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| Alejandro Naveas REFDI National Director |
About four years ago the Ministry of Education through the Programa Inglés Abre Puertas (PIAP) offered the opportunity to Chilean language teacher trainers to initiate a dialogue that is still ongoing. It was thanks to the initiative of PIAP and its allies, the British Council and the American Embassy, that all universities started sharing their experiences, dreams, fears and expectations about language teacher training in Chile.
From the very beginning we were all exposed to ideas and projects which came from different parts of the world. There were presenters from our own Latin American continent as well as from English speaking communities. The forum was able to open up an interactive and rewarding exchange of ideas and practices which made us aware of what we were doing and what we should be doing.
After practically two years of continuous professional development most of us realised that this initiative should not disappear and, as we were close to a possible change in the political administration of the country and this could affect the development of more seminars, we decided to organise the first network of language teacher trainers in Chile. Our belief was backed up by the academic as well as the social ties that we had grown among ourselves until that point.
It has been about two years since we started and, luckily enough, PIAP has continued to offer seminars for teacher trainers and, we hope, this will not stop. There is so much we have learnt and shared and there is so much we still have to learn.
Since we started, REFDI was willing to have a much more dynamic role in all this but, as the main operation is generated by PIAP, we have decided to continue being a professional network and use this electronic newsletter to talk among ourselves.
This is the first issue and we intend to produce two newsletters a year. Through our work we all hope we will reinforce our contribution to Programa Inglés Abre Puertas in such a way that we can all contribute to generate much more realistic and ambitious professional programmes in language teacher training in our country.
As stated in our statutes, we are a group of teacher trainers working on different language teacher-training programmes in Chile. Our work is focused on achieving successful and more beneficial developments for English language teaching and learning in Chile. Our network intends to cater for opportunities for teacher trainers to reflect, exchange academic proposals, and engage in cooperative endeavours so as to generate a positive impact on the way English is taught and learnt in our country.
We intend, therefore, to build up alliances among the various academic departments and teacher trainers who are offering language teacher training programmes in Chile through the implementation of joint research projects and other academic proposals which will benefit and strengthen the presence of English in Chile.
As a network we would like to invite all of those who are not part of the group to join us. The invitation is open so do not hesitate to contact us and do let others know about us! Let me take this opportunity to wish you all a very successful 2016.
Alejandro Naveas
REFDI National Director
