Commentary

The purpose of these tasks is to suggest how a teacher education curriculum can be reviewed methodically to identify opportunities for adding to or increasing the focus on language-sensitive education. This example of a curriculum was chosen because some detail is provided.

The first step involves reviewing the elements of the curriculum to identify where a focus on language sensitivity is already explicitly or implicitly included. This is relatively easy in the Umeå University curriculum because some courses, such as those on Swedish and English, specifically imply such a focus. But opportunities to easily include discussion of issues related to language and communication and language-sensitive education also exist in other courses, such as certain courses in term 1, which is an important time to introduce the topic of language sensitivity, courses in term 2 and all elements of term 4, by which time student teachers will have gained more understanding of the important role that language plays in teaching and learning.

The next step would be to identify opportunities for ensuring that there is a focus on language sensitivity in other courses and how this focus could be integrated with the other topic areas mentioned.

Going through this process with a sample curriculum from a different context is good preparation for taking a fresh look at the curriculum in one's own teacher education context. Compared with task b) above, an advantage will be that more specific information about each element of the curriculum should be available because the teacher educators involved in the programme can be consulted about the details and can themselves be asked to propose changes to the elements which they are responsible for.