Here are the slides and the handout that I'm going to use at the Asia TEFL 2017 conference in Indonesia.
My presentation is from 13:45 to 14:15 on Saturday, July 15 at Pemandengan 1, Royal Ambarrukmo Hotel.
I regret that, because of the time limitation in this oral presentation, I cannot really compare Open Dialogue and Exploratory Practice or discuss much about complexity (Luhmann 2012, 2013) and pluratity (Arendt 1998), as I promised in the abstract below.
Handout
Open Dialogue in teacher education in Japan
Yosuke
YANASE,
Hiroshima
University
1
INTRODUCTION
Why Open Dialogue?
>Need to regain agency against the repressive culture of teacher
education in Japan.
What is Open Dialogue?
>A psychotherapeutic approach: Family therapy, Bakhtin and
postmodernism in the background
>Open: No important decision is made outside the dialogic
community
>Dialogue: Verbalization of the problem, which is accepted and
responded to by other members
>The clients regain agency by speaking with their authentic
emotions, voices and words, and being reasonably heard and responded to by
other members.
Five important features of Open Dialogue
1 Tolerance of uncertainty
with no single authority: No one knows the truth in a complex situation.
2 Dialogism between equal
persons with different backgrounds: We need different perspectives
3 Polyphony and joint
understanding: All voices must be heard
to complement each other
4 Emotional attunement
from authentic voices: The sense of
acceptance is recognized through emotions
5 Agency of every
participant: Everyone has a right to adapt and invent his or her own way in a
new situation.
Research Question
Does Open Dialogue develop
agency in teacher education in Japan?
‘Open Dialogue’: an adapted one for the purpose of teacher education
‘Agency’: the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting
power
2
METHOD
Time and Place
>A teacher education course of eight sessions at a municipal
education center in Japan from June 2016 to February 2017.
>However, Open Dialogue was only implicitly introduced and
implemented. The main purpose of the course was the enhancement of students’
motivation.
Participants
>Eleven teachers of either an elementary or junior high school
with different school subject specialty. The participation was not voluntary.
We focus on an elementary school teacher, ET1,
in this presentation.
ET1: Not confident about her teaching. Not perfectly well
psychologically. Had a trauma as a young teacher (as it turned out later).
>Two teaching advisers in charge, including TA2, who we focus on, and a few other teaching advisers.
TA2: Concerned about the suppressive culture of teacher education. Interested
in OD, but was not sure if it can be successfully implemented in the education
center.
>Supervisor of the course (the current presenter), Sv.
Data in this presentation
>Personal Email correspondences (voluntary): (i) between TA2 and Sv,
(ii) between ET1 and Sv.
>Video recording of interview between TA2 and ET1.
ç No negative effects of OD were observed in other members.
ç The original Japanese utterances were translated and edited by the current presenter.
3
RESULTS AND DISUCUSSION
From personal Email correspondences
Between Sv and TA2
>Participants and teaching advisers accepted OD in a positive
way.
>The success of OD was manifest in their bodily expressions.
>The two teaching advisers in chief felt uneasy about this
success because it was so unconventional.
>The two teaching advisers realized the power and impact of what
they had been asking participants to do.
>TA2 thought that teacher educator themselves must be observed
and analyzed.
Between Sv and ET1
> A desire to say, be heard, understood and accepted grew from a comfortable
sense of safety.
>Self-exposure becomes possible when each other's vulnerability
is respected.
>ET1’s unsolicited story-telling of her trauma began as the OD
relationship developed.
>Telling her own traumatic experience was a necessary step to go
forward
>ET1 likes the culture of OD but wonders if it can be introduced
in ordinary schools in Japan.
From interview video between TA2 and ET1
>In teacher education in Japan, teaching advisers often give
their own advice before the teacher finishes his or her own story.
>Teaching advisers should endure awkward silence while the
teacher is straggling with thoughts and words.
>Teaching advisers can "advise" in the form of
clarification questions.
>Teacher education is a co-construction between the teacher and
the teaching adviser.
4
CONCLUSION
1 Uncertainty that OD
brings about worries conventional teacher educators but it is the source of
creativity.
2 In terms of dialogism,
teacher educators must be educated in the style of OD.
3 Polyphony can be
developed with a good sense of safety in a comfortable culture.
4 The success of OD can be felt intuitively from the emotional attunement from authentic
voices
5 Teachers agency can develop when teacher educators exert their agency in the style of OD
REFERENCES
Seikkula J & Olson ME. (2003) The Open Dialogue Approach to
Acute Psychosis: Its Poetics and Micropolitics. Family Process, 42(3):403-18.
Seikkula J and Trimble D. (2005) Healing elements of therapeutic
conversation: dialogue as an embodiment of love. Family Process, 44(4):461-75.
*****
Although the notion of reflective practice has established an undisputed recognition in teacher education for long now, many teachers still find it difficult to reflect, that is, to have a good dialogue with themselves or with their mentors. Part of the reason lies in our insufficient theoretical understanding of dialogue; we are not, in fact, exactly able to distinguish dialogue from (reciprocal) monologue, (analytical) discussion or (antagonistic) debate. This presentation reports the progress of a one-year project of incumbent teacher education for 10 primary or secondary public school teachers in Hiroshima, Japan. In this project, dialogue is theoretically understood in the general conceptual framework offered by a renowned physicist-philosopher, Bohm (1996), in which orientation for 'truth' and 'coherence' play an important part. In practice, dialogue is specifically promoted in a way inspired by the 'Open Dialogue' approach in the field of psychiatric care (Seikkula and Olson 2003, Seikkula and Trimble 2005). Despite the differences among mentors and teachers of different school subjects (including English, of course), all participants as equals are encouraged to talk polyphonically, with no obligation to reach a consensus or conclusion. This project involves radical changes in the concept of teacher education itself, and is expected to contribute to a better understanding of Exploratory Practice, whose similarities and differences with this Open Dialogue approach should be carefully examined. Epistemological discussion in terms of complexity (Luhmann 2012, 2013) and plurality (Arendt 1998) is also presented to deepen our understanding of practice in social contexts.
KEYWORD:
teacher education, reflective practice, dialogue
BIO
Yosuke Yanase is professor at Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University in Japan. He radically asks questions about fundamental concepts of language teaching in the spirit of “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” although he is quite aware that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
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