Research on the Professional Development of College English Teachers under the Background of Curriculum Ideological and Political ()
1. Introduction
The curriculum ideological and political education has put forward new requirements for the professional development of college English teachers. The Guiding Outline for Ideological and Political Construction of Curriculum in Institutions of Higher Learning was issued by the Ministry of Education in May 2020 (hereinafter referred to as the Outline). The “Outline” makes the point that we must clearly understand the “main force” of teachers, the “main battlefield” of curriculum construction, and the “main channel” of classroom teaching in order for all colleges and universities, all teachers, and all courses to take on the responsibility of education, integrate curriculum ideological thinking into the entirety of classroom teaching construction, and increase teachers’ consciousness and ability of curriculum ideological and political thinking. The teachers have the key to effectively promoting the intellectual and political framework of the curriculum.
The professional development of teachers has always been a topic of great concern to researchers, and under the background of curriculum ideological and political, it has put forward higher requirements for the professional development of college English teachers. However, due to the lack of ideological and political teaching practices of college English teachers, they cannot better integrate ideological and political practices with college English. Therefore, college English should strive to improve professional knowledge and skills, so as to improve the course’s ideological and political teaching ability and professional development. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the requirements of college English teachers, and put forward the relevant measures for the development of teachers’ professional competence, knowledge, and belief for future research.
2. Feasibility and Necessity of Implementation of Ideological and Political in College English Courses
2.1. Feasibility
The curriculum ideological and political education and College English courses are both public basic courses, and the instrumental and humanistic nature of college English courses makes the teaching of college English itself have the function of ideological and political education.
Li and Wan [1] mentioned in their article titled “Research on the Improvement of College English Teachers’ Ideological and Political Ability in the New Era Background” that college English courses are compulsory basic courses for non-English majors, which has a long teaching cycle, a large number of class hours and a wide range of coverage. Similarly, Xu [2] mentions that “College English courses play an important role in higher education, involve a large amount and a wide range of students in the whole school. So, college English courses have a wide range of audiences and affect almost every college student, making college English become an excellent platform for “ideological and political education” in colleges and universities. Therefore, it is feasible to implement the curriculum ideological and political education in college English courses.
2.2. Necessity
As mentioned above, college English, as a compulsory basic course for non-English majors, has a long teaching cycle and involves a wide range of subjects. Under the circumstance, college students are easy susceptible to the influence of foreign ideology during the English teaching classroom. Therefore, its ideological and political education situation is grim, and it has a great responsibility [1]. In addition, most of the content involved in college English teaching is selected from the West, which is a direct representation of the culture of English-speaking countries and mainly contains Western values. If we ignore the guidance of students’ values, it may lead to incorrect values such as “Western culture is dominant” and “foreign culture is good” [2].
Therefore, it has profound meaning to integrate ideological and political education and moral education into college English teaching. Zhao [3] mentioned that in college English teaching, students can learn a lot about Western culture, such as western dining etiquette and festival customs, so that students can enhance their national pride and cultural confidence in the comparison of Chinese culture. The implementation of curriculum ideology and politics can help students form open critical thinking, enable them to dialectically view foreign cultures and firmly remember the core values of socialism with Chinese characteristics, so as to effectively nurture students’ sense of national honor and pride [4]. College English courses and ideological and political education seems to be two parallel lines that cannot be intersected, but in fact they are two kinds of courses integrated with each other. The elements of ideological and political are integrated into college English courses, college English education will become an important auxiliary channel for implicit ideological and political education, which will promote each other and form a synergistic effect [5]. College English teachers can constantly excavate the moral education factors in textbooks, carefully design the teaching content, naturally enforce students’ ideological and political education activities, and effectively help students establish the correct “three views”, that is, view of life, values and view of world. Therefore, the integration practice of ideological and political education into college English courses is necessary.
3. The Requirements for the College English Teachers’ Professional Development under the Background of Curriculum Ideological and Political
General Secretary Jinping Xi has pointed out: “Teachers should take advantage of the classroom forum well, make good use of the campus position, advocate the core socialist values with their own actions, and light students’ longing for truth, goodness and beauty with their own knowledge, experience and experience” [6]. Therefore, under the background of curriculum ideological and political education, new requirements are put forward for college English teachers’ professional knowledge, professional competence and professional belief.
3.1. Professional Knowledge
College English teachers, as a part of college teachers, should not only master English subject knowledge and grammar knowledge, but also be familiar with humanistic knowledge, such as psychology, the meaning of socialist core values, and the basic principles of Marxism, so as to make their own thoughts reach a certain level, so as to penetrate into English teaching and help students to sublimate their thoughts. However, most of College English teachers graduated from the School of Foreign Languages, lack of theoretical knowledge of political education [7]. Therefore, due to the deficiency in ideological and political professional background as well as ideological and political teaching experience [8] [9] , college English teachers cannot well integrate with ideological and political content in classroom teaching. As a result, the correlation of English teaching and ideological and political education is low, the connection is far-fetched , the depth of content is not enough to achieve the internal unity of ideological and political education and the system of English knowledge [7] [10]. In such a college English class, students’ cognition cannot be improved and sublimated. Therefore, college English teachers need to continue to learn and supplement the knowledge reserve related to curriculum ideological and political, and make the ideological and political content naturally and skillfully infiltrate into the teaching design and classroom teaching.
3.2. Professional Competence
Professional competence refers to the personality and psychological characteristics required by teachers to successfully accomplish the relevant teaching activity tasks during the specific educational and teaching professional activities, which are embodied in the specialized skills, professional knowledge, related professional awareness and professional attitude requirements of teachers. Under the background of curriculum ideological and political education, the college English teachers are required to have the skills to mine ideological and political elements, relevant professional ideological and political theory knowledge, beliefs. College English should strive to improve their teaching ability, find out the ideological and political elements in English curriculum, and consciously integrate the socialist core values into the course teaching, for the sake of continuously improvement of the teaching level.
3.3. Professional Beliefs
Teacher professional belief is a kind of inner belief of teachers, it will affect teachers’ teaching activities and practice activities, permeate in teachers’ teaching behavior, and its guidance is of profound significance. Professional belief is an internal factor influencing the individual growth of teachers, so it plays a decisive part in the professional development of teachers [11]. Teacher professional belief is the main idea and attitude of teachers to engage in education and teaching. Teacher professional belief includes teacher view, student view, talent view, knowledge view, ability view and so on. According to the traditional educational concept, teachers are the role of “preaching, teaching and solving doubts” and are only knowledge imparts [12]. Under the philosophy of curriculum ideological and political education, college English teachers are required to change their roles. Teachers are no longer mere knowledge imparts, but learning co-operators, developers of the ideological and political resources, and storytellers of Chinese stories [13].
4. Strategies for Improvement of Professional Development College English Teachers
Teacher professional development is directly related to the school’s future development, related to the quality of talent training. How should college English teachers improve their own professional development in the background of ideological and political curriculum? The author believes that college English teachers can improve from the following three aspects: professional knowledge, professional competence, and professional belief.
4.1. College English Teachers Should Actively Construct Their Own Professional Knowledge Structure
In today’s era of rapid technological development and knowledge update, college English teachers ought to take the initiative to strengthen learning, constantly absorb fresh educational knowledge, and constantly improve self-cultivation, in order to be competent in college English teaching. While enriching their own professional knowledge, college English teachers need to cover a wide range of relevant subject knowledge, constantly broaden their knowledge field, constantly update and perfect their own knowledge structure, and persistently raise own quality and cultivation, in order to better meet the college English teaching needs. Therefore, while enriching professional knowledge, college English teachers should strengthen political awareness, actively participate in political courses and political theory learning, and enrich their political theory knowledge. Fully understand the connotation and essence of the curriculum ideological and political, and integrate them into classroom teaching in a reasonable and scientific way [14].
4.2. College English Teachers Should Actively Improve Their Professional Competence
4.2.1. Improve the Curriculum Ideological and Political Mining Ability
The content of college English teaching itself has the knowledge system of language subject and the property of educating people, covering a wide range of humanistic elements. For example, different teaching units and themes may involve Chinese and foreign values, political systems, social customs, religious beliefs and other contents. Taking a specific unit as an example, “What is culture” is the unit 4 of Practical English Comprehensive 4. Through learning this unit, it can raise student cultural awareness and understand cultural diversity, have a glimpse of traditional Chinese culture and get to know how to express some cultural symbols in English; see how Chinese culture differs from the western one so as to develop students’ cross-cultural communication ability. Therefore, college English teachers ought to fully excavate the curriculum ideological and political elements in textbooks and skillfully integrate them with the content of textbooks [9] [15] , so as to promote students to recognize, criticize, judge and absorb foreign language culture and related knowledge based on Chinese cultural stance and mainstream values.
4.2.2. Improve Teachers’ Teaching Ability
Teaching ability is the most basic and important professional ability for teachers engaged in teaching work. The goal of teaching is to boost students’ all-round development. Teaching ability is reflected in whether they can cultivate students’ learning interests, foster students’ good thinking quality, and train students’ innovative consciousness and innovative practice [7]. The college English teachers’ teaching ability under the background of course ideological and political education refers to the ability of college English teachers to make full use of implicit education in college English curriculum by innovating teaching design and implementation, constructing the ideological and political context and environment of curriculum.
4.2.3. Improve Teachers’ Ability of Innovation
Innovation is the eternal keynote of education. Curriculum ideological and political is not a new course, but belongs to an innovative educational concept, that is, every course has ideological and political elements, and ideology and politics are in the course [14] [16]. College English teachers should master the latest academic trends, at the same time, combine with the current national education policies, strengthen the innovation of teaching idea, so as to ensure that very ideal education results. In the meantime, during the classroom teaching practice’ process, teachers should have a comprehensive and profound of understanding of the teaching task, take the initiative to apply and innovate teaching method [17]. They should also take advantage of the classroom as a powerful channel for ideological and political education and undertake the corresponding responsibilities for ideological and political education.
4.3. College English Teachers Should Establish a Firm Professional Belief
General Secretary Jinping Xi has laid stressed that: “Teachers are the key to pushing on ideological and political theory course. Promoting the process of ideological and political, teachers should be strong in politics, let people with faith speak faith, and always keep political sober” [6]. Therefore, the political awareness of college English teachers should be further enhanced, and have a comprehensive grasp of the political direction, have a firm political stance, and can always stand at the political level to view the problem. In the background of curriculum ideological and political, after more in-depth study and relevant training, teachers should strengthen their belief in the role of teachers, solve their confusion in professional development, and deepen their understanding of self-growth and professional roles, so as to improve their own professional development. Only with a firm professional belief can college English teachers take education and teaching as their lifelong career and mission, keep learning and making progress, pursue their educational ideals, and be keen on improving their ability of moral education, and improving teaching ability and level.
5. Conclusion
To sum up, curriculum ideological and political education has endowed the professional development of college English teachers with new connotations. To some extent, the course of ideological and political education has put forward new requirements and new challenges for college English teachers, but also injected new vitality. To cultivate and build a team of college English teachers who are outstanding in theoretical understanding and practical exploration is very important to carry forward the ideological and political construction of college English courses. At the same time, promoting the implementation of ideological and political courses is a part of the dynamic and sustainable development process of the college English teachers’ professional development. Teachers can promote their comprehensive, scientific, and long-term professional development by improving their own professional knowledge, professional competence, and professional beliefs.
6. Contribution
Although it is relatively common that more and more domestic scholars studied on the practice of ideological and political research of college English courses and teachers’ professional development, there are still few studies focusing on teachers’ professional knowledge, professional competence, and professional beliefs in teacher professional development. This study has reference significance for future research on teachers’ professional development under the background of curriculum ideological and political, and it is conducive to promoting other researchers to explore other aspects of the research on teachers’ professional development, such as teachers’ professional scientific research ability, professional attitude and motivation, professional character, etc.
Funding
This paper is the project results of the 2022 annual planning project of Meizhou City Philosophy and Social Science―Research on College English Curriculum Ideological and Political Construction based on Teachers’ Perspective, Project No: mzsklx2022065.