” I don’t know why we are here, but I have an idea — that’s because we are celebrating our lives, we are celebrating our classrooms.”
Walewska Braga, English teacher, Municipal School St Thomas Aquinas, Rio de Janeiro
Here is the handout prepared for this event, containing abstracts for posters
[For more on Exploratory Practice, see materials from the Festival workshop given for APIBA by Inés Kayon de Miller and Maria Isabel (Bebel) Azevedo Cunha in Buenos Aires earlier in the year, and/or this set of readings.]
Members of the Rio Exploratory Practice Group involved in Initial and Continuing Teacher Education and working with Exploratory Practice took advantage of the opportunity of the AILA Conference to share their work with visiting teacher educators and applied linguists. Pre-service and in-service teachers, as well as teacher educators, all members of the Rio EP Group, showed their work in the form of posters and there was warm discussion of emerging issues.
This event was held at the same time as the AILA Congress (on a free afternoon) but was not part of it. There was no fee required to attend. The time was divided into two:
First, there was display and discussion of posters by student-teachers and teacher supervisors who have been incorporating Exploratory Practice into their work:
For example, Walewska Braga – ‘Why is it so complex to balance trust, autonomy and control? Challenges faced in a teacher education program’:
And this poster, on ‘When we teach ‘the seasons’, why do we use images from outside our own [Brazilian] reality?’:
Cecilia Nobre interviewed the student-teachers in the photo above about their poster:
Quick interview with a teacher at the Exploratory Practice Discussions – PUC-Rio @TRfestiva pic.twitter.com/gq1hbdLcpb
— Cecilia Nobre (@cecilianobreelt) July 26, 2017
Watch this further interview by Cecilia Nobre to gain insights into Exploratory Practice from another teacher’s perspective:
Following the discussion of posters, there was a general discussion about Exploratory Practice and puzzles arising. Here are some excerpts (thanks to Sabine Mendes Moura and Cecilia Nobre for video!):
