GERMAN VOLUNTEER TEACHING EFL IN LOW-INCOME SCHOOLS IN THE SOUTH OF QUITO: PERCEPTIONS ON THE EXPERIENCE.
During the last two years the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador and Ruhr-University Bochum have carried out a volunteering program for low-income community schools in the south of Quito. The first year, this process was undertaken by a group of Ecuadorian and German-English instructors at an indigenous primary school where English teaching was not permanent given that students’ mother tongue was Kichwa and their compulsory second language was Spanish. On the second year of the experience, the volunteering program required volunteers with B1 level of Spanish coursing their Masters’ in education in Germany, and they were supposed to teach in a public school in the south of Quito. The purpose of the present investigation was to analyze the negotiation of strategies to incorporate the contributions that volunteers could do to the school’s existing program and procedures. Our study intended to negotiate and design a collaborative program to be applied during the volunteering experience of two months, portraying the perceptions of all participants in the EFL experience as the basis for such negotiation. The qualitative data from stakeholders was gathered to project an ideal interaction within the community, and for that we directed a series of interviews, focal groups and participant observation techniques promoting a dialogic and relational construction based on design research and collective imagination, as suggested by Arjun Appadurai in 1996 and Sarah Pink in 2015. Certainly, the results of this study aid to improve and democratize the decision-making process in regards to EFL classrooms in our country.