In this presentation, we will share the experiences of pre- and in-service educators engaged in professional learning (PL) in a variety of spaces, both virtual and physical. These data, collected from interviews and surveys, were analyzed in order to explore how educators navigate teaching content and language within immersion and multilingual contexts.
The Second Language Research Institute of Canada (L2RIC) is housed in the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton, NB, Canada. Members of the L2RIC team have been involved in pre- and in-service PL for immersion and additional language educators for over 30 years. PL takes place in a variety of spaces. L2RIC is committed to programs, projects and research that connect these spaces, both virtual and physical. The initial teacher preparation program at UNB was conceived to ensure the embeddedness of experiential learning (Hirschkorn & Kristmanson, 2010) and L2RIC embraces this philosophy with courses that link to experiences in the field. With this idea in mind, teacher educators at L2RIC wanted to address issues related to linguistic competence and confidence of pre-service teachers specializing in French immersion (FI) as well as address the needs for recruitment and retention of FI teachers in our provincial and Canadian school systems. This study focuses on a professional learning session called "Scéances franco" developed to meet linguistic and professional goals of pre-service teachers. It took also into consideration the special skills and competencies required to integrate language and content (e.g., Cammarata & Tedick, 2021) and problematized the ideology of the native speaker and the native speaker norms used to judge and assess teachers (e.g., Wernicke, 2016; Mison & Jang, 2011). Additionally, modern conceptions of plurilingual and plurilcultural competence (Council of Europe, 2018) as well as mediation (Piccardo, North & Goodier, 2019) formed the basis of the theoretical framework for this study. In this presentation, we will share data collected from pre-service teachers participating in this particular PL session and focus on preliminary data collected and analyzed from one of the data sources- focus groups. From these analyzed qualitative interview data, four themes emerged: 1) Competence and Competence; 2) Spaces for Oral Interaction; 3) Safe and Encouraging Spaces; 4) Spaces for Mediation. We believe that this research will better inform our practices as teacher educators and contribute to the academic-professional conversations related to teacher education for immersion teachers.
