Presentation Covering Culture in the Pre-service Teacher Practicum more

Sat, Jul 10, 13:00-13:30 Asia/Tokyo

Pre-service teachers attending MA TESOL programs often conduct practicum lessons as part of their degree requirements. Typically, lesson-planning of the practicum is focused on improving teaching skills according to best practices in SLA. Practica given at the university level (where language-focus learning is supplemented with authentic material) can cause pre-service teachers difficulty as they are generally not experienced with CLIL or content-based approaches. The study presented here describes one pre-service teacher tasked with delivering a lesson dealing with how the BLM Movement is interpreted in Japan. The novice teacher needed to design an engaging lesson covering issues related to the topic, such as cultural appropriation, racism and xenophobia. The presenters, the master teacher and the novice, will discuss how they approached the topic and worked to co-design a lesson that served the intercultural awareness-raising purpose of the unit, while still proving insightful as a practicum experience.