Hope is our bread and butter: towards a human ecological language pedagogy in the context of siege

Abstract

This presentation is a reflection on the process of developing a situated language teacher education programme in Teaching Arabic to speakers of Other Languages (TASOL) informed by a human ecological approach (Phipps & Levine 2012). In a human ecological view on language learning, the speaker's ability or inability to communicate, learn or 'flourish' in an educational environment is considered a 'spatial' phenomena, dependent on the communicative conditions and educational requirements produced by the environment. 'Competence' is thus not simply read as open-ended potentiality dependent on the individual's efforts alone, but seen as embedded within wider societal structures which can enable and nurture, or equally, disable the individual's disposition to become 'competent' in the first place. The programme is designed for teachers in the context of siege in Gaza, Palestine. It constitutes of 60 hours of online teaching with the purpose of supporting prospective teachers of Arabic in developing their own online teaching material. Our aim is hereby not to impose a 'best practice' framework but to work towards a relational, human ecological model of teacher training, in which 'appropriate methodology' and practices are shared and developed collaboratively and in a context-specific way.