Foreign language graduate student instructors’ experiences with drama-based pedagogy

Required teacher training for graduate student instructors (GSIs) teaching in foreign language (FL) departments is often limited to a front-loaded, one-semester methods course that largely overlooks the needs of more experienced GSIs. The current discourse on FL GSI development has sought to alleviate this problem by giving recommendations of theoretical frameworks and pedagogical practices GSIs can learn to improve the undergraduate curriculum and their own teaching abilities, such as a multiliteracies framework and high leverage teaching practices. However, there are few empirical studies that document how graduate students engage with and take up recommended teaching practices through professional development in their departments. Furthermore, no evidence-based process model of such uptake exists as of yet. This dissertation involved a study of nine GSIs’ uptake of drama-based pedagogy and the factors that helped or hindered their engagement with relevant concepts and techniques. A formative experiment study design, ethnographic data collection, and a grounded theory approach to data analysis yielded a process model of how experienced GSIs engaged with an innovative pedagogy. This model presents a central phenomenon, engagement, that is grounded in extensive qualitative data, with engagement operationalized to mean that GSIs thought about, allocated resources to, and strove toward implementing the drama-based pedagogy at the core of the semester-long professional development. Engagement as a process was embedded in individual and programmatic contexts and specific conditions, such as helpful and hindering factors. Both desirable and less desirable outcomes resulted from engagement with the innovation of drama-based pedagogy. Thus, this theoretical model has implications for how educational developers implement their GSI teaching development. By identifying factors that trigger and help engagement, such as efficacy, value, and support, educational developers can account for and influence these factors in their orientations, workshops, meetings, graduate courses, and other offerings that promote innovative pedagogy. Conversely, educational developers can mitigate hindering factors, such as time and risk, to strive towards more desirable outcomes of GSI engagement as well as more frequent engagement.Foreign Language Educatio