Project Technical Data |
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Teachers, Theory, and Play - A Brief Rationale Behind SIFOC |
The conversation about humanizing our fields has taken on new directions due to the new waves of Artificial Intelligence and their effect on different arenas, education and ELT included. But, rather than talk about AI yet again, the question of what else we need to do to humanize our fields is equally potent. We often talk about humanizing in terms of dignity, empowerment, and professionalism. And yet, the one thing we sometimes miss is empowering teachers to act as real professionals and further dignify their craft.
At the same time, we have created contentious discourses around theory that render it unnecessary, inaccessible, or unavailable to teachers. I firmly believe in the need to read about theory, use it, and turn it into teaching and research, as scholars such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, or Bettina Love have repeatedly reminded us. Based on recent experiences with prospective and practicing teachers in my research lab, letting teachers embody theory, make it theirs, and later play with it to engage in real praxis in their classrooms is the way forward. This macro-project, which started back in 2014 as the main research project involving #TeamLiLE teacher-researchers, wants to share what happens when teachers and theory meet and become one. We also want to show how research provides a powerful avenue for teachers to, as we say here, "reinvent education" from their realities. |
Grassroots Literacy Research |
Stories in and from Our Classrooms has taken a grassroots approach from the beginning. What we have usually witnessed is a culture of oftentimes decontextualized workshops that intend to give teachers quick fixes and premade solutions, all of which dehumanize and disenfranchise teachers in their own settings. Instead, what we have done is invite teachers to join the lab, usually taking advantage of our ongoing relationship with the Master's in Learning and Teaching Processes in Second Languages. Students who have expressed interest in using literacy as the basis of their master's theses become LSLP researchers and many of them remain engaged with LSLP, applying the lessons they learned in their graduate program long after they graduated.
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Grassroots Theorizing |
In that grassroots spirit, one of the main invitations as part of this project is for our teacher-researchers to propose their own conceptual frameworks. We have linked the frameworks they developed for their theses into some of our Micro-Papers as a way to trace how those concepts support LSLP's conceptual backbone.
The image below summarizes this vision of teachers building theory: 
Image expanded from Mora (2021)
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Academic Presentations and Publications |
As this is an extended Macro-Project, it has an extensive research production base. We will share a summary soon, but you can start by reading our researchers' master's theses and dissertations for a first look.
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