Postcolonial Female Voices of Ecuadorian EFL Secondary School Teachers: Becoming a Glocalized Practitioner

Abstract

This article reports a qualitative study on glocalized teaching in Ecuador through the voices of three female Ecuadorian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. Their stories portray their transformation after attending a training course where they learned strategies to contextualize the official curriculum and teaching materials to the reality of their students. The training was part of a national project funded by the United States Embassy that instructed selected public school teachers in active and reflective teaching methodologies. The researchers visited the participants at their schools for class observations, retrospective interviews, and the collection of narrative evidence on the perceived impact of this training program. Employing elements of narrative inquiry, short stories were constructed before their content and context analysis. The findings provide a pictorial view of the journey towards postcolonial EFL teaching with a glocalized approach and the training program at its core. Three main categories were identified after the story analysis: the becoming of a glocalized teacher, the contextualization of content and resources for teaching in the global world, and the recognition and value of ancestral languages, culture, and gender. This study contributes to the literature on diverse identity construction in foreign language teaching in the South Cone, which may be relatable to postcolonial EFL practitioners in other parts of the world.