As the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has expanded the landscape of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), the reliance on digital technology is rapidly increasing in teaching spaces that are in or beyond physical EFL classrooms. In addition to increasing the efficiency of teaching and learning, digital technology is a medium that stands in-between teachers and students and facilitates interactions among them (Jones & Hafner, 2021). Thus, the digital literacy of an EFL teacher in a specific teaching context is much more beyond the ability of managing digital tools to navigate online worlds (e.g., to find, evaluate, create and communicate information, etc.); it is more of a teacher’s meaning-making act or practice, which requires his/her cognitive and technical skills and is shaped by his/her identities, beliefs, goals in a specific context (Weninger, 2023). A teacher’s digital literacy thus determines the future of language teaching in the age of AI, which makes it opportune and useful to explore how an EFL teacher’s digital literacy is formed during his/her (re)construction of identities in a “smart classroom” enabled by AI technologies.

As such, this study employs narrative inquiry to investigate the trajectory of how an EFL teacher and her students negotiate alignments and construct bonds of shared values and knowledge in a smart classroom within one semester (i.e., 15 weeks), aiming to decode how an EFL teacher’s digital literacy are formed in the transition from teaching in a traditional classroom toward AI-empowered teaching. By exploring the dynamics of the EFL teacher’s identities when she starts to teach in the context with AI, the research contributes to a deeper understanding of how to enhance a teacher’s digital literacy and leverage AI technologies to build stronger teacher-student relationships and more effective learning communities in the age of AI.

Research Aim:

The paper explores how The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (hereafter TBITSP) can be used to educate students on the pedagogical and moral issues surrounding the text. The ubiquity of the novel and film means dismissing it outright is simply unhelpful; instead, I wanted to find more meaningful ways of engaging with TBITSP that empowered students by making them aware of the socio-political factors concerning the text’s historical inaccuracies and its prominence in education.

Theoretical Framework:

Inspired by critical literacy practitioners such as Hilary Janks, Navan Govender, and Holocaust scholars Andy Pearce and Tony Kushner, this unit explored what preconceptions students had of the Holocaust, their familiarity with TBITSP, and their knowledge of Jewish people in the UK and beyond. The series of lessons leaned on critical literacy methodologies, prompting students to consider the social and political context of TBITSP and why Boyne wrote the story.

Methods:

Students were surveyed on what they knew about the Holocaust, if they’d seen or read TBITSP, and if they thought it was an accurate reflection of the Holocaust. Thereafter, the lessons encouraged students to question whose perspective the narrative was being told from, whose viewpoints were being excluded, and what effect such narrative positioning had in terms of who the audience sympathised and identified with. Students were given the following thesis statement to respond to, using expert-led scholarship to support and augment their argument: TBITSP should not be used to teach students about the Holocaust.

Findings:

At the beginning, almost all students indicated they thought TBITSP was a factual, accurate, and truthful story. By the end of the unit, student surveys showed they no longer felt that to be the case but demonstrated a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust.

This paper investigates the teaching of Literature in Integrated High School (IHS) and the challenges of reader formation, based on the gap between students and "classic" literary texts. Our concern as educators is grounded in the importance of literary reading for the omnilateral formation proposed by Federal Institutes in Brazil. We focus on the teaching project In the Embrace of a Classic, carried out at the Federal Institute of Triângulo Mineiro (IFTM) – Uberaba Campus, in 2021 and 2022. Our goal is to understand how the reading of literary classics in IHS can become an educational and omnilateral experience, where literary literacy is done "with" the group and not "for" the teacher or the school. This is a qualitative case study involving teachers and students who participated in this project-based learning experience. To collect data, we conducted a focus group with ten students and three teachers, after approval by the Research Ethics Committee. Our aim was to explore the different perceptions and values that students and teachers attribute to this literary literacy experience from the selected classics. As theoretical references for our discussion, we based our studies on the current challenges of Literature teaching, literary literacy, reading mediation, and reader formation, on Calvino (2007), Candido (2011), Cosson (2021), Ciavatta (2005), among others. To reflect on the contemporary educational and sociocultural scenario in a post- pandemic context, the act of teaching, "youth" and student protagonism, we based ourselves on Assmann (2007), Demo (2006), Dewey (1979), Freire (1989), Dayrell; Carrano (2014), Bondía (2002), Mantovani (2022), among others. For the analysis and interpretation of the collected data, we selected the Thematization method proposed by Fontoura (2011). The results indicate that shared reading of literary classics can contribute to the omnilateral formation of young students in Integrated High School.