Luis Sebastián Villacañas-de-Castro

University of Valencia | UV · Department of Language and Literature Education

Language teacher action research (AR) may be understood as a product of necessity, as teachers need to grapple with issues stemming from the complex and uncertain ecology of a language curriculum. Necessity leads them to engage with processes and products that may assist them in the design and enactment of meaningful teaching opportunities. In this...

In this article I explain the contradiction between the averagely high and equitable scores that Spanish students obtained in the last three editions (2015, 2018, and 2022) of the Program for International Student Assessment, and Spain's extremely high and unequitable rate of grade repetition in schools. After ruling out alternative explanations fo...

Careful reading of John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems reveals a weak point at the stage when a given public became self-aware and proceeded to seek representation in the institutions of the state. Aside from a general emphasis on art and science, Dewey’s political theory offered no concrete discussion of the means suitable for this phase of t...

Este artículo ofrece un panorama general de la obra de Lawrence Stenhouse cuando se cumplen cuarenta años de su muerte. El texto identifica la dimensión filosófica, disciplinar, pedagógica e investigadora que se hallan en el corazón de su modelo de desarrollo profesional y curricular, y después las analiza en las diferentes secciones. Sin perder de...

Little is known about how language teacher educators become, and also develop professionally as, teachers of teachers. One avenue for teacher education professional development is that of teacher research, whereby teacher educators can not only improve their practices in their immediate context but also help develop transformative pedagogies in wid...

This volume is about how language teacher educators develop professionally by carrying our research on their own practice. In the paragraphs that follow, we unpack the preceding sentence. Who are language teacher educators? In this volume, the term language teacher educator is used to refer to any professional who formally prepares future teachers...

The collaborative action research project presented analysed the potential of museum education to radically transform the way in which English was taught and learnt in three diverse elementary, middle, and high-school contexts in the province of València (Spain). Insights from museum education and New Literacy Studies were used to expand upon the p...

In this article I aim to establish a relevant connection between John Dewey's educational philosophy and the hippie communes of the United States during the nineteen sixties and seventies. After an assessment of Dewey's philosophy against the background of the countercultural sixties, I summarize and organize Dewey's philosophical thought around th...

This article presents a Deweyan reading of the processes of critique, experimentation, and reform that took hold of a minority of psychiatric institutions in Western Europe during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, under the influence of the so-called Italian and British antipsychiatry movements. Framed within a specific understanding of the sixti...

De unos años a esta parte, el catedrático de Teoría política de la Universidad de Cambridge, David Runciman, viene defendiendo una extensión del derecho al voto que incluya a los niños y niñas en Educación Primaria, esto es, desde los seis años hacia adelante.

This article analyzes the processes and findings of a collaborative action research (CAR) project that aimed to analyze the potential of materiality to radically transform the way English was taught and learned in an underprivileged public school in Spain. The CAR drew on new materialisms and new literacy studies to explore the relationship between...

The juxtaposition of action and research conveys a sense of the richness and complexity of action research, yet it does not entirely translate its nuanced and sophisticated philosophy. In turn, an understanding of this philosophy is crucial for grasping action research’s radical originality. In this context at least, it may be more accurate to defi...

La literatura es un fin en sí mismo, pero también puede ser un medio. En el aula de inglés, los alumnos pueden aprender a leer y a escribir a través de libros y álbumes ilustrados desarrollando así su literacidad y, además, ampliando sus habilidades de pensar, expresar sus ideas y escuchar las de sus compañeros al mismo tiempo. Por su propia natura...

This article aims to establish a line of continuity between John Dewey’s democratic and educational ideals and the practice of action research, to justify that the latter affords an adequate means to enact Dewey’s ideals against the destructive challenges that neoliberalism poses to democracy today. This aim involves three ideas that will be develo...

This article describes the progress and findings of a research project, organized in the context of a university Masters course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), which aimed at translating the student-teachers’ (STs) funds of identity into worthwhile curricular proposals for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) subject. The first...

Action research (AR) equips teachers with systematised reflections and rich data to transform, change, improve, and contest their own classroom practices. Thus, AR, as an inherent element in teaching, needs to be encouraged among teachers, and therefore it is in the hands of teacher educators in pre-service and in-service programmes and continuous...

Una autobiografía educativa representa el esfuerzo de uno mismo por comprender su vida desde el punto de vista de la educación que recibió. Que el autor de este libro trabaje, además, como profesor de educación en una universidad española convierte esta obra en un intento (inédito en nuestro régimen intelectual de trabajo) de poner lo profesional a...

This article summarizes the processes and findings of a 2-year collab-orative action research (CAR) project that analyzed and aimed to counteract some of the most negative educational effects of English linguistic imperialism in the field of English language teaching (ELT) and, more concretely, in the context of English as a foreign language educat...

This text very briefly presents the processes and outcomes of a collaborative action research (CAR) project aimed at opening up alternative identity options for EFL student-teachers and EFL primary learners, in order to help them become more engaged in the educational process. The CAR extended through two cycles of inquiry, during two consecutive a...

This case study aims to describe the development and findings of a research project designed to explore whether the phenomenon of cross-language transfer, regularly conceptualized in terms of the Linguistic Interdependence and Linguistic Threshold hypotheses (LIH and LTH), could also be identified vis-à-vis metaphorical language skills in an EFL ed...

Trainees’ voices, beliefs and experiences as learners, shaped by the tension and dialogue between internal and external theories of teaching and learning, inevitably penetrate the Initial English Language Teacher Education (IELTE) curriculum. Scrutinising these beliefs and experiences, Initial English Language Teacher Education provides readers wit...

The prevailing pedagogical orientations of English as a foreign language (EFL) education in Spain oppress learners intellectually in ways that are counterproductive to their learning. As a reaction to this, 129 EFL student-teachers (STs) took part during the 2013/14, 2014/15, and 2015/16 academic years in a workshop which drew on the methodology of...

ResumenEste artículo contrapone los dos posicionamientos opuestos que encontramos en la literatura sobre las hipótesis de interdependencia y la del umbral lingüístico en el campo de la adquisición de segundas lenguas y la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras. El artículo resume primero la interpretación ortodoxa de estos dos conceptos, junto con sus co...

This first chapter introduces the main concepts of Marxist sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis, two theories that have been intensely devoted to investigating and overcoming the epistemological effects caused by the phenomenal forms which inhered in the mode of production and the psychic apparatus, their respective subject matters. Their two prom...

This chapter will continue to explore the difficult balance that, as shown in the previous one, held together the content and process dimensions of social democracy’s and Freire’s pedagogical projects. The same balance will now be approached from the standpoint of the liberal tradition, which provides critical pedagogy with one of the poles of the...

‘A critical [educational] process is driven and justified by mutuality. This ethic of mutual development’, argued Ira Shor (2009) in the context of his analysis of Freire’s dialogic pedagogy, ‘can be thought as of a Freirean addition to the Vygotskyan one’ (p. 291). As this quote suggests, the aim of this chapter is to describe the essential featur...

This book is a further development from a previous one, published only in Spanish, whose title can be translated as The Copernican turn and the social sciences (Villacañas de Castro, 2013). It was a philosophical work relating to a general epistemological problem lying at the heart of the social and natural sciences. On the other hand, the present...

As advanced at the end of the previous chapter, the present one underscores the need to reassess Karl Marx’s contribution from the standpoint of pedagogy, in order for this field to come to terms with his sophisticated theory of the Erscheinungsformen or phenomenal forms. This analysis seems particularly pertinent in relation to the work of the ear...

As already noted in the Introduction to this book, this chapter contains the only experimental contribution to this volume. Its basic purpose is to illustrate the degree of applicability of the most relevant concepts presented so far: namely, phenomenal forms, critical pedagogy, educational action research, and the pedagogical role of certain basic...

This article aims to apply Stenhouse’s process model of curriculum to foreign language (FL) education, a model which is characterized by enacting principles of procedure which are specific to the discipline which the school subject belongs to. Rather than to replace or dissolve current approaches to FL teaching and curriculum development, this arti...

This reflective contribution covers a wide range of ethical issues which are bound to arise when teacher-researchers engage in technical, practical or critical models of action research. Once these three models are briefly explained, the paper proceeds to justify why ethical dilemmas are an intrinsic part of action research, precisely on account of...

A concept originally formulated in the context of Karl Marx's sociological investigations the Erscheinungsformen, or phenomenal forms plays a key role in relation to a number of educational inquiries, and has important heuristic value for them. Lev Vygotsky saw the concept of phenomenal forms as central to the original Marxian paradigm, and he depl...

This book explores Marx's theory of the phenomenal forms in relation to critical pedagogy and educational action research, arguing that phenomenal forms pose a pedagogical obstacle to any endeavour that seeks to expand an individual's awareness of the larger social whole.

In an attempt to provide an in-depth analysis of John Elliott’s prolonged contribution to the field of educational and curricular studies, the following paper starts by locating this pedagogue’s work in the context of key ideological debates of the 20th century, whose consequences shaped the realm of the social and the human sciences. Elliott’s sta...

This article analyses a case of action research collaboratively conducted by a university teacher and 50 students in a master’s course in teacher training. Its originality resides in the socio-economic, academic, and conceptual nature of the obstacles encountered in the module; in the meta-theoretical orientation of the action research that was cho...

El objetivo de este estudio es el de elaborar una propuesta didáctica que maximice el tiempo y los recursos destinados a la enseñanza del inglés durante los tres ciclos que, en España, recibe la educación primaria, con alumnos con edades comprendidas entre los 6 y los 12 años. El método escogido para lograr dicho objetivo es la interdisciplinarieda...

This paper describes and revises the didactic proposal developed by the enlightened pedagogue Joseph Ja-cotot at the beginning of the 19th century, and later explained by philosopher Jacques Rancière’s in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster in 1987. This analysis will consider some principles of Marxist sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis, and the...

This text focuses on a didactic sequence (DS) which was put into practice during the school year 2011-2012 with 6th grade students from the public school Jaume I ''El Conqueridor'' of Catarroja (Valencia) in the area of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). The DS was applied to the teaching of an expository text, and different pedagogic s...

Como Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges intuyó que la doctrina del eterno retorno debía relacionarse, de alguna manera, con la eternidad. En su versión no es el sujeto como tal quien acababa siendo eterno, sino solamente el instante que vuelve. Por contraposición a aquello que tanto Borges como Nietzsche llamaron eterno retorno, este ensayo pretende demo...

El hecho de que formemos parte de la misma realidad que deseamos conocer tiene efectos necesarios sobre la manera en que la experimentamos, y sobre las representaciones que nos hacemos de ella. Nuestra realidad psíquica, social y natural, cristaliza en nuestra conciencia de modos que no traducen su verdad, que no trasladan -excepto de manera deform...

This discussion-paper aims to present a concrete, albeit untested, hypothesis regarding how second-language learning lessons could prove useful in diagnosing essential signs of confusion, misunderstanding, or of any other kind of cognitive blunder which affects the scientific knowledge of late primary-education students (aged 10-12). In opposition...

This paper will attempt to analyze in depth the theory of raison d'etat put forward by Juan Blázquez de Mayoralgo. Such an analysis will stem from a review and partial correction of J. A. Maravall's approach to this object of study, and will disclose what it believes to be the specific originality underlying Blazquez de Mayoralgo's thought by dwell...

The following article aims at explaining 1) which exactly is the model of scientific rationality involved in the capitalist comprehension of economy; 2) why is this model deficient in managing the economic reality Marx discovered —a discovery (Marx’s) that necessarily contributed new factors to the western model of scientific rationality; finally,...