Journal 5

 In the session of today, I learned something very interesting; "professionalism" has been always connected with having a major; and I include myself when I refer to this because I used to think there was a relationship between they both. However, now I consider that in my case being a professional includes more aspects than just having studied a degree. It involves the development of my critical reflective practice, my cognitions as a teacher, and how I situate EFL methods, also the creation of my own teacher identity. 

However, we found many tensions across our process of becoming professional. One of the most evident global tension is the preference on English native-speaker teachers over non-native teachers. There is still many current discriminatory recruitment practices that continue taking a preference on unqualified native speakers than a qualified and professional 'non-native teachers'. Thus, this results to be a cause of oppression in our context. I would say that even in our program, there are some students who prefer being taught by the native ones, and this is a real problem because we (non-native speakers) are also guilty of choosing NSs over us.  Likewise, we sometimes as learners of the language are marginalized because of our strong Colombian or even opita accent because it does not fit the "ideal" English teacher identity. This mentioned above demostrate the inequality and social injustice in ELT especially focused on 'non-native speaker teacher'.

Other tension that I would like to focus on is the authority and legitimacy in terms of what content to teach and how English should be taught. In my experience as a teacher in a private school, I have seen very evident these aspects since we as English  teachers are not completely free of choosing what topics to teach or even what methodologies to use in the classroom because we are still imposed by the directors of the school. 

Glossary:

Native speaker fallacy: the notion the ideal English teacher is the native speaker of that language.

Professionalism: Include these aspects: critical reflective practice, teacher cognitions, and situated EFL methods.

Teacher cognitions: Besides practical knowledge, pedagogic content knowledge, and personal theories of teaching, which are very much concerned with teachers’ personal and ‘situated’ approaches to teaching.

Marginalization: Treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or peripheral.

Injustice: It is related to unfairness or undeserved outcomes.