Learning by yourself versus learning together

Kaszuba is a PhD candidate in the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education who has expertise in the study of language acquisition, linguistics, and professional development for French second language teachers. Our conversation with him is part of the Scholars in Education series.

I grew up near Toronto and identify as a queer, cis-gendered male. I started my university career in medical sciences, but after taking a course in French linguistics, I realized that my passion for languages and language learning outweighed my interest in medicine. I switched programs and graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Arts. Then I participated in Odyssey, the Canadian Government’s cultural exchange program, which led me to work as an English language monitor in a Quebec high school. This experience really ignited my desire to become a teacher, so I came back to Toronto and earned a teaching degree. I had such a good time during the cultural exchange program that I decided to find a job working abroad after graduation. I taught French as a second language at an international school in Vietnam for two years before starting my PhD.  

My elevator pitch? Talking and doing things in groups is better for learning than doing things by yourself. To build on that idea, I considered how many university assignments – tests, essays and personal reflections – are structured around individual work expectations. Although collaboration certainly happens in courses, my hypothesis made me wonder about the types of collaboration we tend to engage in more often: do we take a divide-and-conquer approach to complete group work, or are our final products the result of intensely shared and co-constructed ideas?

To explore this question, my doctoral study involved the creation of small learning communities with teacher candidates from the Faculty of Education. In these group sessions (which occurred outside of class time), students envisioned their own learning goals and final projects, and worked together to bring them to fruition. My project looked at how students choose to collaborate when provided with such freedom.   

During my teacher education program, I joined several clubs and loved it! One club that I co-founded, Le club de français, served as a social, professional, and academic space – we would play drama games, attend cultural events in the city, and do mock interviews with one another. I felt like the learning through interactions that happened during club activities was sometimes more insightful than some classroom learning. [In my research], it was interesting to note how participants self-organized into mentoring each other, without any directives from me, the researcher. I see my study as providing evidence for the benefits of club-like spaces within academic programs, where the mixing of personal and social interests can be a top priority. There’s no need for a false divide between informal socializing and academic learning.  It’s the principle that motivated me to pursue this research.  

Moving beyond the benefits for the participants in my study, I hope that a variety of institutions, programs, and professions become more open to alternative ways of inducting and training new members. By dedicating space and time outside of the program’s formal requirements, my project aimed to allow student teachers to take risks with their learning. Participation in these learning communities was indeed like taking steps into the unknown! There were no guarantees that the student teachers would collaborate well with other members, nor that they would successfully achieve their learning goals, or even that the learning community would survive. Dedicating personal time to a project with so many unpredictable factors can be scary! Yet, for those who persevered, the risk paid off.  

One thing I found surprising was the profile of the Teacher Ed candidates who chose to actively participate in the learning communities until the end of the school year. They all had one thing in common: they knew and used multiple languages.  This comment from one participant really stood out to me as a possible explanation: they said, “each of us struggled at some point in time to learn the language and it was through different supports that we were able to overcome the adversity necessary to be successful…and the learning community is kind of providing that same support that we got when we were struggling to learn a language.”  In other words, the skills that we gain when learning an additional language, such as perseverance, open-mindedness and collaboration within a community, can prepare us for many kinds of future learning that occur in group settings. 

Reading a series of lectures by the French philosopher Michel Foucault helped to deepen my thinking. As a gay student in a religious school in Ontario, I sometimes felt out of place. On the stigma associated with queerness, I more clearly understood my discomfort after reading Foucault’s On the Government of the Living. In this work, he exposes the origins and harmfulness of the idea that humans are wrongdoers by nature who need to be reformed, and the consequences of this thinking on our modern identities. As a gay person or even as a French language learner, for example, I often felt like an outsider struggling with how to “fit in” in certain social settings. It’s helped me overcome a lot of my anxieties. I’m intrigued to explore how this kind of thinking continues to impact teachers, their identities, and their well-being.

I was interested in working with my current thesis supervisor and she happened to teach at the University of Ottawa. I took a course during my undergraduate years with Professor Stephanie Arnott and really enjoyed the way of thinking and learning that she promoted because it was so different from my other courses! When it came time to apply to doctoral programs, I put all my eggs in one basket…I was either going to be accepted to the University of Ottawa or continue working as a teacher.  I think my choice shows the power of relationships, especially during a doctoral program where you will be working with the same people over several years. 

Adam Kaszuba is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Education’s Societies, Languages, and Cultures concentration. His research focuses on the professional development of French-as-a-second-language (FSL) teachers. He is an Ontario-certified teacher who has taught FSL internationally and was a member of the uOttawa research team for the ReadyFSL project. He is the author of Communities of Practice: A Professional Learning Model for Retaining Early-Career Second Language Teachers, an article published in Réflexions, the magazine of the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers.