Cultural variability: teacher development in a translation studies department in Finland. (Language Teaching & Learning).

Abstract

The University of Helsinki Translation Studies Department in Kouvola teaches translation from English, Russian, German and Swedish into and out of Finnish. This paper will report on a teacher cooperative development action research project that aimed to enhance effectiveness in our department. Teacher informants from Swedish, Finnish and English language sections met for two terms and discussed their first-year written communications courses based on student portfolios, student feedback and teacher reflective discussions. Results suggest that on a broad scale, similar texts can he approached at similar periods within the term across the language sections. However, exact equivalence in text types is problematic. This change of approach also served as a useful way of strengthening cooperation among written communication instructors within our department. Teachers from the various sections had different feelings and impressions toward their courses that were probably influenced by their cultural backgrounds. This study suggests that such cultural difference should be taken into account when planning and administering departments with multicultural personnel.

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Introduction

The drive to improve university based teaching and learning in recent years has taken on a new momentum in Finland. This has taken a variety of forms including internal and external audits, large-scale learner and teacher surveys and other methods of improving the education process. The University of Helsinki is no exception. On a global level, the Programme for the Development of Teaching and Studies at the University of Helsinki 2001-2003 states:

   Teaching practices and methods, as well as examination practices, will be
   reassessed at all levels. At the same time, teaching contents, methods and
   scheduling will be coordinated so that studies can progress efficiently and
   the student workloads are evenly distributed during the academic year. This
   will require increased cooperation between teachers, and between teachers
   and students, when planning and implementing instruction. (Anon. 2000, 25)

At the departmental level where strategies are implemented, officially stated goals do not always reflect what actually takes place. In reality, there is a growing tendency toward funding individual departments based on their graduation rate and research production, especially the number of Ph.D. graduates from each academic department: every department must produce at least one doctoral thesis per year or forfeit a substantial amount of their overall funding. More concretely, in departmental budgets for the year 2001 within the University of Helsinki Faculty of the Humanities, departments either gained or lost approximately 300,000 Finnish Marks or about 50, 000 US Dollars per doctorate. In contrast, a MA degree was worth only 30,000 Finnish Marks or about 5,000 US Dollars and BA degrees did not count at all for funding.

Although there is increasing emphasis on graduation rates and doctoral production, almost no emphasis has been given to changing basic courses which integrate the students into the university and influence retention rates and, eventually, provide future scholars for graduate study. This has tended to lead to a feeling of powerlessness among junior faculty who are not involved in Ph.D. supervision but are still affected by the results or lack of results on the senior level. The administration's intentions are clear but it is difficult to see how their method of implementation can enhance cooperation between teachers and concern for students other than those pursuing a doctoral studies.

This top-down number-based approach to improvement is discussed widely in Finland at the moment. Opposing forces within the university quality control systems contribute to mixed messages for students and the faculty who teach them. Superb departmental research means nothing to incoming students who are unhappy with their first-year courses. They may drop out or switch to different programs. Departments with a tendency toward poor graduation rates have been punished financially for their lack of efficiency. Lip service has been paid to improving student motivation. However, in our department very little concerted teacher or management-initiated effort has been made to improve basic courses, which may be taught by part-time faculty, graduate assistants, or long-term faculty who may teach with out-of-date yellowed notes.

A variety of factors must be examined in order to gain a comprehensive picture of a university's educational culture, including but not limited to curriculum policy and planning, testing, textbooks and teaching materials, teacher and learner attitudes, specific course content and classroom discourse (Garant 1997; Stern 1980). They cannot all be addressed in this study. We believe the top-down approach can lead to a dysfunctional workplace. We feel that the way to improve the quality of teaching at the local level is to develop and accept teacher autonomy. This paper reports on an ongoing action research (van Lier 1988, Cohen and Manion 1985: 174, Garant and Immonen 2000: 266) project that identified an area which teachers thought could use improvement and the effects of such an intervention. The present study will describe how three individual instructors from three different countries viewed their written communication courses for first-year students and sought to improve them within the framework of a cooperative teacher development focus group.

Methods

A teacher development research model (Davis 1999) was used in order to facilitate the sharing of information between three faculty members: one from the English section, one from the Swedish section and one from the Finnish section. Beaven (1999) suggests that when 'staff commitments and funds are unavailable for elaborate teacher development schemes, there is a need for simple practical projects'. He reported about a similar project in Munich calling it a softly-softly approach. Rinvolucri (1999) uses the term mutual super-vision. The term focus group has also been used widely (Merton 1946, Krueger 1994, Thomas 1999). Teacher development has also been referred to as cooperative development (Edge 1992). This is because through the development process, teachers cooperate by sharing and exchanging ideas. In an ideal world, cooperation within the university teaching environment takes place normally. In reality, work loads and time constraints seem more to foster compartmentalization and in worst case scenarios to have each individual faculty member hoarding information with little or no cooperation with his or her colleagues (Beavens 1999: 14).

As strange as it may seem, very little cooperation took place between the various German, Finnish, Swedish, Russian and English language sections in our department up until a few years ago. Our department has 31 full-time tenured faculty and support staff in addition to a number of public and private sector specialists who teach advance translation courses part-time in addition to their regular jobs. Our project was meant to not only enhance cooperation but to establish cooperation between language sections within our department.

In order to do this, the teacher participants met a few times in the fall term and once every two weeks in the spring term to discuss their written communication lessons. Teacher sessions lasted on the average of 45 minutes. We agreed on an agenda and decided on themes that would be discussed in each meeting. These included evaluating forms of cooperation, developing teaching skills and methods, developing teaching written communication, investigating written communication and cultural differences, monitoring student proficiency developing personal goals and improving our department in general.

The data that was discussed in the meetings came from a variety of sources. Each student prepared portfolios of written work so the teachers had concrete writing samples on which to base the present project. Further, each assignment was put on a computer disc to gather a corpus of material for future research.

In addition, each teacher recorded their own thoughts and reflections on their teaching in a diary to provide further data to discuss in the meetings. These teacher diaries were meant to be springboard for communication. In their diaries, teachers recorded their feelings as to how lessons went, what were the strong and weak points and other information. In addition, informal interviews and discussions were conducted to elicit information on the participants' view on the teaching and learning process.

Ongoing learner feedback on various assignments was also incorporated into the teacher discussions in order to try and understand the learning process from the students' perspective in a method similar that that discussed in Dellar (1999). This feedback usually took the form of learner comments on the assignments, which they wrote after the completion of the actual assignment.

Each teacher prepared a syllabus for his or her courses. This is not necessarily the norm in Finland. The Finnish university system is de-centralized where each department is more or less a self-contained unit. Depending on the educational culture (Garant 1997) of the specific department, a Finnish university student may not be given a written description of course content and grading procedures by their teacher in advance.

Using a cooperative development approach is common outside education. Companies, advertising agencies, political and other organizations commonly use this approach as a research tool to analyze their products or approach. When they use this type of group, it is not always thought of as what it is: a research tool. The primarily goal our focus group and this change of approach was to understand what we did on a daily basis and discuss of work on a weekly basis in order to build each teacher's own personal development.

Cultural Variability

The main result of this study is that different aspects that were discussed within the group took on different meaning and importance to the different members of the group. This `Roshomon effect' (Fanslow 1977; 1992; 1993) has been reviewed extensively in the literature and should come as no surprise. Different people tend to see the same act in different ways. This makes faculty teacher training problematic within the university. Experienced university faculty with permanent jobs may or may not accept the views of an `expert' teacher-trainer. They may also perceived management initiated teacher education projects as invading their academic autonomy. In worst case scenarios interventions could be seen as what has been called a `coercive approach' to training (Chin and Benne 1970). Addressing teacher autonomy is an important factor if teacher cooperative development projects are to be accepted in the long run. This project was teacher generated. The significance of this project is what it meant to the individual teacher in relation to their own professional development is shown in Table One. See issue's website <http://rapidinte!lect.com/AEQweb/fallp.htm>.

Table 1 suggests that different teachers had different goals aims related to the project. The Finnish participant tended to emphasize more academic goals. She tended to focus more on second language (L2) acquisition and students cognitive processes. She became interested in the differences between the ways native speakers and non-native speakers produced Finnish texts. She was keen to adapt her course to that of the other teachers as much as possible because we felt the students would benefit from studying similar text type at the same time across the language groups.

The Swedish teacher tended to see the group more a means of establishing greater cooperation and to serve as an orientation to the department because he was a relative newcomer. He found that issues on course content and grading criteria could be put into immediate use, especially since in Finland university faculty are given only loose guidelines on grading procedures. Our focus group began to work toward departmental unity in this area. The results of this part of the study will not be discussed and may lead to a future publication.

The American participant tended also to see the group as a springboard for greater cooperation as well as a place to develop professionally. Teachers saw their courses as having different goals and aims as well as common goals and aims.

The work group did produce a more coordinated syllabus across the language sections. This made it possible for the students to study texts from the same genre (Swales 1990) at approximately the same time, i.e. students studied how resumes and job application letters are written in the various target languages and cultures. In English, there is what could be called a CV and resume writing culture that can be covered over a number of lessons. In Swedish and Finnish this is much less so lessons with the same basic theme of CV and resume writing differed substantially in content across language sections. Even so, seeing how the same text type differs in various languages and cultures was thought to be beneficial to the student. Covering similar text types or genres was not possible in all cases. The Finnish teacher tended to focus more on media and journalistic writing than the American or Swedish teacher. Academic writing in English was taught extensively in one of the English first-year writing courses while in Finnish, a separate course is arranged only for the topic.

In addition to some academic writing, the Swedish teacher tended to choose creative writing assignments and lighter texts in his course because more basic skills training was needed. The students who study English in the department tend to have a higher level of proficiency than the learners who study Swedish. This is probably because incoming students tend to study English for 9 or 10 years before entering our program while they may study Swedish for only 6 years. This suggested that complete coordination was not possible because of institutional factors, which is why teacher autonomy is needed.

Conclusion

Harmer (1999) points out that change works when we have identified the things that need changing. Our cooperative development group felt that regular discussion is an ideal way to initiate teacher generated change and identify some of the areas that may be in need of development. This method appears to work within our specific departmental context and may be useful in other settings. The sharing of ideas tended to make teaching more fun and helped prevent compartmentalization.

It should be noted that participation in the project was voluntary and self-initiated. This type of project did not attempt to address more chronic problems such as faculty members who opt out of further training.

Cooperation took and can take a number of different forms. Our cooperative development group tended to confirm other studies that suggested that innovation and development within educational settings tend to be quite effective when it is negotiated among teachers themselves. We felt that in addition to the ideas the teacher gained from this project, the students were the real winners as they saw their courses develop. During busy periods in the fall term, time was a major consideration. Meetings were limited. However, the benefits teachers received from the group discussions inspired the teachers to make time for the project in the spring.

Overall, this project showed promising results as to teacher-initiated improvement in first-year written communication courses within the Translation Studies Department of the University of Helsinki. Our experience suggests that innovation may not be as effective when a top-down approach is attempted. The key to development and innovation is optimism and encouragement. Perhaps through effective self-initiated cooperative teacher development, it will be possible to identify some of the obstacles we face as university educators and overcome them as we enter the new millennium.

References

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Johan Franzon, University of Heisinki, Finland

Mike Garant, University of Tampere, Finland

Leena Immonen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Mike, Ph.D, is a lecturer in the English Philology Department. Johan and Leena are Ph.D. candidates and instructors at the Department of Translation Studies. Their research interests include the influence of culture on language teaching and translation.