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In this chapter you will find the answers to the following questions:

What is anti-bias education? Why is anti-bias education important? How is anti-bias education connected to inclusion? Why should anti-bias education be an essential part of teachers’ everyday work? What is intersectionality? How can teachers implement anti-bias education in the classroom?

Part of Section 1: Developing Inclusive Educators

Gender bias in teaching materials may influence students’ development and contribute to social inequalities. This study investigates possible gender bias in a newly published English textbook series in Vietnam. Holding gender as a social construct, the research uses a multimodal critical approach to examine language and ideological systems. The results show despite some effort for gender equity, the making of textbooks in today's Vietnam is still affected by patriarchal Confucian values. Males inhabit bigger verbal space and have more social properties. Females are portrayed as less independent; their choices are more limited, and with less resources. Textbook author interviews show the writing was influenced by conscious and unconscious bias, but they agreed gender equality is important, although male domination beliefs still seem to be deeply ingrained in the society. The study raises questions on challenging the status quo and creating a new cultural narrative for women’s rights recognition and enactment.

Gender contents, textual or visual, in instructional materials can be considered as a hidden curriculum, and may either hinder or advance equality. How teachers interpret and respond to this hidden curriculum in their classroom discourse, however, can play a crucial role in creating positive change. This research seeks to understand how teachers work with gender-sensitive contents in a newly-published English textbooks series for lower secondary education in Vietnam. To what extent are teachers aware of genderedness in textbooks, and how do they respond to it? Approaching gender as a social construct, using multi-dimensional methods, the study critically explores teachers’ experiences with the textbooks – their classroom practices and underlying perceptions – through 18 classroom observations and 12 follow-up interviews with 12 teachers in four lower secondary schools. Results indicate that neither the hidden curriculum of gender was recognized nor a critical mediation of it was practised. Gender content, whether ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’, was largely absent from classroom discourse, as teachers prioritized transferring linguistic knowledge. Little space was allocated for promoting students’ critical thinking and self-reflections, including those about gender-related content. Teachers did not often pay full attention to different nuances and dimensions of gender issues, while sometimes their teaching design and interaction were found to be affected by their own bias – consciously and unconsciously. The study reveals that although teachers were later willing to reconstruct their perceptions and future practices, and were able to concretize their pedagogical intentions, enacting teacher agency in relation to critical pedagogy and gender equality in the contemporary English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom in Vietnam might remain a challenge. Based on the study’s findings, pedagogical implications that may enable teachers to be potential agents of change were suggested.

If enhancing the connection between teaching and research has been highlighted in the general English language teaching profession, does English teaching at university – the ivory tower characterized by research – face the same issue? And how might this affect how the profession is perceived? This study provides an in-depth examination of how university English language teaching (ELT) teachers conceptualize research and their doing research, and discusses the issue in connection with the notion of profession. The study uses teacher cognition semi-structured interviewing with faculty members teaching English at a university in Vietnam. The results show ELT faculty construct different versions of research to rationalize their attitudes, self-awareness, and practices: research as irrelevant impositions, research as desirable but unfeasible goals, and research as practical, inner calls. Revealing this group's dilemmas between two worlds – practitioners and academics, external pressures and internal values, visions and realities, – the study argues that to increase research engagement, practical support is needed, but a reconceptualization of research is also an important factor. Also, understanding and realizing the teaching-research nexus in ELT hold implications for the profession's status and the professional’s identity and autonomy.

How stereotyped gender-specific expectations and norms are depicted in teaching materials may negatively influence students’ development and even contribute to social inequalities. In Vietnam, an inclusive growth that ensures girls’ and women’s rights to equal access to resources and services remains a challenge for the country – a Confucian-heritage society that values patriarchal traditions. 

This project critically investigates if and how gender bias is presented in English textbooks in Vietnam, and how it is interpreted and practised by teachers in the classroom. How is gender represented in the English textbooks? How do teachers interpret gender-sensitive content as presented in the textbooks and how do they respond to it in their teaching practices? 

Holding gender to be a social construct, which means women’s and men’s behaviour is influenced by social-cultural environment with its ideologies, perceptions and power hierarchy and distribution, the research uses critical discourse analysis to create a “productive suspicion” of text interpretation, asking questions about our notions of gender to examine how or when the feminine or masculine is constructed as powerful, to explore genderedness. A multimodal critical qualitative analysis, combined with analyses of quantitative traditions, was employed. The textbooks analysed are a newly published English textbook series for lower secondary education English 6, English 7, English 8, and English 9 currently in use in junior secondary schools in Vietnam. This series of English textbooks is part of Vietnam’s ongoing National Foreign Languages Project (NFL Project), Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training. The project also studies the interaction between textbooks and teaching by conducting classroom research. Teaching observation and teacher interview were selected as the methods to investigate classroom interpretation of textbook gender-related content. 

The results suggest that the depiction of gender in the textbooks, though starting to provide girls with more life opportunities, is still affected by gender norms and bias. Males not only inhabit bigger verbal space, they are also depicted as having more social properties than females: They have better knowledge, are more socially influential, enjoy higher status in both occupational roles and domestic roles, receive more opportunities, and aim for more ambitious goals. In contrast, although girls are seen as participating on more or less equal terms in some specific areas, they are portrayed as less independent; their choices are more limited, and they seem to receive less development resources than boys. The interview with the textbook authors shows although some efforts were made to ensure an equal presence of female and male characters, gender was not a priority during the textbook writing. Field observations of school English lessons reveal that teachers are not quite sensitive to possible gender issues in the textbooks and in the classroom. Gender content is largely absent from classroom discourse, as teachers prioritise covering and “transferring” textbook contents – mostly in terms of linguistic knowledge. In many cases, teachers’ teaching design and interaction are found to be affected by their own gender bias – both conscious and unconscious. However, textbook authors and teachers all agreed that gender equality is important in society and education, though breaking traditional norms can be difficult. 

The study raises questions on the possibility of challenging social norms and stereotypes against women, and, at the same time, creating a new culture narrative in which women’s agency is better recognised and enacted. The research helps increase the awareness of gender equality among societal community and professional groups (textbook writers, teachers, students, etc.) and enable them to recognise gender bias to respond to its challenge. Basing on the results, three main areas to respond to gender inequality are suggested: awareness raising, capacity building, and behaviour change. The current efforts towards gender equality are acknowledged, but better progress needs to be made so that girls’ and women’s empowerment is realised now and in the future.

Our presentation discusses the practices and findings from a PhD workshop series at the Academic Resource Centre, Umeå University Library, Sweden. The partnership between librarians, writing tutors/researchers in supporting PhD research has recently become a new reality with Information Literacy courses offered as tools for resources and searching (Hassani, 2015; Paasio & Hintikka, 2015; Garson,2016). The insights from our course contribute to this literature by re-conceptualizing “academic literacy”, including Information Literacy, in doctoral education.

Adopting Academic Literacies (Lea & Street, 1998, 2006) as our workshops’ underlying framework, we propose literacy beyond individual, transferable cognitive skills of writing and reading. Rather, it is an interrelated, dynamic, and situated set of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes that help PhD students acculturate into disciplinary discourses, the academic community, and wider social contexts.

Our course approaches literacy holistically as comprising Research competence, Information literacy, and Academic English, with consideration to social processes (power, identity, and authority). The workshops cover critical reading, the literature review, writing abstract, communicating research and writing papers, but the PhD students are also encouraged to make sense of their writing by having critical, inquiry-based reflections about themselves, academia, and social discourses.

The results from the first three workshop seasons emphasize knowledge co-creation – between academic librarians and researchers, and between workshop instructors and PhD students, as one key principle in developing academic literacies. The findings indicate that Information Literacy can be seen beyond tools and resources but rather a springboard that stimulates PhD students’ critical thinking in their becoming researchers. The positive feedback from the participants also gives the rationale for the expanding roles of the library (Delaney and Bates, 2018). These workshops have strengthened our belief that collaboration is one important strategy for librarians and writing tutors/researchers to acquire the skills of the future.

Contribution: While the role of theory and research is perceived as essential in preparing future teachers for the complexity of teaching, realising the theory-research-practice nexus in teacher education has been identified as one “perennial” dilemma (Darling-Hammond, 2006). Current studies from different countries, while acknowledging the shift from a craft-oriented tradition towards a more academic, research-based approach in teacher education, have indicated challenges faced by teacher educators, especially regarding curriculum and the links between university and school (e.g. Marcondes, Finholdt Angelo Leite, & Karl Ramos, 2017; Sancho-Gil, Sánchez-Valero, & Domingo-Coscollola, 2017; Valeeva & Gafurov, 2017).

This paper discusses the development of teacher education courses within a revised primary (English) language teacher education programme at Umeå University, Sweden. It focuses on how teacher knowledge is conceptualised and realised. In line with contemporary research on teacher education, the study argues that an integration between theory, research, and practical training can help student teachers form a sound knowledge and skill springboard. Such an integration enhances their creativity, autonomy, and identity, which is particularly relevant to the Swedish context, and potentially relevant to other European settings in general.

The key mission of the Swedish school, as stated in the Swedish National curriculum, is to “encourage all pupils to discover their own uniqueness as individuals and thereby be able to participate in the life of society by giving of their best in responsible freedom” (Skolverket - The Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018, p.5). Swedish learners are encouraged to become autonomous yet responsible through realising their potentials and developing their identity as individuals and being part of the society. Those fundamental tasks and values promoted in the Swedish education have implications for teacher education. In the Swedish context, if the school is to educate children to become independent and responsible, teachers must embrace and embody these qualities, since teacher beliefs influence their practice and agency (e.g. Biesta, Priestley, & Robinson, 2015; Brookfield, 2017).

The study’s theoretical framework is based on the view that teacher education involves relationships with factors beyond classroom confines, such as authoritative policies, practical wisdom, and teaching professionalism. Our courses’ development is thus informed by contemporary research on teacher knowledge in general and English language teacher knowledge in particular. We adopted the perspective that teaching is not only an apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975); rather, it is an “interplay” (Boyd et al., 2015) between policy, theory, research, and practical wisdom. Education is liberating: it helps students be able to manage daily classroom practices but it also enables life-long learning and empowers themselves as teachers. With this positioning, we build on the framework of teacher knowledge commonly used (e.g. Roters, 2017) that comprises content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of context and curriculum, and general pedagogical knowledge. We expand the model with a greater attention to research, theory, and reflection, while promoting the development of a growth mindset. Teachers’ abilities to understand and review theories of learning and teaching is now seen as necessary for professional growth (Richards & Farrell, 2005; Boyd et al., 2015; Farrell, 2016) and this should be the overall goal in teacher education (Ellis, 2012).

We thus acknowledge the complexity of teacher educators’ work (Boyd & White, 2017). Teacher educators should adopt a “researcherly disposition” (Tack & Vanderlinde, 2016) and the development of teacher education content should be grounded in not only practical experience, mandated by policy, but also theory and research. Teacher educators’ engagement with research helps better their practices and also creates new knowledge on teacher education.

Method: The courses in focus are one Theory class, one Methodology class, and one class on Being a language teacher, taught to primary student teachers at Umeå University during a recent academic year. The paper presents how the development of the courses (objectives, rationale, content, delivery, and assessment) is connected to contemporary teacher education theories and research. The designing and development of the courses, based on the objectives and requirements specified in the curriculum, followed Backward design approach (Wiggins, Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The way we aligned our conceptualisation of teacher knowledge with Swedish national policies, as well as our students’ needs, is also discussed. To gain information on the effectiveness of the approach, we considered end-of-course stakeholder evaluation (Kiely, 2012), in this case students’ feedback and instructors’ reflective insights. Expert peer feedback from our colleagues was also sought. General evidence of learning and change of attitude was reviewed through a portion of students’ submitted assignments. Initial input from students’ reflections from their first teaching practicum is regarded as a gateway to understanding their teacher cognition (Borg, 2015). Ongoing dialogues between students and instructors during the courses are also discussed as a method of course evaluation (Freeman & Dobbins, 2013). 

Expected Outcomes:  Our research-based approach yielded courses following the “interplay” between policy, theory, research, and practice. Of particular importance were a background of theory and research of second language acquisition for young learners, inquiry-based teacher education, teacher identities and agency, and reflective practice. Results from the student data indicate theory and research still intimidate them. Student teachers tend to imagine teacher knowledge as practical knowledge and skills, such as teaching “tips” and concrete classroom techniques. From our own reflections as course developers, we identified two significant concerns. First, reconciling the paradox between theoretical advocacy and practical guidance needs an explicit and coherent connection between curriculum design, coursework, and field experiences (Darling-Hammond, 2017; Flores, 2017). Second, the programme needs to better prepare students to activate their autonomy. Some dilemmas between design and meeting goals include knowledge interpretations (instrumental vs. liberal), knowledge presentability, materials, teachers and learners’ roles, and the transition from university learning to school professional practices, considering the ‘academic-vocational divide’. However, we also noted changes in our students’ self-awareness, knowledge development, teaching beliefs, and their attitude towards theory and practice.

The study has provided more understandings of the design and implementation of teacher education. During this process, teacher educators are both consumers and producers of knowledge. Seeing course development as an iterative cycle (Forsyth, Jolliffe, & Stevens, 1999/2017), our process needs ongoing review and discussions. Overall the courses showed initial positive results in encouraging student teachers to be more aware of the theory underlying their practice and beliefs, while seeing practice as possibilities for transformation (Flores, 2018). We believe this autonomy will help student teachers establish their own professional stance, especially in response to different demands and uncertainties in their teaching career.

References: Biesta, G., Priestley, M. & Robinson, S. (2015). The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 624-640.

Borg, S. (2015). Teacher cognition and language education: Research and practice. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Boyd, P. and White, E. (2017). Teacher educator professional inquiry in an age of accountability. In Boyd, P. & Szplit, A. (eds.) Teacher and teacher educator inquiry: International perspectives. Attyka.

Boyd, P., Hymer, B., & Lockney, K. (2015). Learning Teaching: becoming an inspirational teacher. Critical Publishing.

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. John Wiley & Sons.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Constructing 21st-century teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 57(3), 300–314.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2017). Teacher education around the world: What can we learn from international practice? European Journal of Teacher Education, 40(3), 291–309.

Ellis, R. (2012). Language teaching research and language pedagogy. Wiley Blackwell.

Farrell, T. S. C. (2016). From trainee to teacher: Reflective practice for novice teachers. Equinox Pub. Limited.

Forsyth, I., Jolliffe, A., & Stevens, D. (1999/2017). Evaluating a course. Routledge.

Freeman, R., & Dobbins, K. (2013). Are we serious about enhancing courses? Using the principles of assessment for learning to enhance course evaluation. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(2), 142-151.

Flores, M. A. (2018). Linking teaching and research in initial teacher education: knowledge mobilisation and research-informed practice. Journal of Education for Teaching, 44(5), 621-636.

Kiely, R. (2012). Designing evaluation into change management process. In C. Tribble (Ed.) Managing Change in English Language Teaching: Lessons from Experience, (pp. 75-90). London: British Council.

Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Marcondes, M. I., Finholdt Angelo Leite, V., & Karl Ramos, R. (2017). Theory, practice and research in initial teacher education in Brazil: challenges and alternatives. European Journal of Teacher Education, 40(3), 326-341.

Richards, J. C., & Farrell, T. S. C. (2005). Professional development for language teachers: Strategies for teacher learning. Ernst Klett Sprachen.

Sancho-Gil, J. M., Sánchez-Valero, J. A., & Domingo-Coscollola, M. (2017). based insights on initial teacher education in Spain. European Journal of Teacher Education, 40(3), 310-325.

Tack, H., & Vanderlinde, R. (2016). Measuring teacher educators’ researcherly disposition: Item development and scale construction. Vocations and Learning, 9(1), 43-62.

Valeeva, R. A., & Gafurov, I. R. (2017). Initial teacher education in Russia: connecting theory, practice and research. European Journal of Teacher Education, 40(3), 342-360.

Wiggins, G., Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Ascd.

This case study of a university in Vietnam examines how professionalism is established and managed in the university context as manifested in institutional quality assurance policies and practices towards academic staff development. By looking at both ‘regulations and instrumentalities’, the research showcases the different political forces involving in the making of professionalism. The findings suggest that the professionalism emerging from the case study is informed by a managerialist ethos. This striving university with its globalised logic can, in turn, be interpreted against a backdrop of larger socio-cultural contexts. In constructing the contemporary professionalism, there exist several forces and together they form an ecology system that includes both internal and external pressures under the overarching globalisation. A better understanding of these forces raises other questions about how they might change the traditional relationship between university and academic staff members, the impact of globalisation and the nature of teacher work and autonomy in higher education.