Department of English

(pp.1-14)
With a majority of local agency-oriented studies being conducted in traditional English-teaching classrooms, there has been little discussion aligned with the agency attribution in the context of volunteer programs, not to mention those in the remote areas. To look into the agency thinking of the volunteering teachers, the researchers accessed a nationally-held summer volunteering program, sponsored by the Ministry of Education. This program featured 14 teams offering five-consecutive-day English instructions in a total of 12 remote elementary and junior high schools in Taiwan in the summer of 2014. The researchers selected three team leaders who respectively volunteered in Nantou, Taitung and Matsu. All of them were pre-service teachers who had completed the entire set of credits required for the National Teacher Certification Program in their own universities. This study, qualitative in nature, aimed to discover the participants’ team-leading experiences and illuminate the agency thinking in such a specialized community. The researchers adhered to Carspecken’s (1996) reconstructive analysis to triangulate the collected data ranging from a feedback survey as well as a semi-structured interview. The findings indicated three distinctive phases through which the research participants displayed their discursive legitimacy to the institutional settings. The participants’ perceptions towards their agency attribution in the pathways of leading their own team were also revealed. Pedagogically, this study reaffirmed the richness of pedagogical content knowledge offered in the National Teacher Certification Program and boosted the value of an “affinity space” (Gee, 2004) within the community. In addition, other critical issues such as the constraint of administration as well as the scarcity of pragmatic training in managing an English volunteering program were also discussed.