Communities of Practice for the Empowerment of Future French Second Language Teachers: A Critical Complexity-Informed Perspective

Abstract

In Canada, there is an increasing concern about the rise of neoliberal priorities in initial teacher education (ITE) policy and practices. Particularly in Ontario, governments have deployed techniques of governance to reform educational systems in an effort to achieve economic goals. This has resulted in an alarming decline in the retention of early-career teachers generally, and French second language (FSL) teachers specifically. While researchers have pointed to the need to bolster Faculties of Education to support early-career teachers before they enter the classroom, they also recognize that universities are subject to their own unique pressures, courtesy of neoliberalism. Set against the backdrop of an Ontario ITE program, this thesis by articles reports on a complex case study that examined the emerging practices of 18 language-focused teacher candidates as they participated in four voluntary communities of practice (CoP) over an eight-month period between 2022-2023. In these voluntary CoPs, candidates had the chance to pursue their own professional learning goals, assert their own norms and values, and develop their own practices. Anchored in a framework of resilience governance, and drawing from principles of complexity theory-critical realism (CTCR), data were collected through a variety of sources, including recordings of CoP meetings, interviews, artifacts, and a researcher journal. Taking each CoP as a unit of analysis, data were first analyzed with regard to the elements of the candidates' practices, reconstructed into narratives, and then contextualized into a complex case study. With support from the three CoP lenses of learning, innovating, and defending, I present the findings through three articles which ground the candidates' practices in educational theories related to mentorship, collaborative inquiry, and resistance. Despite the benefits that these CoPs afforded, such as increased opportunities for candidates to try out new roles, to have more control over the learning process, and to question cultural norms in the ITE program, findings showed that candidates still struggled to sustain the momentum of the groups and often reproduced dominant discourses in their practices. Ultimately, this study highlights that trying to support the autonomy of teacher candidates through policy does not offer them a means of empowerment, nor respite from the neoliberal pressures in ITE programming.