Starting from their everyday activities, participants will develop ‘exploratory’ pedagogic activities that will enable them to work for enhanced understandings of what puzzles them about what happens in their own and their students’ classroom lives.  

1. INTRODUCTION TO EXPLORATORY PRACTICE (Plenary) 

In relation to language education, Exploratory Practice is

classroom language teachers and learners

developing their own understandings of life in the language classroom

(while getting on with their learning and teaching),

with a view to enhancing the quality of the  life they lead together,

 and thereby the quality of the education and the learning in that setting.

 Exploratory Practice offers a set of principled guidelines

for the development and use of locally appropriate investigative practices,

and for the general conduct of such work for understanding.

 EPCentre statement, July 2002.

 (http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/groups/crile/EPCentre/epcentre.htm)

2. OUR EVERYDAY CLASSROOM LIVES (Pairs) 

3. PUZZLES ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN OUR CLASSROOM LIVES (Pairs)

What strikes you or “puzzles” you about what happens in your classrooms when you engage in the favorite/ familiar activities that you have described to each other? Please try to formulate these questions preferably as “Why” questions. Please write your  questions in the space below.    

Why________________________________________________________________________?

Why_________________________________________________________________________?

Why________________________________________________________________________?

Why________________________________________________________________________? 

4. SOME CORE EP PROCESSES (Plenary) 

• Describing and justifying what we normally do;
• Unearthing and critiquing the underlying beliefs in our practice;
• Bringing puzzling issues of classroom life to consciousness;
• Intensifying our way of looking/listening to what is going on, while it is going on;
• Planning for understanding by adopting potentially exploitable pedagogic activities (PEPAs)

5. SOME EXAMPLES OF TEACHERS’ AND LEARNERS’ PEPAs (Plenary)

(See overleaf) 

6. EXPLOITING OUR FAMILIAR PEDAGOGIC ACTIVITIES (Pairs)

Please pick one of the questions raised by the colleagues in the pair – not necessarily your own – and discuss what you could do or what favorite activity you could adapt that  might lead you to deeper understandings of your chosen question.   

7. EP PRINCIPLES AS CONCLUDING THOUGHTS (Plenary) 

Principle 1: put ‘quality of life’ first. 

Principle 2: work primarily to understand language classroom life.  

NB: The above two principles can best be approached by integrating practitioners in the classroom (Principles 3, 4, and 5), by integrating the work for understanding into classroom practice (Principle 6), and by making joint and integrated work generate continuity (Principle 7).

Principle 3: involve everybody.

Principle 4: work to bring people together.

Principle 5: work also for mutual development.

Principle 6: avoid “burn out” by integrating the work for understanding into classroom practice.

Principle 7: make the work a continuous - not a “projectised”- entrerprise.

So, APIES teachers, I encourage you to:

· take any opportunity to share your work with others through your Teacher Association and

· join our EP community of practice in “Working to Understand our Everyday Classroom Lives".