Language Teacher Education for a Global Society: A Modular Model for Knowing, Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing (review)

Kumaravadivelu’s book, Language Teacher Education for a Global Society, is a call for radical restructuring of language teacher education to incorporate process-based multidirectional cyclical modules aimed at preparing teachers to be ‘strategic thinkers, exploratory researchers and transformative intellectuals’ (p. x). These are the qualities that the author argues language teachers need to develop and continually hone to shoulder the responsibilities that ever-evolving globalized societies place upon them.

The book consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1, ‘(Re)visioning language teacher education,’ discusses five inter-connected theoretical perspectives that Kumaravadivelu argues should guide teacher preparation in a world characterized by global economic trends and cultural flows, ever-increasing people mobility, and shifting identities. Postnational, postmodern, and postcolonial perspectives theorize the broad political, historical, sociocultural, and socio-economic contexts within which languages are taught, learned, and used. These contexts demand that language education and teacher preparation embrace post-transmission and post-method perspectives in instructional activities. All these perspectives could be operationalized through the principles of particularity, practicality, and possibility that are needed to underpin language-teacher education. The purpose of viable teacher education programs is to help teachers develop a holistic understanding of classrooms, learners, and teaching, which could be accomplished through the integration of modules functioning as a whole. The modules Kumaravadivelu proposes are: ‘Knowing,’ ‘Analyzing,’ ‘Recognizing,’ ‘Doing,’ and ‘Seeing.’

Chapter 2 explains Kumaravadivelu’s module, ‘Knowing,’ by emphasizing the need to focus on knowing as a process, rather than focusing on a body of knowledge. According to the author, teachers need to develop professional knowledge (i.e., knowledge about language, teaching, and learning) as well as procedural knowledge (i.e., effectively managing language learning in classrooms) and personal knowledge, which refers to developing an understanding of what is possible and plausible in a particular local educational context. The following chapter addresses the second module, ‘Analyzing,’ which calls for teachers to develop knowledge and skills to make sense of learners’ needs, motivations, and autonomy in times of globalization. Kumaravadivelu argues for the promotion of ‘liberatory autonomy’ (p. 49), which would entail assisting learners in developing strategies of empowerment in investigating and thinking critically about the role of language in society, its representations, the ‘Internatization of communication’ (p. 49), and the learners’ place in the world they live in. In chapter 4, the module ‘Recognizing’ focuses on the need for teachers, who are moral agents, to recognize the identities, beliefs, and value systems that they bring into the classroom as these form their ‘teaching Self’ (p. 55). The next module, ‘Doing,’ outlines the importance of doing if one is to be an effective language teacher and transformative intellectual. Doing entails teaching (conceptualized as maximizing learning opportunities and mentoring personal transformation), theorizing (i.e., deriving a personal theory of practice through classroombased inquiry), and dialogizing (‘having conversations with Self, with texts, and with others on matters related to learning, teaching and theorizing’ p. 94). All aspects of doing are interrelated and comprise a cycle of ever-evolving formation and transformation. The final module in the model, ‘Seeing,’ discussed in chapter 6, requires that classroom activities be viewed through the various perspectives that learners, teachers, and observers bring to and develop from their classroom experience. The author distinguishes between ‘seeing-in’ (superficial looking), ‘seeing-as’ (identifying similarities and differences between past and new experiences and actions), and ‘seeing-that’ (critical application of knowledge) and argues for the need to engage in ‘seeing-that’ forms of observation (p. 100).

The last chapter in the book offers a summary of the modular model. The significance of the model is its aim to encompass a dynamic network of modules that interact with each other in complex ways, allow for multiple entry and exit points, and have the potential to address language teacher education in its multidimensionality within a globalizing world. The model draws on a perspective in approaching organizations called ‘design...