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TEACHER COGNITION AND ICT IMPLEMENTATION IN THE EFL CLASSES IN MEXICO

Vega Animas, Leticia Mishelly

[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2017.

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Abstract

The impact of technology in society nowadays has led to significant curricular reforms around the world that aim to achieve a higher quality in education. Mexico has not been the exception and in 2008, the Reforma Integral de la Educación Media Superior, RIEMS (the Comprehensive Reform of Upper Secondary Education) was launched with the aim to overcome three challenges in upper secondary education in Mexico: access to education, quality and equity. The proper development of this educational level would represent a fundamental assumption that the country could respond to the challenges of the global economy in a context of equity and diversity. In this context, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools has become a required tool considered as the necessary action for the qualitative improvement of the teaching and learning process. This provides many possibilities, but also new demands. One of the most important challenges concerns the teaching task and the fact that teachers are required to play a different role from the traditional approach that they are used to using in class and which is common in classrooms in Mexico, becoming instead facilitators of the learning process. This thesis was carried out to explore how EFL teachers engage with ICT in their practice in the context of Mexican reform initiatives. Specifically, the study focused on teacher cognition to understand what teachers think, know, believe and do related to ICT adoption. A case study approach was used to collect data from three EFL teachers in a high school in Mexico through interviews, observations and stimulated recall sessions. The results show that the participant teachers face a challenging, complex, multifactorial situation that hinders their adoption of ICT. The organisational structures of schooling and the social dimension of the particular school setting impact negatively on the conceptions that teachers bring to their practice making it difficult for ICT tools to be explored and appropriated pedagogically.