What puzzles teachers in Rio de Janeiro,and what keeps them going?

Abstract

This paper focuses on the key mechanism of ‘puzzling’ in EP, and the crucial issue of sustainability (see Allwright, this issue, Sections IV.2 and V.2), in the context of volunteer teacher development work (Section VII.2).

Having taken part, initially as participating teachers and now as ‘multipliers’, in Exploratory Practice (EP) meetings held in the city of Rio de Janeiro since 1997, we decided to investigate the puzzles presented by teachers from state and private schools as well as from language courses, in order to gain a general idea of their concerns and to better plan our future EP meetings. We grouped the puzzles into six emerging categories: motivation, anxiety, teaching, institutional lack of interest, discipline (or behaviour), and Exploratory Practice itself.

This grouping gave us an interesting picture of the teachers’ concerns and led us to investigate further by interviewing nine of the teachers involved. We found that these interviews also gave us insight into the extent to which sustainability, one of the main principles of EP, is being achieved at present and how EP is related to teachers’ lives.

The whole process of investigation and reflection led us to the understanding that EP is as important to those teachers as it is to ourselves, for it helped each one of us to sense considerable improvement in the quality of our lives.