Speaker
ABSTRACT
Exploratory Practice (EP), a type of practitioner research, facilitates reflection on teaching/learning contexts, viewing students as agents with unique understanding of their particular classrooms who have the ability to provide critical feedback and insights. Its goal is understanding specific learning situations to improve the quality of life for all participants. In other research methods, in-class data collection may interfere with “normal” class activities, but EP recommends “Potentially Exploitable Pedagogical Activities” (PEPAs) for gathering information about puzzles in teaching/learning contexts with minimal disruption. In my experience in Japanese university EFL, where students sometimes try to avoid using English, explicitly framing tasks and assignments as opportunities to provide feedback via digital formats has benefitted both sides, opening channels of communication and providing students reasons for producing English output in monolingual classrooms. Further, students’ responses form data sets that can benefit the teacher in terms of both developing appropriate localized classroom practices and conducting research for publishing opportunities and professional development. In this poster presentation, I present my “takeaways” from digitally gathering, managing, and analyzing qualitative student data collected with surveys, writing prompts, asynchronous posts, and recorded discussions to report on my experiences of the affordances of these PEPAs.
KEYWORDS
Exploratory Practice, task-based instruction, digital tools for research
| TITLE | Exploratory Practice: Two birds (student output/data), one stone (PEPAs) |
|---|---|
| RELEVANT SIG | College and University Educators (CUE) |
| FORMAT | In-person interactive poster session |
