Teacher educator

In the Summer term 2019 I had conducted a Spanish seminar at the University of Kiel employing digital portfolios with the objective of documenting course activities, enhancing my students' digital competences and as a product for the examination. The following presentation describes this teaching experience, considering its achievements and flaws. This reflection leads to a set of questions that I aim to respond with the help of references and a discussion with my audience.

This presentation portrays part of my work in 2017 in many ways. First, I had applied for funding -which was granted- to develop a Spanish Didactics seminar at the University of Kiel. Second, my perspective regarding the use of Spanish in the classroom is bidirectional and includes the learners' contributions in communication. This was possible after learning about Conversation Analysis as an approach to investigate interactional practices and language learning in the classroom. Third, it displays my experience and my evaluation about it. It constitutes an example of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) which aims at benefiting my own practice and my students' learning.

I prepared and held this presentation in collaboration with Mareike Oesterle,  teacher and research assistant from the University of Education Karlsruhe. She had been working on an European project (VEO Europa), which employs Video Enhanced Observation (VEO) to foster teacher development. I met her because I was searching for technology-enhanced ways to benefit my students' preparation as teachers at the University of Kiel. Our talk had two sections. Firstly, the features of VEO for teacher training and, secondly, its integration in a Spanish didactics seminar at the University of Kiel. 

This presentation combined theory with an opportunity for practice. I aimed at raising awareness among my fellow Spanish teachers of the relevance of the activity-initiating instructions. My approach was rather unidirectional, focused on the teacher and his/her classroom talk. The literature I was reading at that time explored classroom discourse from the teacher's perspective. 

I spent seven months in Canada, where I had a fantastic experience as an English student. The course that impacted me the most was "oral presentations". Our teacher recorded every speech we gave to our group and we analyzed our talk and the body language. When I was appointed a Spanish oral production course at the University of Bremen, I knew I had to include video, peer-feedback and reflection into our program. In this presentation I described this experience and discussed its difficulties and learning opportunities as well. 

In 2014 I was working at the University of Bremen and most of my students were prospective Spanish teachers. Given this situation, I started thinking of ways of enhancing their language learning in combination with their future role as Spanish teachers. This presentation is one of my first steps into my emerging role as a teacher educator.