Bir İngilizce öğretmeni mesleki gelişim stratejisi olarak ders imecesinin eleştirel etnografya yöntemiyle incelenmes

This dissertation is a critical ethnographic study that investigates the practice of teacher professional development at a tertiary level foreign language education school of a public university in Turkey. The study examines how professional development is practiced at the school, and how this practice influences the EFL teachers. With a critical understanding, an emancipatory methodology is applied to introduce and create a paradigmatic shift in terms of teacher professional development. Accordingly, Lesson Study, which has been discussed as a collaborative, teacher-led professional development model is implemented to shift the existing top-down approach into a bottom-up, transformative approach of professional development. Overall, the study seeks to understand (1) how Lesson Study manifests itself as a collaborative, and teacher-led activity, (2) what (if any) are its main influences on the participants' professional development practice, and (3) what (if any) are its influences on the teaching practice at the research setting with an exclusive focus on the practice of professional development. These aims constituted the research questions of the current dissertation. For the framework for analysis, this dissertation study draws on Cultural Historical Activity Theory. Due to its paradigmatic alignment with critical ethnography and Lesson Study, this framework enables the analysis of investigated activity systems in light of cultural and historical elements that are related to the setting in which the activity unfolds. In tandem with this, a community of five EFL teachers at the school participated in a semester-long Lesson Study process that follows prior fieldwork, observation, and preparation. Using qualitative data collection methods such as fieldnotes, artifacts, and interviews, a thematic analysis informed by the theoretical framework of the study was carried out. The study reveals that Lesson Study can be perceived as a meta-activity; the theoretical framework of the dissertation allowed the analysis of EFL teachers' Lesson Study modeled professional development practice as an activity system in and of itself. Activity is driven by a subject towards a collective object and outcomes embedded within a culturally and historically informed system. In accordance with such an understanding, the findings demonstrated that Lesson Study was a meta-activity due to its iterative, recursive, and structural properties. As for its influences on participant teachers, (1) Lesson Study created an authentic learning space for the growth of pedagogical content knowledge, (2) it enabled elevation of reflective practice at both individual and collaborative planes co-emerging together, (3) it fostered reflexive professional development practice, which created a recursive impact on teacher learning and (4) it generated a goal-oriented community of practice that allowed sociocultural teacher learning. Related to the last research question of the current dissertation, the findings uncovered the transformative impact of Lesson Study with a scalar limitation; however, the Lesson Study implementation that was reported in the current study framed a holistic paradigm of transformative and empowering professional development for EFL teachers. Further studies should continue to shed light on this paradigm by giving rise to augmented transformative models such as Lesson Study. The prospective research should also investigate the language of professional development of EFL teachers that is produced in such transformative models to better understand the linguistic nature of teacher learning.