The collaborative process developed among pre- and in-service teachers within a continuing teacher education program

Current paper discusses the collaborative process developed between a preand an in-service teacher of English Language within a continuing teacher education program at a public school in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil. The collaborative research investigation (MAGALHÃES; FIDALGO, 2008) focused on the interactions established between the participants in the development of English Language classes, which were prepared based on the concept of language as social practice (MOTTA-ROTH, 2008) for Grade Five students of the primary school, taking into account students’ needs and specificities. Lessons were recorded and transcriptions became the corpus of the research. The analysis revealed the collaborative process through the incorporation by the participants of traditional pre-established roles: a leading role undertaken by the in-service teacher, and a supporting role performed by the pre-service teacher, due to their hierarchical position within the apprenticeship and trainee system. However, the analysis also showed that the supporting role by the pre-service teacher enhanced a more dialogical collaborative process to the English classes, since her teaching contributions increased students’ participation and stimulated their production in the activities proposed.


Introduction
Current research is part of the umbrella project 'Representações Sociais no Contexto Escolar' (TICKS, 2010), which follows a collaborative perspective and was developed in a public school, called NELL (fictitious name to preserve the school's identity) in one of the districts of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, between June 2010 and October 2011.The project aimed at constructing a teachers' continuing education program to improve the qualifications of teachers working at NELL, to provide them a space for critical thinking on their practices and to develop a collaborative way of acting in that context.Dialogically, current investigation becomes a learning process also for the researchers in terms of questioning and improving their collaborative researching processes within the contexts of government-run schools.
More specifically, between June and December 2010, teachers and researchers discussed three learning theories: behaviorism, constructivism and sociocultural perspective.In addition, to establish theoretical and pedagogical relationships, a workshop on literacy was developed from February to October 2011 to help in the production of pedagogical activities for different disciplines based on the concept of language as social practice.
Within the umbrella project, this particular investigation tries to describe and explain the interactions established between a teacher of English teacher working at NELL and a pre-service one.More specifically, it focuses on the interactions established in the development of English Language activities within a 5 th grade class in October, 2011.These activities were based on readings and discussions on the concept of literacy set in the school between March and May, 2011.Therefore, the main objective of this particular essay is to discuss to what extent the pedagogical activities designed within the workshops were critically and collaboratively developed in English classrooms by the pre-and in-service teachers.By understanding how activities were carried out in class we could reveal to what extent these participants managed to work together in order to build a collaborative practice in the teaching of English within a continuing teacher education program.It would perhaps help them to incorporate this collaborative role into their future teaching practices with other members of the teaching communities.

Collaborative research
Continuing teacher education processes have received increasing attention in Brazil during the last few years due to the teachers' upgrading and updating needs (MELLO;DUTRA, 2011).Concerning updating needs, Magalhães (2002) states that it is necessary to have a continuing education process based on a context of construction of knowledge that allows participants of an investigation to be constantly searching, reflecting and being critical of their own practices and beliefs.
With regard to the current panorama, the project 'Representações Sociais no Contexto Escolar' aims at constituting a continuing teacher education program by means of a collaborative research.These collaborative practices intend to construct new knowledge by teachers that become researchers of their own practice, and by outside researchers, working together to negotiate issues put into the debate to review teachers' own practices (MAGALHÃES, 2002).In other words, a collaborative process needs to be meaningful for both participants (researchers and teachers), as stated by Ninin (2006), who argues that an activity exists when, consciously, the people involved find motifs that push them towards the object and the result of the activity.Therefore, collaborative processes imply asymmetry of ideas and interests, tensions and conflicts that will promote possibilities of reflection, construction and transformation of knowledge (MAGALHÃES, 2002).
In summary, collaborative research aims to provoke changes in the education panorama as it focus on the process of reflection and not uniquely on the results (MAGALHÃES; FIDALGO, 2008).That is, it focuses on the real life of teachers within their practices and on the educational process and the relationships established by the teachers and the researchers as subjects of the story they are constructing in the development of their practices (FERREIRA; IBIAPINA, 2011).
Critical discourse analysis Fairclough (2003, p. 124) conceives discourse as […] ways of representing aspects of the worldprocesses, relations and structures of the material world, the 'mental' world of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and so forth, and the social world.
Through discourse people build different perspectives of the world, according to their position in the world, their social and personal identities and their social relationships, that is, "[…] discourse is rather a social practice than a purely individual activity" (FAIRCLOUGH, 1992, p. 63).
A social practice is understood "[…] as articulations of different types of social element which are associated with particular areas of social life […]" (FAIRCLOUGH, 2003, p. 25), for instance the social practice of teaching in a public school in the city of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil.This social practice and all others articulate particular ways of using discourse with the social relations of the classroom (FAIRCLOUGH, 2003).That is, in a classroom, language is constructed through the interaction among students and teacher(s) within their specific context.
Discourse can be seen as a social practice since it is a mode of action, in which "[…] people may act upon the world and especially upon each other […]" (FAIRCLOUGH, 1992, p. 63).Discourse is a mode of action which regulates social life within a particular context, both shaping and restricting, for instance, identities, relations, and rules.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) contributes […] to see the extent to which language does rest upon common-sense assumptions, and the ways in which these common-sense assumptions can be ideologically shaped by relations of power (FAIRCLOUGH, 2001, p. 4).
That is, CDA helps to construct a particular perspective on the social world by denaturalizing these common sense assumptions through the implementation and development of critical educational processes (FAIRCLOGH, 1989).Fairclough (1992) also argues that CDA has three dimensions: 'description' of the text; 'interpretation' of the interaction processes and their relationship to the text; and 'explanation' of how the interaction process relates to the social action.Therefore, the three dimensions will be taken into account to analyze the corpus of current study since it is through language analysis that we observe to what extent we manage to develop a collaborative practice.Therefore, CDA may be related to collaborative research as it comes as a social change in contemporary society by raising awareness that may transform the context researched.

Sociocultural theory
The concept of language as social practice is present in this theory of learning, mainly developed by Lev Vygotsky, a Marxist-oriented researcher, who had as his main concern the social interaction among individuals.According to Vygotsky (2001), knowledge is constructed step by step with the aim of building new concepts, that is, the abstract concepts are incorporated into the concrete ones to be internalized by the individuals during the learning process, that is, knowledge construction is an outside process that is later internalized by the learner.
Thus, Vygotsky (1933) proposed that the construction of the learning process occurs through the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).The ZPD begins with the zone of actual development: what a child can do alone and unassisted, and it proceeds towards the construction of scaffolds, in which a child will gradually construct knowledge with the help of someone more competent.After scaffolding, the child internalizes the concepts and will seek new knowledge to be built.These knowledge steps may be understood as a continuing learning cycle.With regard to the concept of ZPD, we perceive that the basis of the sociocultural theory is the learning process as a social, historical and ideological phenomenon, that is, we internalize concepts that are culturally and ideologically marked by our experiences in society.

Context of investigation
The school where the project 'Representações Sociais no Contexto Escolar' was developed is located in one of the districts Santa Maria in the Brazilian southern State of Rio Grande do Sul.It was established in 1992, with almost 1,800 students distributed in 56 classes in three different shifts.The school staff has 120 professionals, comprising teachers, office staff, supervisors etc.

Participants
The participants of current research are: 1) 'The pre-service teacher': Maria (fictitious name) is an undergraduate student of English Major attending the 8 th semester, and also a researchparticipant of the project 'Representações Sociais no Contexto Escolar'.In the analysis we will also refer to her as PT (pre-service teacher).
2) 'The in-service teacher': Regina (fictitious name) has a Major in English and Portuguese, and took a Post-graduation degree in Linguistics.She teaches Portuguese at another public school in Santa Maria.She teaches 20 hours of English classes per week, distributed in approximately 9 different classes in the school where we developed the project.In the analysis, we will refer to Regina also as IT (in-service teacher).
3) 'The students': All of them are 5 th graders.They are between 10 and 12 years old, with some exceptions.The students generally live in the school area and belong to low income families.In the analysis we will refer to the students as S1, S2, S3, and so on.

Procedures of data collection
Within the umbrella project, Regina and Maria have designed together an English class plan for students of a 5 th grade class at NELL.Afterwards, they went to the class to pilot the pedagogical material and video-recorded the lessons.Therefore, the corpus of this work is comprised of three video recordings of three classes developed at NELL by the pre-and the in-service teachers.These three recordings were identified (Table 1), transcribed and analyzed.Procedures and categories of analysis First, we identified and described the nature of the instructional activities developed by the teachers in the three classes, and calculated their recurrence (Table 2).Secondly, we analyzed the process of giving instructions, taking into account the scaffolding process built by the teachers with the students, following the sociocultural learning perspective.This theory was actually discussed in workshops developed with the participants throughout the continuing teacher education program.More specifically, we highlighted the gaps in the instructional processes identified along the classes (Table 3).We decided to focus on these difficulties because they helped us understand the process of collaboration established in class between the pre and in-service teachers.
Table 3. Categories of analysis related to the teacher's instructional process.

Category (1)
Lack of instructions on how to do the activities (2) Lack of time for students' production (3) Lack of scaffolding After these two instances, we also analyzed the roles played by each teacher in the process of giving the instructions in terms of their status and power relations established in class, or rather, the nature of these roles.As a result, we came up with two main roles: 'a leading role' and 'a supporting role'.In this case, the leading role is the position of first taking the floor in the process of instructing the activity, for example, the teacher who starts introducing or explaining the activity to the students.The supporting role is the position of giving support to the other teacher who is leading the instructional process, that is, the teacher who rephrases or complements the instructions given by the leading teacher.

Class instructions following a sociocultural learning perspective
The activities developed in the first class (#10/10/2011) were drawn upon a comics genre retrieved from Ciência Hoje para Crianças website.The comics approaches an English classroom in which the main character, a student named Ptix, is facing some problems to understand what the teacher is saying.The problem is solved with the help of his language neuron cells, also a character in the comics, who decodes the teacher's message, translating it from English into Portuguese.
The activities developed in the second (#14/10/2011); and third (#17/10/2011) classes explored the song and the music video of Pray, performed by Justin Bieber.In general terms, the song, the video clip and the comics discuss the themes 'friendship/solidarity'.
When the activities in class by the teachers were evaluated, it could be noted that the teachers, Regina and Maria, faced difficulties in the process of giving instructions on how to do the activities (Category 1) in some of the reading activities for the first and second classes.To exemplify these difficulties, we further analyze the pre-reading activities of the first class (Figure 1).In the pre-reading activity of the first class, the teachers started to question the students orally about their previous knowledge on comics, but they did not instruct the students to write down their answers.The pre-reading questions were discussed orally before giving the students the printed activity in which they could have written down their answers.Therefore when the pre-service teacher finally gave the sheets to the students, some of them were quite confused on how to proceed with the material, "[…] a gente tem que fazer alguma coisa, sora?" (S1) (Excerpt #1).
When the students finally received the sheets, they started doing the activities.However, this time the teachers did not give them enough time to write down the answers (category 2 -lack of time for students' production) and carried on with their lesson (Excerpt #2).Regina (IT) asked the students to answer the questions ('vão respondendo aí'), reminding the students the questions had already been discussed ('a gente já conversou, né') and stated that they should move to the next activity ('agora façam o número 5').Maria (PT) reinforced what Regina said ('quem gostaria de ler o número 5?').
Excerpt #1 (#10/10/2011) Excerpt #2 (#10/10/2011) In this pre-reading activity, the teachers could have offered the students more time for writing their answers, or, while discussing the questions, the teachers could have written some of the students' ideas on the blackboard, in order to guide them in their answers (category 3 -lack of scaffolding).Vygotsky (1997, p. 49) argues that "[…] the teacher is the director of the social environment in the classroom, the governor and guide of the interactions between the educational process and the student".Therefore this category of scaffolding refers to the support that is provided by the teachers to help learners achieve their learning objectives.Within the pre-reading activity, the teachers could have provided a gradual construction of knowledge so that they would understand how to proceed with the activities step by step and would have not feel lost when developing it.
Turning to a positive aspect, we could also highlight some moments in which the teachers succeeded in giving instruction to the students, helping the students' construction of knowledge.For instance, in Excerpt #3, Regina and Maria asked questions about the characters in the comics, particularly about the function of each language neuron cells ('O Zé Neurim lá é responsável pelo que, dentro da cabeça do Ptix?'), whereas students were expected to understand the functions of each language neuron cell by analyzing their names and the illustrations in the comics text.
Excerpt #3 (#10/10/2011) With the aim of guiding the students in the construction of their own answers for the exercises, the teachers could have explored better the time for the written production in class, as the students were facing difficulties with it.This lack of planning in the development of some activities may be justified by the fact that the two teachers did not meet beforehand in order to discuss how the class plan would be enacted.Regina and Maria designed the materials for the 5 th graders but did not set a meeting to plan how the activities would be handled in class or who would introduce or explain each activity.Although the teachers' feedback of their classes was quite positive, this was an aspect that influenced negatively the development of the activities in class.
The collaborative process between the pre-and in-service teachers In order to understand how the collaborative process between the two teachers was established in class, we first identified, as previously mentioned in the Procedures and categories of analysis section, the instructional activities developed in the three days of class (Table 2).Once these categories were established, we looked for the leading and supporting roles that each teacher quantitatively played in each instructional activity (Tables 4 and 5).
According to the total percentages shown in Table 4, Regina had the leading role in most of the activities involving instructions (64; 28%).This fact is due to her being the in-service teacher, that is, she is officially in charge of the class.Consequently, Maria ended up most of the time with a secondary role in class (35; 71%), as Table 5 shows.This secondary position held by Maria may be explained by the fact that she was the intern teacher, thus, a recent member of the school staff.Due to this condition, we believe Maria decided to observe how Regina worked with her students to help her and thus placed herself in the position of an assistant teacher.In Excerpt #4, we perceive this hierarchy being constructed in class.
Excerpt #4 (#17/10/2011) The hierarchical relation above can be noticed through Maria's question to Regina, "[…] dá para pegar um giz e apagar o quadro?" (PT).In this statement, Maria is asking Regina's permission to erase what is on the blackboard to write down some grammar explanation for the students.By asking for Regina's permission, Maria is reaffirming Regina's role as the leading teacher in the classroom.
After analyzing quantitatively the leading and supporting roles, we also investigated the nature of these roles.First, it is important to explain that, due to the extensive corpus of this research and to better analyze the collaborative process between the two teachers in classroom, we have selected a few excerpts from the transcriptions that are representative of this process, analyzing the roles with the highest percentages.The leading role Starting with the leading role (Table 4), as previously mentioned, the in-service teacher, Regina, assumed the leading role in most of the instructional activities, mainly in the practices of 'giving instruction on how to do the activities' and 'organizing students/classroom (logistics)'.In Excerpt #5, Regina is giving an instruction on how to proceed with the task of creating a comic strip.As already mentioned, we believe that most of the 'giving instruction' activities (70,58% -Table 4) are performed by Regina because she is the teacher in charge of the class, that is, she is officially responsible for leading and explaining the tasks for the students, a power position given by the Educational institution.
Excerpt #5 (#17/10/2011) In Excerpt #6, Regina is leading the instructional activity 'organizing students/classroom (logistics)'.In order to develop the activity proposed in class, the students should first get together in groups.Regina is the teacher who distributes the groups in the classroom space and also organizes them according to the number of people.

The supporting role
So that the pre-service teacher's supporting role could be analyzed, we took into account two functions, which appeared in the corpus: 1) a supporting role that complements the instructions, giving new information to the students on what to do (60%), and 2) a supporting role that rephrases what the leading role has already instructed (40%).
Excerpt #6 (#14/10/2011) Through Excerpts #7, #8, and #9, we perceive examples of the supporting roles that complement the instructions.In Excerpt #7 Regina is stating to the students that the comics that they were about to read is quite different, for the reason that its characters were not commonly known, "[…] hoje nós vamos trabalhar com uma história em quadrinhos diferente […] não é comum em revistinhas por aí" (IT).
Excerpt #7 (#10/10/2011) In Excerpt #8, the teachers are talking about the characters of the comics.They had first to present each of the characters as they were new to the students.As already mentioned, the characters of the comics are the neuron cells of a boy named Ptix, who helped him to understand English at school.
Regina states to the students that Ptix's brain is the home of the neuron cells and affirms that everybody knows what it is, 'todo mundo sabe o que é neurônio' (IT).Maria complements her by checking whether the students already knew what a neuron cell is, 'vocês sabem o que são neurônios?' (PT).As some students said that they did not know what they were, the pre-service teacher raised another question, 'O que os neurônios fazem a gente fazer' (PT) and then, one of the students answer that the neuron cells are responsible for our thoughts, 'fazem a gente pensar' (S1).By raising that question, Maria intended to open space for students' participation, thus, we perceive that in this excerpt there is a complementation of a statement that gave new information for the students to develop the activities.
Excerpt #8 (#10/10/2011) Excerpt #9 is from the class in which we approached the genres video clip and song.In this excerpt, the teachers are developing the listening activity of organizing the song according to the audio.The students were very excited about the song and were quite agitated in class, so Regina decided that we should play the song in parts so that the students could better complete the task, 'vamos colocando aos poucos porque tem gente que tem que completar' (IT).
At that time, we could notice that Maria realized that the students were facing some difficulties and she proposed to develop the activity together with the children, 'podemos fazer juntos?' (PT), and played the song again, stopping at every sentenced.Even though Regina calls the students' attention to this activity, it is Maria's intervention with regard to the student's needs that gives continuity to the development of the entire activity with the students, 'o primeiro mostra o nome da música […]', 'daí a próxima começa com qual?', 'e agora, qual é o próximo?', 'conseguiram achar?' (PT).
We may perceive through excerpts #10 and #11 the supporting roles that rephrase what the leading role has already instructed.In Excerpt #10, Regina, as the leading teacher, starts to instruct the students on what to do, 'agora façam a número 5' (IT).Maria rephrases what she said by asking the students who would like to read the next question, 'quem gostaria então de ler a número 5 para a gente?' (PT).In this extract, we believe Maria's purpose was not only reinforcing what the in-service teacher said, but also to make the students more involved in the class by reading the questions themselves.Even though Maria was only rephrasing what Regina previously said, she was also inviting the students to participate in class by raising a question to them, that is, she modalized her discourse in order to invite the students to answer her question ('Quem gostaria ?[…]').On the other hand, Regina made use of a straight order ('Agora façam […]') with the purpose of making the students to do the exercise.This order seemed not to be taken into consideration by the students as they did not respond to it.At the moment that Maria raised a question and not a command, the students apparently got more involved in class.The students' behavior in this situation might be explained by the kind of speech acts uttered by the teachers, and also by the use of modalization.When the pre-service teacher raised the question 'quem gostaria de ler […]?' she was making use of a hypothetical modality, which makes questions more tentative, as if she were hypothesizing about asking the question rather than actually asking it (FAIRCLOUGH, 2003).This linguistic strategy might have been received by the students as less demanding, making them feel more comfortable to interact.
In Excerpt #11, Regina is giving instruction to the students on what they should pay attention to while watching the video clip of the song 'Pray'.By stating to the students that they should pay attention to the images, Regina makes a demand ('preste').On the other hand, Maria's supporting role of rephrasing is more dialogical than Regina's orders, in the sense that the first rephrases what the second has just said by raising a modalized question to the students ('o que será, se a gente não consegue entender o inglês, assim tudo, a gente vai prestar atenção nas imagens'), what again might be felt, by the students, less invasive than orders.
In Excerpts #10 and #11, Regina and Maria are requesting something from the students, or rather, what Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) call 'speech role of demanding'.For these authors, we may recognize two types of speech roles in a conversation, giving and demanding information.In the first one, we give a piece of information to the listener, that is, we 'invite to receive'.On the other hand, in the speech role of demanding, we 'invite to give' because we are not only doing something but we are also requesting something from the listener.In other words, 'giving implies receiving and demanding implies giving in response'.
In the excerpts shown above, the teachers make use of different speech acts.In class, Regina's speech acts are mainly of command to make the students participate in class; in other words, she gives orders.In contrast, Maria makes use of speech acts that invite the students to engage in class, such as asking questions.Therefore, in these examples, Maria acts more dialogically than Regina when supporting her in class.Excerpt #11 (#14/10/2011)

Final considerations
The main aim of current research was to describe and explain to what extent the pedagogical activities designed within the workshops in the continuing educational program at NELL were critically and collaboratively developed in the English classroom by the pre-and in-service teachers.
Our first goal was to explain and assess how the pre-and the in-service teachers developed the pedagogical activities with 5 th grade class students considering the sociocultural learning theory adopted by the research group and discussed with the participants.The analysis conducted to accomplish this objective demonstrated that the teachers failed in some of the instructions to the students, that is, they did not guide the students properly when developing some of the activities.This lack of instruction might be explained by the fact that both teachers did not meet each other previously to prepare how the lessons should be conducted.On the other hand, when the teachers managed to give proper instructions, the students were able to complete the activities successfully.
The analysis of the collaborative process between the two teachers explored the roles and power assumed by them in class.Regina took the leading role since she was the official teacher in charge of the class, a position given by the educational system.In this sense, Maria assumed the supporting role in class, most of the time complementing Regina and also trying to rephrase her instructions in a more dialogical way, in an attempt to gain the students' attention.
Finally, we believe that the collaborative process established between Regina and Maria contributed to the problematization of their teaching practices (MAGALHÃES, 2002).We could also perceive that, at the same time Regina and Maria got involved in the discussions about the context of their classroom, they also assessed and reorganized their practices (MAGALHÃES; FIDALGO, 2008) aiming at developing a contextualized class for the students.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Example of a pre-reading activity of the first class.

Table 1 .
Topics, genres and dates of classes.

Table 2 .
Instructional activities and their recurrence in class.

Table 4 .
Recurrence of teachers' leading role in classroom.

Table 5 .
Recurrence of teachers' supporting role in classroom.