The Exploratory Practice Centre

Ines Miller

Ines Miller’s impressions on the 2003 event 

“ Bringing teachers and learners together: A dream coming true” 

What impressed me most about the event was that it helped us understand that our challenging dream could, in fact, come true. It was clear that participating teachers and their learners had worked ‘together’ on their puzzles and had reached joint understandings of their teaching-learning activities and relationships that they tried to convey during the event.  

As other participants’ impressions suggest, an important thing was the feeling of ‘togetherness’ in the EP enterprise. We were all very much aware that we were part of a larger group of colleagues and students who, during the preparation months, seemed to come closer to each other as people and to think more of each other as ‘friends’:

-Within classrooms walls teachers and learners were arriving at many joint understandings about their classroom lives and their lives in general as well as making all sorts of joint presentation decisions. Similar processes were a work in an institutional context (Cultura Inglesa, for example) where the EP work for understanding was being developed between mentors and their mentees. 

-  At the pre-event fortnightly meetings we came together to share our teacher-learner EP preparation process and our ideas for the event in general. It was very encouraging, for example, to see that on some occasions students joined these meetings with their teachers and participated actively in the session. We were also pleased that these meetings created new reflection possibilities for a group of PUC colleagues, renewed old EP contacts with some members of the Cultura Inglesa staff and encouraged new contacts with teacher-researchers from other local institutions (UFRJ, UERJ).

-  Dick Allwright came from the UK to be even closer to the EP Group in Rio during the month prior to the event. He was quite keen on participating in the preparatory meetings as well as in regularly joining in Ines’ Teaching Practice sessions, in which teacher-learners and herself were organising two workshops on “Planning for Understanding”.)

-  Sub-groups that were organising various activities on the program were also getting more and more enthusiastic about making joint decisions and putting the event together in a general sense.

Another aspect that struck me was that it helped us become more aware of the fact that participants -- teachers, learners and researchers who acted as rapporteurs – seemed to be

so keen on discussing issues of ‘quality of (classroom) life’ – motivation, autonomy, cultural identity, anxiety, affect, among many others (see event program). 

A post-event perception was that the innovative conception of the event seems to have generated interest in creating opportunities for the EP Group in Rio to share their EP work with practitioners – teachers and learners -- in several other local institutions (see Report of Rio activities 2003) and in Europe as well (see report on EP in Europe). 

Lancaster, February 2004.

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Last Updated March 26,2004

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