Reimagining Primary Teacher Preparation in Mozambique: Literacy Mentoring in Hybrid Spaces as a Transformative Practice

In this article, we describe our collaborative work with the Mozambique Ministry of Education in re-imagining primary literacy teacher preparation through an initiative that promotes closer personal (literacy focused) relationships between preservice teachers (formandos) and primary-aged students during the formando's preparation program. Our work seeks to disrupt traditional notions of Mozambique teacher preparation, which are mostly didactic and disconnected from community-based interactions with children. We are working to move toward ideologies that recognize and draw on children's cultural and linguistic resources. Our collaboratively designed literacy methodologies call for building personal relationships, engaging in responsive teaching, promoting translanguaging, encouraging children to take the lead in their own literacies, and drawing on community resources in our work with formandos. This report will focus on a description of the literacy mentoring program we are enacting and the results of a feasibility study at the Instituto de Formac, ao de Professores de Chitima. We will summarize the mentoring program and the findings from research, discuss our successes and challenges and the ways in which this initiative has the potential to reframe the current mode for academic coursework in primary teacher preparation, and our next steps in Mozambique. This collaborative model stands to inform a re-imagining of teacher preparation that is situated locally and grounded in practice. Keywords Primary teacher preparation; Literacy mentoring; Hybrid spaces; Transformative practice; Mozambique
Introduction 'The child I am working with cannot speak Portuguese,' stated one of the formandos (a preservice teacher) in a group debriefing, following one of the literacy mentoring sessions at [...]