Tools of Action Research in Undergraduate Teacher Education: Experiences from Brazil

The worldwide shortage of professionally trained teachers shows the general necessity to find sustainable forms of teacher education and training—this actually affects all subjects but is particularly visible in the case of German teachers. Research-Based Learning and Action Research, both of which quite significantly involve reflection, seem to offer useful approaches to counter this situation, although further surveys for concrete application are needed. Taking up the issue, the article pursues the question to what extent tools used by Action Research can be a useful instrument in teacher education, even at the undergraduate level. For this purpose, a course offered to German teacher education students in Brazil is presented and, by means of a retrospective survey (n = 12), the impact of the course on the further activity as a German teacher is investigated. The research was based on a grid of questions used in the Goethe-Institut’s “Deutsch Lehren Lernen” program (DLL), which is broadly used in a wide variety of educational contexts and is specifically aimed at practicing reflection techniques. The results suggest that it does not necessarily need a complete training cycle, but that appropriate impulses and suggestions, even for a limited period of time, already can have a long-term impact on the perception of teaching and the reflection skills of the participants involved.