Phase 4 - Action

On the one hand, the pedagogical mediation is a useful tool to help the actors of education to interpret these experiences and realities. According to Gutiérrez and Prieto (2002: 50), “it is the treatments of contents and ways of expressing the different topics in order to carry out the educational act within the horizon of education perceived as participation, creativity, expressivity, and rationality.” The pedagogical mediation allows the educator to teach in a non-orthodox way that is fun for the apprentices, and at the same time they are learning in a significant approach; they are learning not only for their future but also for their whole life. The act of mediating means to be a conciliator between knowledge and the learner.

On the other hand, teaching  is the process of attending to people’s needs, experiences and feelings, and intervening so that they learn particular things, and go beyond the given. Interventions commonly take the form of questioning, listening, giving information, explaining some phenomenon, demonstrating a skill or process, testing understanding and capacity, and facilitating learning activities (such as note-taking, discussion, assignment writing, simulations and practice).

Speaking of how meaningful this proposal is to me, I can say that it has been resignifying my pedagogical practices in a positive fashion since students have shown themselves cooperative, motivated, and willing to learn resorting to this novice strategy for aiding them to broaden their vocabulary. Moreover, this is an efficient-and enjoyable-in-the-classroom-and-out-of-the-classroom strategy that has proven accurate, well-suited, and working towards boosting students’ motivation in this process. Needless to say, where there are motivation and joy, there is learning. Motivation is the key to success in the teaching-learning process. Motivation, as the name suggests, is what ‘moves’ us. It is the reason we do anything at all. Paraphrasing Gredler, Broussard and Garrison [4], motivation is defined as “the attribute that moves us to do or not to do something” (p. 106). It is an internal impetus or drive to do a specific action or behavior (Ryan & Deci, [5]). Motivation is a critical component of teaching and learning.

When it comes to the observed changes, a change of attitude is the main one, which is just one of the many factors, both extrinsic and intrinsic, involved in language learning and teaching, and which in turn might have a positive and/or negative impact on apprentices’ learning processes. This has also boosted their motivation, and, gradually, they have started to develop the good habit of autonomous learning.

In the sense of those who have participated and contributed to my process, I can say that up to this point, the ones who have participated in the strategy are the students themselves. Yet, speaking of my process as a whole, everything and everyone has participated and contributed to it since everything and everyone has a teaching to offer. We learn from everything and from everyone either consciously or unconsciously. We just have to be open to the possibilities. In other words, it is like the butterfly effect in the chaos theory which refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. In this sense, that tornado represents my teaching and the butterflies' wings are represented by all those who have been part of this beautiful journey of teaching.