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Major Article 01 

Editorial note

An earlier version of this paper is being published in Germany by Peter Lang  (in a book on Finnish teacher education edited by Ritva Jakku-Sihvonen and Hannele Niemi, University of Helsinki, Finland).  

Developing foreign language education through transformative teacher growth

Viljo Kohonen

Viljo Kohonen has worked as professor of foreign language education at the University of Tampere, Finland, since 1980, working on pre-service and inservice teacher education. He has collaborated continuously with language teachers on action-research projects in an experiential learning framework,  developing FL education through the teacher's professional growth connected with long-term collegial collaboration.  He is a coauthor of  Kohonen, V. et al. 2001, Experientail learning in foreign language education (by Pearson Education), which is an outgrowth of his project work. More recently he has worked on authentic assessment in the projects related to the European Language Portfolio (ELP) under the auspices of the Council of Europe, acting as a consultant to several national ELP projects within the European community. E-mail: Viljo.Kohonen@uta.fi

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Introdcution
1. A note on contextualizing teaching, learning and teacher education
2. Foreign language teaching as language education 
2.1 Intercultural communicative competence in FL education
2.3 A pedagogical model for FL education
2.4 The European Language Portfolio as a tool in FL education
3. The language teacher’s professional growth: voices from the classrooms
3.1 Two site-based action research projects: project design
3.2. Enhanced language teacher’s professional identity
3.3. Teacher growth as emotional involvement
4.  Discussion
4.1 Sociocultural aspects in FL education 
4.2. Towards a transformative paradigm in teacher education
4.3. Encountering an educational change
4.4 The contradictory context of professional growth
References

Introdcution

I will explore current developments in foreign language education in the context of fostering socially responsible language learning through the teacher’ professional growth towards transformative teacher learning. I will first discuss the salient recent developments in foreign language (FL) teaching in the light of the influential Common European Framework of Reference by Council of Europe (CEFR 2001). Closely connected with the CEFR, the European Language Portfolio (ELP) has been developed as an instrument for fostering student autonomy and intercultural learning through self-assessment. I will examine the teacher’s growth in the educational change process involving a new paradigm in FL education, based on the basis of the findings of two recent Finnish research and development projects carried out as action research.  In the light the new goals of FL education, I will consider the implications of the paradigm shift for teacher education as transformative professionalism. 

1. A note on contextualizing teaching, learning and teacher education

As a school is part of its surrounding society, it is natural that developments in society and work life impinge on educational policies, administration and learning cultures in school. The ongoing global restructuring of work life requires important new skills such as flexibility in thinking, continuous learning, participation in multicultural work settings, responsible team work, taking the initiative, and the use of information and communication technologies.

In many post-industrial societies, schools have got more freedom in designing their curricula and using their resources as part of a more general trend of decentralizing administrative power. The purpose is to underscore the need for democratic citizenship education at all levels of schooling. In Finland schools have been expected to design their own site-based curricula since the mid 1990’s, based on the national framework curricula that are specified further in the municipal curriculum guidelines. A pedagogical aim of the innovation is to involve the teachers in decision-making concerning their own work and thereby to increase their engagement in the work place community.

Changes in society and work life pose new challenges for education at all levels of schooling. In an important European report a decade ago, schooling, democracy and teacher education were linked together, emphasizing the role of teachers for raising the general level of education, building a European identity and developing the key competences in school  (White Paper 1995). In another report (Cochinaux and de Woot 1995), the future of education in Europe was discussed in terms of the following properties:
• Learning is accepted as a continuing activity throughout life.
• Learners take responsibility for their own progress.
• Assessment  confirms progress rather than brands failure.
• Capability, personal and shared values and team work are recognised equally with the pursuit of knowledge.
• Learning is a partnership between students, parents, teachers, employers and the community, all of whom work together to improve performance.
These goals emphasise the need to promote responsible student autonomy, social skills and intercultural communication abilities through an active participation in the classroom community. To become more independent and autonomous language users, students need to develop an awareness of language and communication. They also need to develop their study and heuristic skills to make effective use of the learning opportunities and the available materials on their own as a process of life-long language learning. Facilitating such changes in student learning is a question of developing teacher education towards a new kind of professionalism involving collegial collaboration and partnerships.

A recent Draft on teacher and trainer education by the European Commission (Draft 2005) suggests a number of new policies for teacher education in Europe. The paper notes that teachers and trainers play a crucial role in providing high quality education for personal fulfilment, better social skills and more diverse employment opportunities. The paper emphasizes certain values for the teaching profession such as inclusiveness, nurturing the potential of all pupils and advancing human potential. To implement such values, the development of teacher and trainer competences and qualifications is seen as a key priority in Europe. Teachers need to know how to respond to the challenges of the knowledge society and how to prepare their pupils to be autonomous lifelong learners.  

The Draft also emphasizes the social and cultural dimensions of education with reference to EU citizenship education, based on the common cultural base and the rich national/ regional diversity in Europe. To develop schools, the participants should aim at establishing partnerships between higher education and schools and other educational institutions.  Similarly, policies for continuity in professional learning need to be integrated in teacher education:  initial training should to be followed by continuous professional development, involving interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches, that is, collegial work across the curriculum.

For the teachers, the changes suggest the need to develop teacher education towards an activist teacher professionalism, as Judythe Sachs puts it.  She notes that teacher professionalism is in transition towards a transformative notion of professionalism emphasizing the elements of professional expertise, ethics and autonomy as the platform for activist teacher professionalism.  The emerging concept needs rethinking and revitalizing teacher professionalism in the light of the new ideas of professional learning and the changes in the educational context. (Sachs 2003, 12–17).

However, developments are frequently contradictory. To my understanding, the principles and practices of the market economy are currently being brought far too crudely from business life to education in many national settings. The now fashionable policy is to have schools and institutions compete against each other for “customers” and resources. Competition is intensified by introducing controlling mechanisms in the interest of what is called “quality assurance”. Such devices include centralised norms and performance standards, various competency lists, inspection and standardised tests. While educational quality obviously is vital for all teachers, these tendencies seem to undermine the teacher’s position as an autonomous professional. They also create a turbulent context for school development aimed at a collegial process of collaboration  between the participants and the stakeholders.
		
2. Foreign language teaching as language education 

2.1 Intercultural communicative competence in FL education

As part of the need to increase multicultural collaboration, intercultural communicative competence is now generally seen as an overarching goal in foreign language education. It involves essentially a capacity for encountering cultural diversity in intercultural communication between people coming from different socio-cultural settings. It also emphasises the importance of being able to critically reflect on  one’s cultural identity and values and to develop an awareness of the complex relationships between language, society and cultural meanings (Byram 2003; Kaikkonen 2001; 2002; 2004). 

The seminal Common European Framework discusses the new goal orientation in terms of fostering the language user’s plurilingualism and pluriculturalism in linguistically and culturally diverse Europe The notion involves a complex, multiple language competence on which the language user may draw in intercultural communication. It suggests the need to consider both affective, cognitive and behavioural elements in the pedagogical development of pluriculturalism (CEFR 2001). 	These goals clearly entail a new paradigm, involving the development of student autonomy as a language learner and as a language user. Intercultural communicative competence is an action-oriented concept, suggesting the importance of relating constructively to otherness and foreignness in human encounters. To do so, language users need to accept the ambiguity inherent in intercultural communication and develop a respect for cultural diversity. As cross-cultural encounters are also a question of attitudes and emotions, becoming an intercultural language user clearly emphasises the role of the affective elements in foreign and second language education. Intercultural communicative competence is thus an educationally valuable goal in its own right, entailing an element of personal growth as a human being. (Jaatinen 2001; 2007; Kaikkonen 2001; 2002; Breen 2001; Kohonen 2001; 2005; Kalaja & Barcelos 2003.)

Language learning constitutes  an important part of the student’s preparation to responsible citizenship in societies that are becoming increasingly multilingual and multicultural. A natural task for language learning is to connect people from various cultural backgrounds and thus increase openness for human diversity. There is thus a new challenge for second and foreign language teachers to facilitate their students to grow beyond the boundaries of their own cultures (Kaikkonen 2001). Such a goal also entails a clear socio-political dimension in foreign language education: promoting student autonomy and democratic citizenship education as an inherent part of language education. To do so teachers need to encourage the pupils’ active participation and responsible action in the classroom community. They also need to enhance their students’ personal identities as part of a wider European (and global) identity. (CEFR 2001; Beacco and Byram 2002; Kaikkonen 2002; 2004; Byram 2003; Kohonen 2001.) 

2.2  Foreign language education

Foreign language education  involves purposefully designed and facilitated human growth that touches the student as a whole person. It aims at meaningful learning that is based on personal experience. I use the term foreign language education to refer to this kind of student learning. It involves the following properties:
1. The student’s own goals and autonomy
2. Personal engagement in learning
3. Student initiative and responsibility
4. Meaningful learning in a holistic orientation
5. Emphasis on reflection and self-assessment
6. Integration of social, affective and cognitive learning goals
Foreign language education promotes self-directed learning and socially responsible student autonomy. By this I mean the student’s willingness and ability to take increasing charge of the decisions concerning his or her learning. I understand student autonomy as denoting a significant measure of independence from external control. This is, however, balanced by our mutual dependence on each other in society; thus it is a question of social interdependence (Kohonen 2001; 2004).  According to the classic definition by David Little (1991, 4), autonomy is essentially a "capacity –  for detachment, critical reflection, decision-making and independent action".  For autonomy to increase, the student needs to develop a responsible, self-directed psychological stance to the process and content of learning.
In terms of the conception of man, the student is seen as a self-directed, intentional person who can be guided to develop his or her competences in three inter-related areas of knowledge, skills and awareness: (a) personal awareness and self-direction, (b) awareness of learning processes, and (c)  awareness of language and communication. I discuss these perspectives briefly in the following (Kohonen 2001; 2003; 2004; 2005).
(1) Personal awareness and self-direction develop in learning processes throughout the individual’s life cycle. Self-directed language learning poses demands on the student’s ability to cope with unknown situations. Acceptance of  ambiguity  is particularly necessary in foreign language learning which is bound to involve unpredictability and novelty because of the new linguistic and cultural systems of language behaviour. Students with high self-esteem are generally more willing to take risks in communication. Fostering self-esteem is a question of working towards a community of learners in which the students feel safe to explore their language learning, communication and cultural meanings. Cognitive factors are thus integrated with the affective elements in language teaching and language use. (Kohonen 2001; 2005; Arnold 1999; Breen 2001; Kalaja & Barcelos 2003.)
 (2) Awareness of the learning processes helps language students to monitor their learning towards increasingly self-organized, negotiated language learning and self-assessment. This involves knowledge about the strategies of language learning and communication. At a higher level of abstraction, the metacognitive knowledge of learning helps students to improve their ways of planning, monitoring and assessing their learning processes. It also means acquiring the social skills needed in responsible learning. To enhance their learning students need to be actively involved in the whole process, interacting with their peers (Kohonen 2001; 2006a; van Lier 1996; 2004).
 (3) Awareness of language and communication. Language classrooms provide a powerful environment for fostering and guiding student learning. They allow language, communication and learning to be made explicit and discussed and explored together, with the teacher as a professional guide and organiser of the learning tasks and opportunities.  The quality of this environment is a question of what kind of tasks the students do and how they are guided to work on what they do. Awareness of the language as a linguistic system also includes learning the meta-knowledge of language at the various levels of linguistic description. Through such knowledge students can become more skilled language learners and users who are also capable of assessing their language proficiency. They need to understand their foreign language learning enterprise and conceptualise their role as active participants  in the process (Kohonen 2001; 2006a; Huttunen 2003; Little 2004).
These components of learner development need to be accompanied by and consciously linked to the teacher’s professional growth towards an ethically based view of what it means to be a professional language teacher and a language educator. Further, teacher development needs to be embedded in the context of a purposeful staff development towards a collegial institutional culture, connected with the society developments at large. This entails redesigning the language teaching profession and reculturing the schools as collaborative work places.

2.3 A pedagogical model for FL education

I propose the following holistic framework for foreign language education, emphasizing the role of reflective experiential learning in the process (Figure 1; Kohonen 2001, 55–56).

Figure 1. Foreign language education  in the institutional context.

The model suggests an integral connection between language learning, teaching, evaluation and the teacher’s professional growth and poses new challenges for the teacher’s professional competence. Working towards a coherent and transparent language learning/teaching process requires an explicit support for the teacher’s professional growth and collegial collaboration. 

2.4 The European Language Portfolio as a tool in FL education 

The Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for language teaching (CEFR 2001) is an outcome of a long-term commitment (since the early 1970s) to promote a broad learner-centred approach in the teaching of modern languages in multilingual and multicultural Europe. The European Language Portfolio (ELP) is connected with the CEFR as a pedagogical language learning and reporting instrument. It consists of three parts: the Passport section, the Language Biography section, and the Dossier section. It encourages students to monitor a record of their language learning experiences, both formal (in organised schooling) and informal (e.g. in multicultural families and work environments and in sustained contacts with speakers of other languages). 

The ELP has two complementary functions in FL education: the pedagogic and the reporting function. The pedagogic function of the ELP emphasises the process aspect of language learning: helping the students to identify their learning aims, to make action plans, to reflect, monitor and modify the processes, and to evaluate the outcomes through self-assessment and reflection. The reporting function of the ELP, on the other hand, is concerned with the product aspect of foreign language learning: providing a record of their language skills and cultural experiences by relating their communicative skills to the proficiency levels according the CEFR (levels A, B and C). This distinction between the two functions of the ELP is essential for understanding the potential of the ELP for enhancing foreign language education.

ELP-oriented FL pedagogy, with an emphasis on negotiated task-based learning, offers new possibilities for making language learning more concrete, transparent and thus visible to students and teachers. As Leo van Lier (1996, 11) points out, learning something requires that one notices it in the first place: “This noticing is an awareness of its existence, obtained and enhanced by paying attention to it. Paying attention is focusing one’s consciousness, or pointing one’s perceptual powers in the right direction, and making mental ‘energy’ available for processing”. Thus experience alone is not a sufficient condition for learning. Experiences also need to be processed consciously by reflecting on them, both alone and in groups. Critical reflection is an important key to learning from experience. 

Without the necessary meta-knowledge about language and learning, it is only natural for language students to feel lost or at least embarrassed when facing self-assessment tasks of their foreign language skills. However, even young (or beginning) learners are more likely to know what they can do communicatively in the target language. They are also aware of the general level of proficiency at which they can do it (Little 1999). The functional “can do” checklists (developed by the Swiss ELP project) can therefore be a more natural thing to start with. 

The Finnish ELP piloting experiences suggest that it is advisable to begin with the students themselves as learners in general and as language learners in particular. In other words, students learn a basic reflective orientation by working on their experiences, beliefs and assumptions of learning in the first place. Learning to be reflective about oneself as a human being and as a language student seems to be something that many students find a natural thing to do (while again for some students it seems to be quite a difficult orientation to get hold of). It is helpful to start with simple questions or semi-structured statements designed by the teacher. It is also important for the teacher to justify the benefits of reflection to the students and explain why she is asking them to reflect on their learning and assess their communicative skills. (Kohonen 2004; 2006b.)

Self-directed language learning poses great demands on the students’ ability to cope with the uncertainties in developing their skills of reflection and self-assessment. Taking charge of their learning as  socially responsible members of the classroom community is similarly a new learning culture for many students. Students can take an increasing amount of control of the complex social and cognitive learning processes only to the extent that they assume the necessary understanding, knowledge and skills of organising their work and working together and develop, and develop an engagement for the new goals. Teachers need to understand the paradoxical nature of the task that they ask their students to undertake when encouraging their self-assessment. Students need a great deal of specific help, guidance and support to cope with the task gradually. (Kohonen 2003, 2005; 2006b; Little 1999; 2004.)

3. The language teacher’s professional growth: voices from the classrooms

Fostering FL teaching as language education entails that the teacher is able to translate the goals and  principles into a coherent pedagogical action and guide student learning over time, as appropriate in the given context. In doing so the teacher needs to work on his/her educational values, beliefs and assumptions and carry out conscious work on his/her professional identity as a language educator. In this paper, I will discuss ways of fostering the treacher’s professional growth through inservice teacher education, based on the data from two long-term projects at the Department of Teacher Education in Tampere University.

3.1 Two site-based action research projects: project design

I will discuss salient perspectives to the professional growth in this section based on the empirical findings of two research and development projects: (1) the “OK School Development Project” (1994 – 98) directed by Viljo Kohonen and Pauli Kaikkonen.  A central goal in the project was to enhance the teacher’s professional growth and responsible student learning by fostering collegial school culture as a cross-curriculum approach. The project was joined by about 40 teachers from six schools in the vicinity of Tampere (Kohonen and Kaikkonen 1996; 2001; Kohonen 2002; 2003).  The OK project was followed by a national (2) ”Finnish ELP Pilot Project” (1998–2001) directed by Viljo Kohonen and Ulla Pajukanta. The project was carried out under the auspices of the Council of Europe, as part of a large European ELP pilot project (1998–2000).  It took place in eight schools, with a total of 360 students and 22 language teachers (Kohonen 2004; 2006b). 

We extended both of the projects over a period of three school years with the same pupils and teachers because we wanted the participants to complete the whole three-year cycle of schooling (lower/upper secondary/ vocational school). Both the projects had a clear emphasis on fostering the participating teachers’ professional growth in an experiential, reflective learning framework. The decisions concerning the project implementation were discussed and negotiated together with the participants. For this purpose we established a small project planning group consisting the project leaders and some of the participating teachers. The seminars and the joint planning work created a spirit of professional sharing and negotiated learning in the two projects. The seminars had a central element of small group discussions, which provided the teachers with opportunities for mutual, interactive learning. The interactive process also encouraged the teachers to use similar techniques in their language classes, based on their own experiences of reflective professional learning in the teacher groups.

We also encouraged the teachers to record their observations, thoughts and insights in personal diaries and collect their worksheet materials for the students, as well as student feedback, in their personal project portfolios. Based on such qualitative research and development material, we asked the teachers to submit professional development essays at the end of each school year to report on their pedagogical experiences and findings during the past year. This qualitative material also provided an important source of data for the project evaluations (supplemented by recorded thematic interviews of a number of teachers and pupils at the end of the projects). Reflective, interactive teacher learning became thus gradually a natural element of the project work.

In both of the projects, we developed the concept of bridging tasks involving professional reading and/or classroom piloting on topics discussed and agreed during the seminar day. We invited the teachers to study a great deal of relevant professional literature (in duplicated copies for each) and discuss their thoughts in their school teams and share their findings at the seminars with other project participants. In this way the experiences from the schools fed into the group work during the next seminar day. The bridging tasks provided important continuity between the seminars and gave teachers opportunities to explore their work in the light of the inputs from the seminars and the reading materials.

As reflective learning was a new thing to most of the students, we aimed at teaching it as explicitly and as concretely as the familiar language skills, using reflection as a tool for learning reflection and becoming a more reflective student. In several teacher workshops, we spent a great deal of time putting together our understanding and experiences of teaching reflective learning.  In small groups the teachers outlined concrete ideas and lesson plans for the motivation and orientation of the students for reflective learning.  The findings were discussed together at the seminars. The teachers used the ideas in their classes (with the necessary modifications) and again shared their experiences with each other, getting new perspectives to enrich their own experiences. 

3.2. Enhanced language teacher’s professional identity

The language teachers took up the idea of the language portfolio as an important pedagogical tool for encouraging self-directed language learning. Discussing and negotiating the curriculum aims, contents and processes in the classes helped the students to gradually take more responsibility for their learning.  Having options entailed personal choices about how to set the individual (or small group) objectives and make action plans.  The plans specified the time frame for the work to be done:  agreeing on the deadlines for consulting and returning the completed assignments, the contents to include in the reports, possibly with (minimum) requirements for acceptable work (e.g. in terms of the length of the report and the range of topics to be dealt with, the way of reporting and the quality of the language). 

Teachers soon discovered that tutoring their students’ portfolios required a great deal of time for designing and guiding the work, negotiating the ground rules and deadlines, answering questions, reading the student assignments and giving feedback about their work. It also required a new kind of firmness in setting the tone of the work, negotiating the processes and expecting that the students also observe the agreed deadlines. Encountering the students on a more personal basis in an open consultation was a new experience for many teachers.

Teachers found that teaching such lessons to their students was changing their personal views and images of teaching in a fundamental way. It was necessary for them to reflect on their professional roles as educators. The portfolio-oriented learning opened them significant new perspectives to their work. Student portfolios clearly helped them in getting to know their students better as individuals with their own lives, interests and hopes for the future (Kohonen and Kaikkonen 2001; Kohonen 2002; 2003; 2004; 2006b). 

For a secondary school teacher, the language portfolio opened a new world of professional growth and student guidance and tutoring. The whole concept of “teaching” was gradually unfolding to her in a new way (Kohonen 2002; 2003): ‘I still “teach,” of course, and am still a certain authority and adult in my class, …  but I have also become a counsellor of my students’ learning.  I attempt to create a positive climate in my classes and I also have the courage to take risks.  I have become an observer of learning and I continuously encourage my students by giving them positive and still honest feedback, both orally and in writing.’

Another language teacher found that she was more than just a teacher of the languages in her school. At times she felt like being ‘… a social educator, a psychologist, a family therapist, a listener, a referee, someone who comforts.’  Increased personal collaboration with the parents in the parent meetings also gave the teachers a better knowledge and understanding of their students’ home backgrounds. However, the meetings also raised the question of where to find the time for them, particularly as they had to be organised in the evenings.

An upper secondary language teacher analysed her developments, noting that ‘ knowledge transmission and authority were not the basic idea of being a teacher. What then?  Could it be that the teacher is also a human being in class, someone who can also make mistakes and admit them?’  Important for her was a two-year intensive course on student counselling, and a long-term work as a mentor of student teachers.  After a thirty-year career, her current view of teachership consisted of elements of guiding her students, talking and negotiating with them, giving space for student questions and being an adult person in the class.  Portfolio-oriented work gave her essential tools for this orientation.  She noted that all her experiences and formative incidents had been necessary for her development during her long professional career (Kohonen 2002; 2003).

Language teachers found that collaboration was mutually beneficial to everybody. The colleagues provided, as it were, a mirror for the teacher to reflect on her own teaching. The teachers’ reflections indicate an enhanced notion of the secondary teacher’s professional identity, consisting of the following dimensions of expertise (Kohonen 2002; 2003):
a	Language and linguistics expertise:  the knowledge of the languages taught and the theoretical linguistic understanding of them. This is, of course, the traditional role identity of the secondary teachers.
b	Pedagogical expertise: knowledge of the students and individuals, how to encounter and guide them individually, how to facilitate their learning and teach them to be more competent and skilful learners; how to make the curriculum contents more readily accessible to them. 
c	Partnership in school development: understanding of the personal and institutional change processes and assuming a responsible role in developing the school as a collegial work place.
The dimensions suggest a major enhancement particularly in the secondary school teacher’s traditional role as the subject (language and linguistics) specialist working mainly alone (and using frontal instruction). The new kind of professionalism thus poses a significant challenge for the teacher, teacher education and the culture of schooling.

3.3. Teacher growth as emotional involvement

Facing professional change is not just an intellectual and rational matter of learning the factual information. It is also very much a question of undertaking the necessary emotional work inherent in any major changes (in any profession). This requires modifications in the beliefs and assumptions of the teacher’s role identity (Jaatinen 2001; Kohonen  2002; 2003).

Teachers related differently to such emotional demands.  On the one hand, the new discoveries were rewarding and entailed feelings of increased professional competence and even a kind of “empowerment”: ‘when I have got high enough I notice that flying does not take energy any longer.  I can just glide up there and let the currents in the air (that is, the new ideas and projects) carry me further. Now that I have learned to fly I also have the courage to visit new lands and enhance my experiential world.’  The development of school culture towards a collegial community was also felt to be energising: ‘There has been a manifest change in our school culture: we have learned to work together, plan together and give collegial support to each other… We had a heartily good time together during the brainstorming session.  We found each other and it was energizing to laugh at everything that had been irritating before.’ 

Professional growth was thus a personally enriching experience for many teachers. They felt that they had gained more belief in the significance of their work: they could make a difference to their students’ lives. They learned to accept their limitations and imperfections and realised that they were still good teachers.  Not having to be perfect was a liberating experience: ‘We touch others through our insufficiency, not through our impeccability and excellence.’  Teachers assumed the courage to bring up their thoughts more openly in the community and did not get so discouraged when facing resistance (Kohonen 2002b; 2003). 

On the other hand, however, professional growth also entailed feelings of uncertainty and insufficiency. Many teachers were also asking themselves how they could behave in their classes in a confident way while having inner doubts about their work: ‘Will these doings of mine have any bigger significance? ... I feel that while gliding among the clouds I have been a too hopeful idealist ... I hope I will gain a balance between my doubts and experience and assume certainty of my importance. My former self-confidence cannot have disappeared altogether’.

Being an innovative teacher was causing stress and anxiety to several teachers, who felt that they did not have enough time to cope with the increased tasks: ‘If only I had time!  Time to discuss with my students, to listen to them, negotiate, plan, make agreements and follow them up, time to get to know each student better as a person!” ... With the increase of the tasks I have a feeling of racing against time ... and we have less and less time to think of our everyday work routines…’ However, there were big individual differences between teachers: what was a stressing situation for one teacher could be a challenge for another teacher (Kohonen 2002; 2003).

The findings indicate that collegial on-site support and joint discussions at the project seminars was useful for sharing ideas and considering possible ways of dealing with the emerging problems of student guidance, motivation and evaluation. Developing foreign language teaching as language education is clearly a question of the teacher’s professional growth and fostering a collegial institutional culture. Student learning needs to be accompanied by and consciously linked to the teacher’s professional growth towards an ethical educational stance (Kohonen 2004; 2006b).

4.  Discussion

4.1 Sociocultural aspects in FL education

Connected with the rise of qualitative research methodology in classroom-based research, there has been a manifest shift of emphasis on the importance of the students’ own contributions to their language learning through an active involvement. In current views of sociocultural learning, the process of knowledge construction is discussed with an emphasis on interaction between the participants. Lev Vygotsky (1978), an early precursor of the theory writing in the 1920/30s, emphasised social interaction as the basis for the development of higher-level mental activity of the individual. Through social, interpsychological action the individual is mediated to move to the individual, intrapsychological plane.

Vygotsky described this process of development using the metaphor of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), referring to the zone between the individual’s actual and potential planes of development. Learning begins with what the child already knows and proceeds through social interaction. The tasks that pupils can do on their own are within their area of self-regulation. The development in the zone thus proceeds from other-regulation to self-regulation, from tasks carried out with the help of others to increasing self-regulation and autonomy (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1998; Lantolf 2000; Breen 2001; Alanen 2003; Watson-Gegeo 2004; van Lier 2004.)

In sociocultural theory, students are seen as a significant resource for their own learning as well as for each other’s learning. They need to take charge of their learning in order to enhance their autonomy as students and language users. This shift in the research has brought about a new focus on the students themselves as language learners. Students need to be facilitated to develop a basic reflective orientation to learning by working on their experiences, beliefs and expectations of language use and learning. Kalaja & Barcelos (2003, 1) define beliefs as “opinions and ideas that learners (and teachers) have about the task of learning a second/foreign language”. Beliefs are socially constituted, interactively sustained and time-bound assumptions about the roles and duties of the participants in the social teaching–learning process. Consequently, they are modifiable and changeable (at least to some extent), rather than being stable and permanent (Lantolf 2000; Kalaja & Barcelos 2003; ; Barcelos 2003; Kohonen 2005; 2006a; Lehtovaara 2001; Jaatinen 2001; 2003; Little 2004;  Watson-Gegeo 2004; van Lier 2004.)

As Devon Woods points out, beliefs are integrated in a larger dynamic model of thought and action forming a central framework within which all learning takes place. The formation and development of beliefs can thus be seen as a type of learning. Beliefs impinge on the teacher’s decisions, actions and events and the interpretation of events. Teaching behaviour is influenced by a complex set of relationships which the teacher may or may not be aware of at a particular moment and which he/she may not be able to make explicit. (Woods 2003, 2002–2008.) Being unconscious and covert, they easily remain unnoticed and are kind of taken for granted in the classroom community. In this sense they can exercise a powerful hidden influence on the learning/teaching culture in the social contexts of foreign language education. By learning culture I understand the shared assumptions and understandings about the ways things are done in an institutional context. 

The teachers’ educational practices and beliefs of language teaching and learning will also shape the pupils’ images of ”good” language teaching and learning. For these reasons it is important for teachers to develop an awareness of educational phenomena in their classes, to consider their beliefs and views of education, and the roles of the participants in the process. This is also a question of using educational power in the classroom. (Alanen 2003, 60–63; Wertsch 1998; Kohonen 2001; 2004; 2005.)

As professional teachers and teacher educators we need to realise that our conception of man is inherent and embedded in our educational practices whether we are aware of it or not. Our lesson plans and methods inevitably presuppose some perspective from which we view learning, our teaching and students, the human beings to whom we teach languages. Our teaching methods are an inseparable part of our conception of man. As Jorma Lehtovaara points out, our methods are our philosophy of praxis. He argues further that we need genuine contemplative thinking based on a lived and personally experienced open dialogue in the spirit of a humanistic-scientific approach. We need to clarify our educational stance and make our implicit conception of man more explicit by asking questions such as: what is it – being human? What is the meaning of that for me?  How can I approach a person’s way of being-in-the-world so that I let it be what he or she experiences it to be? To what extent can and dare another person manifest himself or herself as he or she inherently is in my presence? (Lehtovaara 2001, 157-58).   

4.2. Towards a transformative paradigm in teacher education

In the transformative  paradigm, the teacher is an ethical professional who needs to be engaged in the process of reflection to understand his or her work at a deeper level of professional awareness. Experiential and sociocultural learning theories provide a powerful educational basis for integrating theoretical and practical elements of learning as a whole-person approach, emphasising the significance of personal experience and social interaction for language teaching and learning. Together they provide important concepts and pedagogical tools for building a new learning culture between the participants in school.

The notion of transformative learning also entails that teachers emancipate themselves from their constraining educational beliefs and assumptions and work towards a professional identity as educators, designing pedagogical learning environments in collaboration with other educators and stakeholders of schooling, and evaluating the outcomes of their professional efforts. The change integrates the cognitive, social and emotional aspects of professional learning. Transformative learning includes the following properties (Kolb 1984; Askew & Carnell 1998; Darling-Hammond 1998; Edge 2002; Kohonen 2001; 2003; 2005; Huttunen 2003; Sachs 2003): 
1	Realising the significance of professional interaction for growth
2	Developing an open, critical stance to professional work, and seeing oneself as a continuous learner
3	Developing a reflective attitude as a basic habit of mind, involving reflection on educational practices and their philosophical underpinnings, 
4	Developing new self-understandings in concrete situations,
5	Reflecting on critical events or incidents in life and work history, and learning from the personal insights
6	Conscious risk-taking:  acting in new ways in classes and in the work community
7	Ambiguity tolerance: learning to live with uncertainty concerning the decisions to be made

The approach emphasises the teacher’s self-understanding, based on pedagogical reflection in concrete situations with the students. Linda Darling-Hammond points out  that teachers learn by observing and listening to their students carefully and looking at their work thoughtfully.  This  develops their understanding of how their students see themselves as learners, what they care about, and what tasks are likely to give them enough challenge and success to sustain motivation. Teacher learning therefore needs to be connected with actual teaching, supported by ongoing reflection and theory building: “Teachers learn best by studying, doing, and reflecting; by collaborating with other teachers; by looking closely at students and their work; and by sharing what they see.” (Darling-Hammond 1998, 8).

To develop curriculum, teachers need to share their ideas, insights and uncertainties with each other. They need to clarify and redefine their educational beliefs and assumptions, working towards increased reflectivity by judging their findings against empirical classroom-based evidence and feedback from relevant other stakeholders. The purpose of the reflective work is to integrate their professional beliefs and current theoretical knowledge into new personal meanings and concrete practices for the benefit of student learning. Transformative learning thus entails that teachers move from the role of being consumers of outside expert knowledge towards taking an active role as curriculum developers and researchers of their work. 

4.3. Encountering an educational change

Teachers found that working on the ELP with their students changed their views of teaching in a fundamental way. Developing new practices was, however, was causing feelings of stress. Many teachers were asking themselves how they could behave in their classes in a confident way while having inner doubts about the new pedagogy and their professional skills. They were facing the paradox of being innovative teachers: how to give an impression of being a competent and self-confident teacher while feeling professionally uncertain and at times lost? They found it emotionally heavy to work on changing their professional beliefs and practices in the middle of the full work load in school. In addition to working on their own change processes, innovative teachers also had to face the suspicions and doubts from a number of their students and also colleagues.

Behind such problems is the well-known phenomenon of change resistance  to major changes in life and work. Changes generally trigger a broad spectrum of feelings. Change resistance is quite understandable because of the conflicting tensions and the uncomfortable feelings associated with it. Educational changes pose feelings of threat to personal security as they imply that some knowledge and skills are becoming obsolete and need to be replaced by something new. The transitional period of change processes often involves feelings of discomfort (and sometimes even anxiety and chaos) because of the uncertainties involved. However, people relate differently to such tensions. What is an anxiety situation for some teachers may be experienced as an energising challenge by some others.

On the other hand, the feelings of progress and increased understanding and professional growth are generally very rewarding and even empowering experiences, as seen in the data quoted above. An important source of teacher motivation and development was provided by observations and experiences of student progress. There is seems to be a cyclic interplay between teacher and student engagement: the teacher’s professional conviction and confidence increase student interest and motivation, and a positive student response promotes teacher enthusiasm. Essential in the process is the common understanding between teachers and students based on shared ground rules and negotiated learning. Ushioda and Ridley (2002, 51) make this point succinctly by noting that common understanding came about only “when there was a mutual agreement (negotiation) about the priorities regarding what was to be tackled, when and in what manner”. 

Change processes require emotional work that consumes mental resources.  This is why support and (where possible) a reduced work load are advisable in change processes, to avoid the so-called innovation overload in work (Fullan 1996). Moving from a (relatively) teacher-oriented classroom organisation towards a clearly student-centred teaching promoting student autonomy is a major educational change that requires a complex set of new skills and attitudes. It also entails the development of a new kind of professional identity, seeing oneself as a facilitator of student learning and as an intercultural language educator.

The knowledge of change processes in general is also beneficial. It is helpful to know that professional learning often involves feelings of decrease in the skills of classroom management (the so-called “DIP” phenomenon, an acronym for “decrease in performance” as noted by Michael Fullan).  It is common to feel that one is doing less well in teaching than before until the new emerging pedagogical skills take over and yield positive experiences. This is what seems to happen in the ELP-oriented pedagogy when the teacher begins to shift pedagogical power and responsibility to the students. Students often misuse their increased liberties until they are facilitated to understand the purpose of the change, and assume a more responsible stance and self-regulation.  For these reasons it is essential that teachers get support over the crucial transition in their professional growth so as not to give up and revert to their former safe practices. Creating pressures without sufficient support is likely to lead to a disappointment and withdrawal (Fullan 1996, 231; Kohonen 2003; 2005).

Our experiences indicate strongly that language teachers should not be left alone with the portfolio challenge. The support needs to be made explicit at the different levels of school administration: the national central administration, the local/ regional educational authorities and the head teacher of the school. The significance of collegial collaboration came up repeatedly in the teacher reports and discussions. The teachers found it very helpful to discuss the theoretical principles and and practical ways of organising student work in relation to a given classroom context.  When sharing experiences and uncertainties, significant professional learning could develop through mutual interaction, trust and respect. Similarly, sharing the moments of insight and success in the classroom strengthened  the spirit of community and professional growth. Rather than restricting to the foreign languages alone, it is also desirable to link the portfolio work with a school-wide approach for promoting socially responsible student learning as a public pedagogical orientation, as far as possible. (Kohonen 2003; 2004.)

Margarita Limón Luque discusses professional learning as a matter of integrating the intellectual, emotional and behavioural components of personality development into a conscious capacity for action.  She points out that the following three conditions are necessary for a conceptual change (Luque 2003, 135–140): (a) knowledge and understanding of what it is that needs to be changed (metacognitive/-linguistic condition), (b) motivation for the change (volitional condition: engagement, commitment), and (c) self-regulation of the change process (condition of self-regulation: goal-setting, monitoring, self-assessment). An intentional conceptual change becomes possible when the person understands the reasons for it and is facilitated to plan, monitor and evaluate the change processes. As the skills of self-regulation develop, the person gets positive rewards from the process and becomes more motivated for the changes, with proper support and encouragement. Reflection is an essential element in all of these conditions, and it needs to be facilitated explicitly (Kohonen 2005).

4.4 The contradictory context of professional growth

The perspectives discussed above pose new demands for the teacher’s professional knowledge, skills and educational beliefs and values, encouraging teachers to rethink their traditional ways of organising the classroom work in the light of the moral nature of teaching. Teachers need to update their professional knowledge, skills and understanding, assuming a more autonomous professional stance as educators.  I see autonomy as part of a more general concept of values education in school. Being an autonomous person entails the respect for one’s dignity as a moral person and valuing others by treating them with dignity. An essence in human dignity is the notion of moral agency: being morally aware of one’s conduct and its consequences to others. Values education is thus an inherent part of any encounters between the participants in the school community. (Kohonen 2003; 2005.)
As I noted at the beginning of this paper, the policies and practices of school development are now frequently contradictory. It seems to me that the principles and working methods of current neo-liberalist market economy are being brought uncritically from business life to education in many national settings. The key tenets in the public sector reform, borrowed from market theories, are now effectiveness, efficiency and economy. Effectiveness means managing change better; efficiency suggests focusing on outcomes and results while economy refers to doing more with less (Sachs 2003, 20). If some practices seem to work in business life, it does not automatically mean that they are also valid for education. Education is inherently an ethical question of fostering and nurturing human growth. The now fashionable ethos seems to be an unquestioned belief in the power of all-pervasive competition and evaluation to improve quality in any field of human activity. Education is not a matter of fierce competition against each other; it is a question of the stakeholders working together to foster student growth. 

While the public rhetoric talks about increasing freedom and local school power in decentralisation, the policies of quality assurance seem to introduce powerful (and somewhat hidden) control mechanisms. In some national settings such mechanisms are reinforced by the public rank-ordering of schools (“league tables”) and introducing merit pay schemes based on narrowly defined and thereby easily measurable learning of factual knowledge and skills. Their underlying message seems to be: one size fits all. Such policies seem to reduce teachers into didactic technicians whose task is to bring about scorable (and thus countable) short-term performance in their pupils. Where this is the case, the teacher’s professional autonomy as an educator is reduced to being a producer of services according to specific evaluation criteria. Education becomes measurement-driven.

Hannele Niemi points out that the professional status of teachers entails a critical stance to developments in the professional field, taking the current emphasis on evaluation as an example. She notes that evaluation is an important part of the profession, and teachers need to be actively involved in evaluating their work if they wish to preserve the appreciation of the profession in society. However, evaluation should not be an end for its own sake, and it should not lead to an ”evaluation game” orientation whereby evaluation is done superficially just to satisfy the demands of bureaucracy, without leading to any changes as a result. While evaluation can at its best lead to a fruitful collaboration of the partners it can also lock them to defensive positions at its worst. Teachers thus need to be critically aware of the possible hidden effects and potential problems of evaluation, such as the impact of excessive competition on genuine collaboration and the use of the criteria in evaluation: will evaluation yield real new information or does it measure only things that are easily measurable? And to what extent does evaluation serve the goals of education or schooling? As representative of an ethical profession, teachers need to be involved actively in the design of evaluation and also consider the extent to which evaluation meets the ethical principles of the teaching profession. (Niemi 2006, 90–92.) 

Developing student autonomy and intercultural learning in foreign language education is a complex process that requires nurturing and explicit pedagogical guidance. The teacher needs to reflect on his or her professional identity as a language educator. In transformative professionalism the teacher becomes a facilitator of learning, an organizer of learning opportunities, a resource person providing students with feedback and encouragement, and a creator of the learning atmosphere and the learning space. An essential question is how the teacher uses his or her pedagogical power in the class. However, the transformative paradigm goes far beyond merely increasing the participants’ self-understandings in the social contexts. Teachers also need to develop a critical position to their profession in order to understand the constraints imposed on their work by external circumstances. When necessary, critical reflection should also lead to determined action. In accordance with this emancipatory interest of knowledge, teachers need to voice their justified disapproval of their working conditions and resources and take active charge of developing their profession. (Kohonen 2003; 2005.) 

Transformative teacher learning requires time for reflection, collegial discussions and planning for site-based pedagogical action. Teachers also need time for collecting their observations, evaluating them and modifying their action, based on the findings. This is why major educational innovations should not be pushed through too hastily in the interest of effective change management in schools. Changes of the magnitude of paradigmatic shifts in teacher thinking, pedagogical action and school culture do not take place overnight. They are inevitably a function of time, conscious effort and explicit concrete support in any profession. Educational administration policies and practices ought to support such an orientation, not undermine it. Teacher educators have a crucial task in investigating and developing teacher professionalism through pre-service and in-service teacher education. This perspective also challenges the teacher educators to reflect on their educational values and practices and aim at professional renewal through collegial collaboration and partnerships with teachers.  

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