Problems and countermeasures: a phenomenological study of Chinese EFL supervisors’ perspectives about the practicum / Problemas y contramedidas: un estudio fenomenológico de las perspectivas de los supervisores de ILE en China sobre el programa de prácticas

Problems in the practicum

The practicum is a staple learning experience in higher education as a problem-based, contextualized learning approach to nurture student teachers’ reflective practice, self-assessment skills and holistic development, and teacher identity. However, in practice, learning-to-teach in the practicum is situated in tensions between disruptions in relation to the contextual factors. As Phantharakphong and Liyanage (2021) suggested, among the relationships among the factors, individual pre-service teachers and their uniqueness of learning-to-teach work as ‘one dimension of the complex interactions of mutually influencing and recursively co-constructing systems’ (p. 4). The practicum is generally a stressful cognitive and emotional process of coping with a series of frictions (Jóhannsdóttir, 2010), such as ‘hazing’ (Johnson, 1996), limited school support and supervision (C. M. Yan & He, 2015) and emotional flux (Yuan & Lee, 2016), to socialize into new cultures and establish teacher identity (Caires et al., 2012).

A pervasive disregard for praxis and coherence between campus course study and school practices is evident (e.g., Allen et al., 2013; Legutke & Schocker-v. Ditfurth, 2009). As Sannino (2010) pointed out, the transition from abstract notions of pupils to specific understandings of concrete individual pupils and differences among them is often naively seen as a natural consequence of novice teachers’ exposure to interactions with pupils. Hindrances arising from the university include the small number of university faculty’s involvement and the quality of their supervision (Ong’ondo & Borg, 2011). As Barahona (2019) reported, supervisors have to respond to often contradictory demands and an overemphasis towards quality assurance actions that are potentially detrimental to pre-service teachers’ development.

Obstacles stemming from schools include mentors’ inadequate mentoring competence, limited incentive and distrust (Steiner & Rozen, 2004), principals’ resistance (Smith & Lev-Ari, 2005) and traditional instructions caused by ineffective teacher professional development systems and limited support (Dever et al., 2003). As Edwards and Collison (1996) described, student teachers and their mentors were ‘desert-islanded’ within the ocean of school life. The different interests, educational philosophies and statuses of two largely separate worlds exist (Cohen et al., 2013). Edwards and Protheroe (2004) found that the mentoring given to student teachers did not encourage them to engage in responsive pedagogic acts. As ‘outsiders’ in the schools, university supervisors’ ideas and feedback are discounted as unrealistic or idealistic (Bailey, 2006). The limited productive interactions are detrimental to student teachers’ learning, for example, giving plastic lessons to please supervisors (Ong’ondo & Borg, 2011). Zeichner (2010) contended that the root of the problem was teacher education programmes’ perception of schools as places in which to demonstrate learning rather than to learn.

Strategies for improving the practicum

Two major strategies emerged in the literature to improve the practicum thereby to enable interns ‘to manage their relationships with the social situations of their development, to seek complexity in learners and tasks, and to recognize resources that will support their actions’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 67). The first one is sustainable, dynamic and systematic university–school partnerships to set concrete goals and assessments at each stage, and make curricular and pedagogical transformations responsively (C. M. Yan & He, 2021). As an incremental learning experience, the practicum needs to be staged to transition from observing mentor teachers to independent teaching of full classes in different forms.

The second strategy is tripartite collaborations among university supervisors, school mentors and student teachers on the partnership platform. Supervisors and mentors need to complementarily help student teachers develop reflexive and interactive positioning and teacher identity via various authentic intellectual learning experiences (Mosvold & Bjuland, 2016; van Velzen et al., 2012). Supervisors’ dual roles as supporters and assessors can promote student teacher learning through on-site professional and emotional support and supervision (Hastings, 2008; Sim, 2011). As Barahona (2019) suggested, supervisors need to re-envision their roles and functions to productively expand supervisory practices as an integral part of teacher education. Some research confirms the transformative impacts of participatory, interventionist methodologies. For example, Max (2010) documented that a collaborative inquiry task generated change and development among the collaborating partners. In order to teach catalysed change, Jóhannsdóttir (2010) found it advisable to exploit the contradictions between schools and the distance education programme. Sannino (2010) reported that computer-mediated learning practice facilitated student teachers’ movement from the abstract to the concrete in understanding individual students.

The school mentors, as effective instruction models and facilitative coaches, should also influence student teachers’ preparedness by providing instructional support, collaborative activity and job-search support. Therefore, selecting and training of mentors is a crucial condition (Bryk et al., 2012; Matsko et al., 2018). As Horn and Campbell (2015) emphasized, supervisors and mentors should jointly help student teachers navigate and naturalize contradictions across settings to establish their teacher identity, and translate academic discipline knowledge into a form that fits the school curriculum and the level of the pupils. Edwards and Protheroe (2004) suggested that mentors should collect evidence and use this evidence to reflect on their goals as a community, how they achieve them and how they are constrained. Making explicit the tensions and conflicts to be addressed is a starting point for learning at the level of the system.

Meanwhile, student teachers’ motivations and initiatives in the practicum are imperative to acquire ‘artistry’ in teaching (Middleton et al., 2011). An example is guided reflective practice and deliberation around this reflection, which entail instructional, social and emotional support from supervisors, mentors, peers and other significant members (Smith & Lev-Ari, 2005). Edwards (2010) suggested that student teachers need to develop a capacity to interpret and act on the workplace and to question meanings and the social practices that sustain them.

The literature review shows that previous research has been mainly focused on student teachers’ perspectives, and occasionally on school mentors about the practicum. Limited attention has been awarded to the perspectives of supervisors, who are supposed to facilitate students’ professional learning and growth in both coursework and practicum experiences. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine supervisors’ perspectives by using phenomenology, an underused research methodology in teacher education research. It will fill the methodological research gap for its distinctive advantages of probing the unstated, opaque, informal orders in the local environment (Holliday, 1992). Meanwhile, the study will generate some valuable insights to teacher education programme providers, teacher educators and researchers on how to address the problems in the practicum system.

Theoretical framework

The conceptual framework for the present study was the cultural-historical theory, in particular Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective and Engeström’s cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), to help the researchers’ insider viewpoint not ‘lapse into ad hoc use of commonsense interpretations’ (Silverman, 2005, p. 236). The sociocultural perspective was used to examine the supervisors’ views which resulted from socially mediated practices. CHAT was adopted to examine not only the practicum problems in the activity system where university–school partnership operated but also how and why these problems developed.

The sociocultural perspective

Vygotsky’s (1997, 1998, 1999) sociocultural perspective sees learners as actors in and on their cultures, internalizing and externalizing of patterns of thinking and speech. These patterns reflect prior cultural practices and ultimately help individuals to construct them anew as they take on and reproduce their societies’ ways of knowing. Vygotsky (1997) believes that development is not a passive and mechanistic way of learning but a qualitative change in psychological systems of the way of thinking to solve problems. It is transformation from the lower psychological functions (such as spontaneous rudimentary biologically driven psychological processes) to higher psychological functions (such as logical memory, abstract thinking and speech, voluntary attention and creative imagination). He proposed the concept of zone of proximal development in realizing maturing psychological functions in a bud form into psychological functions in a fruit form. Therefore, teachers need to heed critical teaching moments that guide learners to focus on what may be the next steps in their potential developmental trajectory (Minson et al., 2022).

The sociocultural perspective has been substantially developed in the last two decades in teacher education. Timperley (2011) and Muijs et al. (2010) highlighted the importance of socio-cultural conditions and processes in schools and the wider education systems to re-structure and re-culture collective learning. Research (e.g., C. M. Yan & He, 2021; Johnson & Golombek, 2016; Lee & Hung, 2016; Littlejohn et al., 2019) demonstrates the positive effects of physical and networked professional learning communities on institutional environment development, teacher/teacher educator beliefs and practices.

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)

In his departure from Vygotsky, Leont’ev (1978) proposed the first- and second-generation activity theory to develop practice and the sites of practice. However, he shifted the emphasis from individual to collective subjects and mediated actions or interventions of collectives. According to Leont’ev (1978), activity is an evolving, complex structure of mediated and collective human agency. It exists twice, first as a material entity in the world and second as a vision or an image, both in its present state and how people envisage it in the future.

Engeström (1991) developed ‘third-generation activity theory’, called cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). His activity system contains subject, object, tools, division of labour, community and rules represented in a triangular model. He put forward expansive learning, which involves the development of a simple idea into a complex object of activity, and expansion into a collective movement or institution through dynamic relationships in the social situations (Engeström, 1999). According to Cole and Engeström (1993), expansive learning is facilitated by resolving four levels of contradictions. Primary contradictions are internal to a fundamental entity. Secondary contradictions occur between two constituent entities. Tertiary tensions happen between the object of the dominant and the object of a culturally more advanced form of the activity. Finally, a fourth-level contradiction involves troubles between the central activity and one of its neighbouring activities. Beatty and Feldman (2012) also suggested that inner contradictions, when brought to the level of consciousness, become the primary driving forces that bring about change and development within and between activity systems. They believe that working through these contradictions becomes part of the process of creating and understanding change.

CHAT has been used to frame and study the contradictions in teaching activity (e.g., Barahona & Ibaceta-Quijanes, 2020; Ellis et al., 2010; Nguyen, 2017), teacher/teacher educator identity and agency development (e.g., Hökkä et al., 2017; Karimi & Mofidi, 2019). Research (e.g., Beatty & Feldman, 2012; Y. Yan & Yang, 2019) concurs that contradictions inherent in activity systems are pivotal for change. Bourke and McGee (2012) identified five conditions for cultural innovations, including clarified objects, mediating artefacts (resources), strong platforms through rules and division of labour, widened communities and sustainable introduction of external rule changes. Some research integrated CHAT with sociocultural theory concepts into a holistic framework to address complex educational issues. For example, Yang (2012) combined CHAT and zone of proximal development to uncover systemic contradictions in Chinese EFL teachers’ professional agency development. Dang (2013) utilized CHAT, zone of proximal development and perezhivanie to examine Vietnamese pre-service teachers’ identity development through a co-teaching programme.

Following this line of research, this study integrated Vygotskian sociocultural perspective and the activity theory for their appropriateness in interpreting the research findings. The sociocultural perspective was meant to interpret supervisors’ perspectives about the underlying social and cultural issues in EFL teacher education in the Chinese context that contributed to their beliefs about the practicum. The CHAT theory aimed to examine the practicum as an activity system, in particular the contradictions in the partnership process.

The pre-service EFL teacher education programme

The pre-service EFL teacher education programme under investigation was based in a national teacher education university in China, one of the six national teacher education institutions affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education. The university established 29 teaching practicum zones in 11 provinces/cities for their teaching practicum and teacher research. The programme aims to develop EFL teachers who will engage in English teaching at secondary and tertiary levels with BA, MA/MEd and PhD qualifications. The department boasts over 40 full-time teaching staff in four major academic areas, i.e., linguistics, translation, literature and teacher education. Thirteen staff members (including the first author) specialize in English teaching methodology and teacher education with master’s qualifications obtained locally or from abroad, and six hold PhD degrees in EFL methodology or teacher education.

The four-year duration of the programme is divided into eight semesters. The first three years focus on on-campus discipline courses, language development courses and pedagogical courses. The fourth year includes the 10-week-long teaching practicum and courses of eight weeks in the first semester, and dissertation writing and viva in the second semester.

The teaching practicum

The teaching practicum scheduled spanned 10 weeks from mid-September to late November, which is significantly shorter than the mandated one semester. The practicum comprises tripartite responsibilities: classroom teaching, class representatives’ tasks and educational research. The majority of students are assigned in groups of 10 to provincial key senior secondary schools within the province where the university is located, including both rural and urban schools. Each group is assigned a supervisor, who is free from teaching commitments and available to assume the role during the practicum period irrespective of their areas of expertise. A small minority of students contact placement schools themselves, which are generally based in their hometowns. The remaining numbers are assigned to junior secondary schools and colleges. For such cases, no supervisors are assigned due to the staff shortage.

As the job descriptions indicates, a supervisor’s responsibilities include liaising with practicum schools and university practicum committees, supervising and revising student teachers’ lesson plans, arranging trial lessons, observing student teachers’ teaching, supervising and participating in various activities organized by the student teacher groups, completing the supervision manuals, and participating in practicum evaluations with student teachers. Supervisors for schools nearby are required to make a minimum of three visits, and supervisors for schools outside the capital city are expected to stay at the practicum school for a week. The practicum ends with assessments, including self-assessment, peer assessment and mentors’ and supervisors’ assessment.

Method

To describe as accurately as possible the phenomenon, the study followed epoche (the bracketing or suspension of our naturalistic assumptions about the world and the objects), intuiting (returning to what is intrinsically given in our intuitions, Moran, 2000), generating the meanings (coding ‘units of meanings’) and reproducing the ‘reality’ of the phenomenon. Such phenomenological principles informed the choice of data-gathering methods and procedures.

Purposive sampling was employed to recruit participants from the 12 practicum supervisors (eight females, four males). Nine of them (five females, four males) agreed to participate. They had served as practicum supervisors for two consecutive years at the time of the investigation. They were all over 40 years of age. Six of them were associate professors, and three were lecturers. Their academic fields included education, linguistics, translation and literature. The profiles of the participants are provided in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Profiles of participants.

Participant	Gender	Age	Qualification	Professional title
Zhou	female	45	MA in linguistics	associate professor
Zou	female	41	MA in linguistics	lecturer
Jiang	female	42	PhD in translation	associate professor
Zhang	female	41	MA in translation	lecturer
Liu	female	42	MA in English literature	lecturer
Weng	male	55	BA in English language and literature	associate professor
Hu	male	57	MA in English education	associate professor
Li	male	50	MA in English education	associate professor
He	male	52	MA in linguistics	associate professor

The sample was sufficient to show the range of variations that would be present in the population as a whole, and reach saturation for a phenomenological study. As Boyd (2001) suggested, adequate variation of phenomenographic samples is normally captured within 10 interviews in terms of range of demographic characteristics to discover what is possible, rather than what is most common (Åkerlind, 2008). For the purpose of confidentiality, the names are pseudonyms.

Different from the teacher educators who transition to teacher education in university settings from school teaching or other different pathways, they have been working in the university since their graduation from the department under study. Only one participant assumed an administrative role as vice department head. Except Weng, the department’s practicum coordinator, all supervisors had concurrent teaching responsibilities in the semester. Each of them supervised two practicum schools located in the same region at the time of the investigation. Informed consent was ensured before the start of the investigation.

Data collection was conducted in two stages. The first stage consisted of the first author’s longitudinal observations through practicum meetings and archives of their supervision notes to generate non-judgemental memos of the participants’ supervision behaviours as comprehensive as possible. The long-term observations produced large quantities of dated memos, including descriptive and reflective notes to record ‘what the researcher hears, sees, experiences and thinks in the course of collecting and reflecting on the process’ (Groenewald, 2004, p. 13). The rich observation notes served as the basis of the questions in the interviews in the second stage, which allowed in-depth dialogues between the researcher and the participants to unfold the meaning of the participants’ experiences (Groenewald, 2004).

The second stage of data collection started with one semi-structured interview with each participant on their perceptions of their roles in the practicum and their activities. Each interview was conducted in Chinese in a non-threatening environment, lasting 60–90 minutes. The interviews yielded a series of further questions, such as their perceived roles in the practicum and reasons for their perceptions. Abundant informal individual conversations were subsequently carried out to probe commonalities and differences in different aspects of the puzzle. To minimize the researcher effect caused by the power differentials, the first author, who was also an academic administrator, emphasized honest and open opinions to help improve the quality of the current practicum.

The process of data explicitation (rather than analysis) followed Hycner’s (1999) five steps, including:

This process involves cross-case analysis for delineation of similarities and differences, in particular unique or minority voices across cases with a view to supporting empirical generalizability and theoretical predictions.

Problems in the practicum

Three problems emerged, including supervisors’ limited involvement, limited support from the university and practicum schools, and interns’ weaknesses in the practicum.

Strategies for practicum improvement

Two strategies emerged to enhance the practicum, including the initiative of interns and a stable collaborative platform.

Discussion

The study reveals two hindrances in the practicum, including challenges in interns’ socialization to the school environment and supervisors’ limited engagement. Interns’ challenges present a major concern at the start of the practicum, in particular their sense of weariness and vulnerability (Evelein et al., 2008). It was caused by their lower status within the school’s hierarchical system, limited knowledge of school contexts and inadequate professional skills and competence to deal with the complex sociocultural context and the social and intercultural relations between cultures. As Li et al. (2023) observed, Chinese EFL interns’ learning systems are interwoven with other complex systems, including the mentor’s system (such as his reluctance to allow interns to teach), the headteacher’s system (such as transferring workload to interns) and the school’s system (such as exam-oriented teaching environment), as well as the impact of the conflicts between systems (such as the conflicts of language teaching ideas between the mentor and interns).

Four levels of contradictions in Cole and Engeström’s, (1993) model surfaced in the study. Primary contradictions were represented by the lack of shared practicum goals within each of the school and university systems. Secondary contradictions existed between two disconnected activity systems with their respective responsibilities. Tertiary tensions happened between the dominant school object of exam-oriented education and the culturally more advanced but peripheral university object of promoting quality-oriented education. The quaternary conflicts occurred between the central activity of supervising and mentoring practicum and other various daily school activities. The mentors did not see themselves as part of the broader activity of the partnership. The disconnection between individual sub-activity systems undermined exploitation of the learning tools, division of labour and vague rules, and divergent objects, and ultimately, expansive learning did not occur to develop higher-level understandings of the meanings of the practicum activity. These findings echo some documentation (e.g., Mairitsch et al., 2021; Y. Yan & Yang, 2019) about the absence of a robust activity system.

The study indicates that the supervisors adopted a hands-off supervision style and provided little support to develop interns’ professional content knowledge, pedagogical reasoning skills and personal practical theories. Objective and subjective factors contributed to their supervision style. Objectively, the pervading linear process–product conceptions of teacher learning led to the supervisors neglecting the complexity of the learning-to-teach process and failing to experience the process in its entirety for deep and constructive tripartite supervisions. Institutional staff evaluation policies did not encourage enthusiastic engagement. As C. M. Yan and He (2015) noted, the prevalent foundationalist teacher education paradigm and the ‘publish or perish’ academic climate devalue teaching and practicum supervision.

On the other hand, subjective factors also played a part. The supervisors’ perception of themselves as dispatchers of interns and reliance on experience-based and anecdotal approach stood out. Lacking an awareness of helping student teachers to transition from episteme to phronesis, and to artistry (Eisner, 2002), the supervisors did not perceive pressing issues in the practicum, such as the university–school partnership construction, connection between the curriculum and the practicum, and identity development of student teachers and themselves. As Lichtenstein et al. (2006) suggested, the identity-forming process concerns dialectics between individuals and cultures. They may have been deeply acculturated by their prior experiences of the foundationalist teacher education paradigm through ‘apprenticeship of observations’ (Lortie, 1975), and naively assumed a straightforward transfer of knowledge into effective classroom practice.

Echoing previous research (e.g., Vess et al., 2018; Yuan & Lee, 2016), this study suggests that apart from their own initiative, novice teachers also need professional and emotional support to develop agency to reach their learning goals in the complex learning systems. It shows that resolving the contradictions in the practicum requires transformation of the existing foundationalist teacher education paradigm to construct a strong partnership system. Therefore, there is a need to establish a fair faculty assessment system to motivate teacher educators’ practicum supervision, which prioritizes students’ long-term development as well as a stronger connection between student learning, academics’ research and the wider community. Practice-based research and self-studies should be recognized to promote teacher educators’ efforts to reframe their beliefs and identities. Supervisor selection and training should be a top agenda to develop teacher-educator-researchers to lead a transformative practicum system involving all stakeholders concerned.