The Exploratory Practice Centre

Rio de Janeiro, 22 November 2003. 

REPORT OF RIO DE JANEIRO EP GROUP ACTIVITIES

JULY-NOVEMBER 2003

(Prepared by core members of the EP Group in Rio)

        In July 2003, almost a month after the EP event held in Rio in June 2003, members of the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Group participated in the Second International Seminar of Education held at the University of Campinas, São Paulo state. They presented a paper on the principles of EP illustrated with photographs of sessions, events, and groups of teachers and students. Maria I. Cunha presented two papers on her work with Exploratory Practice and the English Learning Clinic developed at a private school in Rio de Janeiro (Colégio don Quixote). 

        On 15 September, Inés Miller was invited to present the ideas of Exploratory Practice during a Teleconference organised by the Distance Education Centre at PUC-Rio. The theme was “Research and the Teacher” and the other participants were Prof. Menga Lüdke and Prof. Ralph Bannell, both from the Education Department at PUC-Rio, Brazil. Inés had 20 minutes to make a brief presentation of EP: its origins, its core principles, and its worldwide expansion. An interesting discussion on reflective practice, teacher research and teacher knowledge followed the presentations. 

        As a consequence of the success of the EP event in Rio, the Rio de Janeiro EP Group was invited to participate in the XIII Meeting of the Espírito Santo Teacher Association (attended by 150 teachers) held in Vitória from 25 to 27 September, 2003.  As guest plenary speaker, Inés Miller offered a one-and-a- half hour ‘interactive’ plenary session, in which she briefly presented EP’s historical background and then went from puzzles to PEPAs with a chance for the audience to experience some of the key moments of an Exploratory Practice process. Members of the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group also had a one-hour session on the following day to discuss the principles of EP, to illustrate the notions of teacher professional development and student autonomy, and to demonstrate how EP promotes understandings of the quality of life within our daily classroom practice. 

        During the month of October 2003, the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group was actively present at the following events: 

1.   At the 6^th English Teachers’ Forum held at Cultura Inglesa, Icaraí branch in Niteroi, Inés Miller opened the day (October 4, 2003) with a plenary session for 150 teachers. In her interactive plenary she presented a brief historical background of Exploratory Practice and then invited the audience to share with a partner their everyday classroom activities. From there, she helped them extract puzzles and explore their activities into PEPAs. She also discussed the EP principles and a number of examples of PEPAs prepared by teachers and students.

      Later in the day, members of the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group showed four posters prepared in collaboration with their students, where interesting puzzles were discussed: “Why do we insist on speaking English?”, “Why does the English taught at school not prepare the students for the job market?”, “Hamlet at school – how do you like your drama classes?”, “Why do people think of school teachers and students versus course teachers and students?” Participants were invited to write poster appreciations and to formulate their own puzzles. 

2.    At the 1st Meeting of the BRAZ-TESOL Rio de Janeiro Chapter, on October 17 2003, the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group worked with participants’ favorite classroom activities and from there explored their investigative possibilities. The audience reflected on their choice of activities and the adaptations they could make to turn them into PEPAs. Finally, they extracted puzzles that had a connection with their PEPAs. 

3.   The English Language Department of the Municipal Secretariat of Education of the City of Rio de Janeiro (SME-Rio) invited the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group to work with two groups of Municipal Sector teachers of English (in the morning and in the afternoon) in their Annual Meeting held on October 22, 2003. Maria I. Cunha and Inés Miller introduced the sessions with a brief plenary presentation of the EP principles, which was followed by plenary poster presentations given by members of the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group and their students’ on puzzles such as “Why do we insist on speaking English?”, “Why does the English taught at school not prepare the students for the job market?”, “Hamlet at school – how do you like your drama classes?”, “English in Brasil – an instrument of social inclusion?” There was also an enthusiastic staging of some scenes of Hamlet by adolescents of a Municipal school in Rio de Janeiro.

Several important aspects need to be highlighted about this event: it was the first time that a group of Municipal teacher and their students presented their work to teachers who came to participate of a teacher development event. These teachers were also quite impressed to see public sector students basing their oral presentations in Portuguese on texts that they had written in English as part of the EP processes they were describing. But the highlight of the day cam when one of the authorities representing SME-Rio asked a student to explain the difference between this type of English classes and the ‘regular’ ones. The student thought for a minute and then replied: “These classes are serious but they are also fun!” 

4.      The Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group was invited to run EP workshops at two private universities of the state of Rio de Janeiro: UNISUAM, in Bonsucesso, on Tuesday, October 21 and UNIPLI, in Niterói, on Tuesday, October 28. During the SEMANA DE LETRAS (LETTERS WEEK) of those institutions, the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group presented an Exploratory Practice Workshop to interested and participating audiences of students and/ or teachers of different subjects (Mathematics and Physical Education included). Both sessions started with EP poster presentations and went on with an analysis on their classroom puzzles. The participants were stimulated to discuss in pairs the poster they most identified with and to justify their choices. They also thought about what ‘puzzled’ them in their classrooms. After a short plenary, the principles of EP were presented and the audience was invited to join the next meetings or to visit the EP website. 

5.      The Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group offered two EP Workshops entitled “Vivendo e Aprendendo na sala de Aula” (Living and Learning in the classroom), at PUC-Rio, on October 24 and November 7, 2003. These 3-hour workshops were held to meet the demand of teachers who had come across EP during the June event and wished to find out more about this type of work and also of EP teachers who wanted to have some EP sessions before the end of the year! On both afternoons, participants were divided according to their previous contact with EP into a ‘junior’ group (30) and a ‘senior’ group (15) but both groups came together for tea/coffee, cookies and for more joint reflection.   Maria I. Cunha took the ‘junior’ group through a mini-EP process: they started off by working on their classroom narratives, raised their classroom puzzles, unearthed their personal professional beliefs, and even began to understand the richness of working with Potentially Exploitable Pedagogic Activities (PEPAs). Inés Miller met with the ‘senior’ group and, during the first meeting, encouraged a discussion on the sustainability of the EP process in the group’s every day classroom lives by asking teachers to share their own and their students’ most recent puzzles. In the second meeting, Inés took the challenge of tentatively working with the senior group on their most commonly adopted pedagogic ‘solutions’. After collectively voicing the beliefs that would seem to underlie such pedagogic actions, the group reflected on the possibility of transforming such familiar solutions into ‘exploratory solutions’, i.e., solutions that could yield some understandings due to a change in the agent’s intention. For example, supposing a teacher reported that she “walks around the class to make her students participate”, we considered the possibility of “walking around the class to try to understand why her students are not participating”. Since this modification in the intention of the action would turn the solution into an ‘exploratory solution’, we thought of tentatively proposing the notion of Potentially Exploitable Pedagogic Solutions (PEPSos?).

Maria Isabel and Inés also offered a handout in which they had condensed some connections they had established between EP and some of their recent readings. Other teachers promised to send their own connections to our epcentrerio@hotmail.com address. 

6.      On November 6, 2003, Inés Miller participated in the “XI Semana Interdisciplinar de Estudos Anglo-Germânicos” as an invited member of a panel to propose some connections between Vygotsky’s  and Bakhtin’s thinking and  Exploratory Practice. Inés related EP’s principles with the multiplicity of voices participating in the socio-historic construction of classroom work as part of classroom life, with perceived quality of life, with dialogic interaction with the other, with pedagogic practice as ideological signs. She proposed Exploratory Practice as a movement of discursive transformation in pedagogic contexts by emphasizing, among other points, the use of classroom time and space to stimulate, pursue and ‘be seduced by’ questions/puzzles rather than by precipitate solutions. She took the chance to join the movement and invite colleagues to participate in the 6^th EP Event in June 2004. 

    In October, some members of the Rio de Janeiro Exploratory Practice Group attended the “3rd International Seminar of Education”, in which they enjoyed presentations by Professor Phillipe Perrenoud and Monica Thurler. They dealt with such topics as: School projects and the development of competences and as a source for professional development, Re-thinking the work organization at schools, Professional cooperation and community responsibility.

EP Centre  WebMaster
Last Updated March 26,2004

© 2004  EPCentre