Paradoxically, academic life does not encourage us to be reflective. There is always a deadline to meet, a project to start, a report to complete. What this means that it is only towards the year end, when this grind is momentarily suspended, and the nature of temporal landmarks encourages retrospection, that one gets to tackle questions like: What have I done this year that made a difference? Was it worth it?
I have published a little (perhaps less than in the past, when I thought I had something to prove), I’ve done my share of teaching (while being acutely aware how our universities let down our brightest young people), and I’ve done somewhat more than my share of administrative work (a price one pays for delivering on time and without many mistakes). But if I want to be honest with myself, I think that the one thing that makes a tangible difference to the world (and me?) is my work at the Language Education for Refugees and Migrants MA programme. In this post, I would like to share some information about my role in this programme, and about the module that I coordinate, the LRM teaching placement.
Structure of the LRM teaching placement
Overview of the LRM teaching placement
The teaching placement module (LRM63) is the culmination of the Language Education for Refugees and Migrants programme. It follows a series of more theoretical modules that focus on topics such as Applied Linguistics, Language Teaching, Critical Education and more. Table 1 shows a full list of the modules we offer.
| Module code | Module title |
|---|---|
| LRM50 | Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition |
| LRM51 | Migration, Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication |
| LRM52 | Critical Pedagogy |
| LRM53 | Language Teaching for Adult Refugees and Migrants |
| LRM54 | Language Teaching for Children with Refugee and Migrant Background |
| LRM55 | Design and Development of Educational Material for Digital Media |
| LRM60 | Introduction to Arabic Language and Culture |
| LRM61 | Human Rights and International Law for Refugees and Migrants |
| LRM62 | Research Methodology in Multilingual Contexts |
| LRM63 | Teaching Placement (Practicum) |
| LRM64 | MA dissertation |
What students do
in the LRM teaching placement
In the module, we embed MA participants into a setting that provides learning opportunities for refugees, migrants, or other linguistically othered populations. This could be an NGO with a language programme, a mainstream school with induction classes for foreign children, or any similar setting. There, we ask them to do three things.
Plan
First, participants spend approximately a month learning about the setting. We have, over time, developed a familiarization process that helps participants find out how the school works and what the learners’ strengths, needs, and interests are. (One of the first changes I made, when I took over was to move away from ‘needs analysis’ and the deficit perspective it indexes).
Act
Based on this observation, participants then design and implement a teaching intervention. We think of this as a self-contained sequence of lessons with a specific concrete aim. We do this for two reasons. For one, refugee and migrant education tends to be very unstructured, and we believe that teachers need to develop confidence and competence in working autonomously. In addition, many of our participants are at a stage in their career, when they are ready to transition to leadership posts, and we believe that it is important for them to start gaining experience in course design.
Reflect
Finally, we ask participants to reflect on their design and teaching. Reflection (in, on, and for action) is a core component of the module design, because we believe that it can make teachers more deliberate and purposeful in their work. Such reflection, we believe, can help them to identify where they can develop as teachers, and where they can make positive change happen. This is important in all kinds of education, but perhaps a more urgent need when it comes to the education of refugees and migrants, where injustice is more acutely experienced.
Engaging with the LRM teaching placement
One could argue that a lot of what I have described above could just as easily take place after participants graduate and when they make their way into their careers. This is very often true, especially for the most driven and confident participants. However, my experience after years of coordinating this module is that there are benefits from a structured learning experience.
Different teaching paradigms
One of the things that the teaching placement offers is a robust frame that helps participants withstand the shock of first teaching. This is a non-trivial consideration, considering how different the expectations of our MA programme is from the routinised practices that participants often encounter.
In an article in Teaching and Teacher Education (Kostoulas, 2024), I describe this transition from our university-based ‘ecology of ideas’ to the ‘ecology of ideas’ experienced in the locus of their placement. Our programme is grounded on an agenda of transformative education, and some core tenets include social justice, empowerment, and valuing the cultural and linguistic heritage of our learners. Education systems tend to be more conservative: they value standardization and integration, and they tend to use formal language teaching as a means to preserve social boundaries. We do not view this mismatch as a flaw of our programme – rather, we see university education as a transformative force.
| Transmissive paradigm | Transformative paradigm |
|---|---|
| Language as system | Language as social action |
| Technicalisation | Flexible (post-method) eclecticism |
| Neoliberal agenda | Critical-humanistic thinking |
A challenging transition
But the fact remains, the transition from thinking about education in one sense to experiencing education in a very different sense can be overpowering. As I described in Kostoulas (2024):
Many participants often struggled, at least in the initial stages of their teaching placement. They reported that irregular student attendance often rendered their lesson plans irrelevant. Also, abrupt relocations or deportations of their students had a frustrating effect, as one of the participants noted: “That could be more difficult for me because I didn’t have time to say goodbye. Sometimes all we got was a message on the messenger group. […] Their lives are full of unsaid goodbyes” (P1).
Some participants struggled with student indifference: “unfortunately, I also noted that when we did this exercise, not all students participated with most of them not responding to my questions” (P10). Others, like Participant 31, found that younger learners, who might not have fully assimilated school expectations, can be very challenging: “A notable incident which took place during the lesson was that a matching exercise involved the word ‘Pakistan’ and this word triggered some students who erased the word and wrote ‘Afghanistan’ instead. The boys who did this action started talking to me in a mixed language between Dari and English and the only word that I understood was ‘terrorists’. (P31)
Kostoulas (in press).
Reverting to ‘factory settings’
as a coping strategy
In other words, when our teachers are frustrated or stressed by the mismatches they perceive between their expectations and their experience, they go back to ‘tried and tested’ modes of teaching. When this happens, they tend teach more grammar and have the students practice writing the Greek alphabet – even though their more urgent communicative needs are not met. This is, sometimes, because of the advice they are given by more experienced teachers. Sometimes, it’s also a natural tendency to find safety in what one aready knows. Here’s how one participant rationalised her practices:
We conjugated nouns in their notebooks [which] was not fun for the children, but I believe that activities of this kind are necessary too, because they need to be familiar with the correct spelling and conjugation of masculine nouns.
Alternatively, they resort to technology-enhanced learning, and leverage its potential to impress the class. Here’s how a participant described her teaching (you may want to ignore the awkward third-person construction by which they refer to themselves).
Students watched two videos and read a text concerning the parts of the house, in order to obtain new knowledge. Activities on a tablet, drawings, and one multiple-choice activity were selected by the teacher, in order for students to exercise the new vocabulary.
You might notice how hard it is to discern any of the transformative agenda that I described above. There is no empowerment, valuing the learners’ voice, translanguaging… This would be quite frustrating an outcime, considering how much we invest helping our participants develop in this direction.
Growing and challenging
However, this is not where this story stops. What the LRM63 teaching placement offers our participants is a supportive context where they can withstand the intial shock. This is a space where they can reflect on what they are doing, hypothesise about what shapes their choices and explore alternatives. It is also a safe space for discussing their frustrations, critical incidents and important interactions with students, and learn from them.
Soon, many participants emerge from this experience much more confident about their classroom management skills, their planning ability, and their capacity to make positive change happen. In the words of one participant: “What I realized after the end of the lesson is that teaching refugee students is a challenging, but not a terrifying experience” (Kostoulas, 2024).
This increased confidence means that, quite soon, participants begin to feel comfortable experimenting with more creative, more purposeful and more disruptive forms of teaching. Sometimes, these are small steps, such as when a teacher notices which students tend to be more silent and provides targeted speaking opportunities for them. Other times, these are more ambitious: for example, such as when a teacher worked with her advanced class to produce new learning resources for less advanced learners. And sometimes, these are outright disruptive, such as when a teacher ditched her suggested syllabus and decided to teach students how to engage with police officers rather than how to order fruit and vegetables.
What students gain from the LRM teaching placement
Teaching the same course every semester for several years can be a tedious experience. In my view, LRM63 would be no different if it did not have this transformative character. For me, it is an example of what can happen when you give intelligent, creative and committed people enough structure to feel safe and enough freedom to make a difference. It is with this in mind that I would like to now share some thoughts by our participants, who talk about how the teaching placement helped them.
Alexandra
During the practicum I had the opportunity to reflect on issues of bilingualism and literacy of Roma children […] The concerns that arose during my discussions with students reminded me of the relationship between theory and practice, causing constant renegotiation and reflection. I felt that I was constantly learning things myself, e.g, about their living conditions and their views towards life and towards education. In addition, through my interactions with the children I began to learn their language, Romani, as I got to know the world of my students better through it.
Maria
Working with unaccompanied minors is demanding; it is hard to be empathetic when facing situations one cannot begin to fathom or even imagine. On the other hand, these young people can benefit from a structured lesson as much (or even more) as anyone, even though their own attitude may be more relaxed and less committed than I initially expected. Balancing between the two was what I struggled to do during my intervention, and in my view, this meant communicating my trust on their abilities, which were closely related to their cultural and linguistic background, and to the whole range of their previous knowledge. This attitude I will pursue to carry forward as I develop professionally. I think that trying to bring out and build on the students’ strengths, abilities and talents does not only pertain to refugee and migrant children but to all children, particularly the socioeconomically disadvantaged.
Sofia
What amazed me the most was how in the beginning, as I had mentioned, the students found it strange to engage in translanguaging or talking about their countries and cultural practices. During our multilingual activities, I observed how excited all learners became to teach me new words and expressions in their own languages, having us engaged in a process of learning about each other and from each other. This developed into such a way that it became an integral part of our lessons. In summary, I cannot claim that by the end of my teaching intervention, all learners were competent users of English or Greek or more literate in the L1s, however, they did not ‘hide’ their identities anymore and they did develop into more confident, emergent multilingual learners. Personally, I developed more empathy, more knowledge and deeper understanding on what is required to teach children from diverse settings.
As for me, I believe that my engagement with the LRM programme has made me more alert to the various forms that language education can take, and more confident in letting our students take risks and learn from them. Striking a good balance between giving structure and space does not always come easily, especially when one tends to be hands-on and overprotective. Nevertheless, I have found the results to be almost always very pleasantly surprising.
Would you like
to find out more?
The Language Education for Refugees and Migrants MA programme is fully accredited by the Hellenic Authority for Higher Education, the national authority responsible for accrediting tertiary education programmes in Greece. It starts every semester, in March and October, and it typically has a two-year duration. However, students can opt for more comfortable paces, depending on their circumstances. The language of instruction is English, but we are not this is not a TESOL/ELT course: we work with participants who teach several languages.
If you are interested in refugee and or migrant education, we would be happy to have you in our programme. To find out more information, feel free to get in touch with me for an informal chat, or contact the programme administrators who will be happy to provide you with more information.
About me
I am Achilleas Kostoulas, an applied linguist language teacher educator based in Greece. I teach at the University of Thessaly, and also have an affiliate position at the Hellenic Open University. In the latter capacity, I teach at the Language Education for Refugees and Migrants MA programme.
About this post
This post was written in December 2023. It uses information from my recent publications and content produced by our LRM students (pseudonyms; with permission). The images are from Adobe Stock and are used under license. The content of this article does not reflect the views of the Hellenic Open University or the LRM programme leadership.
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