Eight expert Indian teachers of English: A participatory comparative case study of teacher expertise in the Global South

这个博士项目涉及八名印度英语教师的比较案例研究，所有这些教师都是根据多个标准确定其各自背景的专家。最初的参与性设计包括在收集数据之前举办一次规划讲习班，使参与者能够对研究的研究问题作出贡献，并规划对他们及其同事有实际用途的产出。在高收入和中上收入国家对被确定为专家的教师进行了100多项实证研究。然而，在全球南方通常发现的更具挑战性的背景下，几乎没有进行过类似的研究，这可能是由于错误的假设，即教师专业知识在这种背景下不存在，因为缺乏支持和资源来发展。本研究挑战这一假设，提供了一个公平的，可复制的设计和详细描述的做法和认知的专家教师在南方的背景下工作（印度政府资助的中学教育）。通过这样做，它有助于为印度土著良好教学做法的知识库奠定基础。这种研究可能有益于教师教育、课程和政策;它使当局能够根据在当地条件下工作的专家教师的做法制定未来的模式。因此，它们可能比基于从高收入环境引入的外源做法的教学模式更适合文化，更可行，更可持续。研究发现，这些专家教师之间有许多共同特征，其中大多数在他们的同事中不太常见。这些包括良好的教学内容知识和英语语言能力，以及建立学习者自信心，吸引学习者和确保课程内容的理解的信念。参与者被发现与学习者建立了温暖，支持的关系，并在课堂上对所有语言表现出包容性。他们经常使用互动式全班教学与定期的，独立于学习者的活动相平衡，这些活动包括协作学习和积极监测座位工作，使他们能够提供差异化的个人支持，即使在大班。他们的专业精神是以终身学习、广泛反思和关心学生为基础的，他们最重视学生的意见。然而，在一些领域也观察到了差异，包括与他们的学科概念（英语是什么）和他们对课堂过程的控制程度有关的临床差异。也注意到与教师专业知识（主要是在高收入背景下进行）的先前研究的结果的强烈协议，虽然重要的差异包括参与教师的优先级的包容性和建立信心的高标准的设置，他们的重点是学习者理解高阶思维技能和他们的各种策略，帮助学习者吸收内容从雄心勃勃的课程。这项研究为低收入背景下的教师提供了一个临时专家原型，以及一个公平的，可复制的模式，用于识别和研究全球南方的教师专业知识。它为专家教师的某些经常记录的特征（特别是他们的关怀，奉献和反思的个性）提供了进一步的支持，这些特征对教师招聘，发展和评估具有影响。它还提供了印度中学英语教学法的潜在重要性的意见，如脚手架文本解释的做法，使学习者能够理解和访问课程文本远远超出他们的独立阅读能力的水平，和参与者的复杂的跨语言的做法，复制那些发现在更广泛的印度社会。

This PhD project involves a comparative case study of eight Indian teachers of English, all identified as experts of their respective contexts based on multiple criteria. The original, participatory design involves a planning workshop prior to data collection to enable participants to contribute to the study's research questions and plan outputs of practical use to them and their colleagues. Over 100 empirical studies of teachers identified as experts have been conducted in high and upper-middle income countries. However, almost no comparable studies have been conducted in the more challenging contexts typically found across the Global South, likely due to the erroneous assumption that teacher expertise does not exist in such contexts because of a lack of support and resources for it to develop. This study challenges this assumption, offering an equitable, replicable design and detailed descriptions of the practices and cognition of expert teachers working in a southern context (Indian government-sponsored secondary education). By doing so, it helps to lay the foundation for a knowledge base on indigenous good pedagogic practice in India. Such a study is of potential benefit to teacher education, curriculum and policy; it enables authorities to base future models on the practices of expert teachers working in local conditions. As such, they are likely to be more culturally appropriate, more feasible and more sustainable than pedagogic models based on exogenous practices imported from higher-income contexts.The study has identified many shared features among these expert teachers, most of which were less frequently observed among their colleagues. These include well developed pedagogical content knowledge and English language proficiency as well as beliefs in building learner self-confidence, engaging learners and ensuring understanding of lesson content. Participants were found to build warm, supportive relationships with learners and show inclusivity towards all languages in the classroom. Their frequent use of interactive whole-class teaching was balanced with regular, learner-independent activities that included both collaborative learning and active monitoring of seatwork to enable them to provide differentiated individual support, even in large classes. Their professionalism was underpinned by lifelong learning, extensive reflection and care for their learners, whose opinions they valued most. However, variation was also observed in a number of areas, including clinal differences relating to their conception of subject (what English is) and their degree of control over classroom processes. Strong agreement with the findings of prior studies of teacher expertise (mainly conducted in higher-income contexts) was also noted, although important differences include participant teachers' prioritisation of inclusion and confidence-building over the setting of high standards, their focus on learner understanding over higher-order thinking skills and their varied strategies for helping learners assimilate content from highly ambitious curricula. The study offers a contingent expert teacher prototype for low-income contexts, as well as an equitable, replicable model for identifying and studying teacher expertise in the Global South. It offers further support for certain frequently documented features of expert teachers (particularly their caring, dedicated and reflective personalities) that have implications for teacher recruitment, development and evaluation. It also offers observations of potential importance for Indian secondary English pedagogy, such as the practice of scaffolded text interpretation as a means to enable learners to understand and access curriculum texts well beyond their level of independent reading competence, and participants' complex translanguaging practices that replicate those found in wider Indian society.