ABSTRACT
This text presents how we integrated ‘work for understanding’, a central notion to Exploratory Practice (Allwright & Hanks, 2009), into our monolingual and bilingual initial teacher education program, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio, Brazil), and into the recent Brazilian Government Grant Program for Initial Teacher Education at PUC-Rio (PIBID/CAPES/PUC-Rio). As our non-technicist philosophy was conflicting with the teacher-learners’ wishes ‘to be taught how to teach’, we were being led to focus on ‘performance’ rather than on ‘understanding’. So, we started to innovate by bringing the critical, investigative, ethical and inclusive pedagogy of Exploratory Practice to our pre-professional context. We focused on such novel concepts as ‘learning opportunities’, ‘planning to understand’ (Allwright, 2005; 2006) and ‘quality of classroom life’ (Gieve & Miller, 2006) and related them to traditional teacher-learning tasks, such as lesson planning, micro-teaching, teaching practice reports, etc. The second innovative integration of Exploratory Practice happened organically, as PUC-Rio joined PIBID. In this program participating future teachers would work with teachers and their learners in Rio de Janeiro public sector schools. We share here our successful experiences but we also present some of the challenges that we have faced.
