Students of English Teacher Education: trajectories and evaluations

Abstract

The focus of this study are the English Teacher Education students, the sociocultural contexts they interact with, their perceptions of the teaching profession and the evaluations they make of their trajectories. The researchers implemented surveys, focus groups and interviews and the data was analyzed statistically and following the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.

The participants can be described as a relatively homogeneous group; they are mostly female and they were born and live in Santa Fe province. Their narrative identities as students are mostly constructed around their affinity with English.

The assessments of their trajectories are closely connected to individual factors; the participants rarely relate their academic paths to social, institutional or curricular factors.

A vast majority of the participants characterize the schools where they see themselves teaching as single, isolated classrooms; the political and organizational contexts schools are part of are absent in the students’ projections.