Champion Teachers Peru: Stories of Exploratory Action Research

In Peru, the Champion Teachers programme started up in 2016 as an initiative focused on inviting teachers to share accounts of how they approached challenging situations through classroom interventions. In 2017, however, the British Council offices in Chile and Peru embarked on the design of a more ambitious binational project. This initiative aimed at strengthening and expanding teacher-research capacity in English language teaching in Peru and Chile and generating a community of teacher-researchers in both Pacific Alliance countries. In 2018, further funds were allocated for the expansion of the Champion Teachers programme once again, to the other Pacific Alliance countries, Colombia and Mexico.

Since the CT programme in Peru was in its first year, experienced former Champion Teachers who had already worked as near-peer mentors in the CT programme in Chile, were selected to mentor their Peruvian colleagues. Teachers gathered together in Santiago in Chile, in January 2018, for a final reporting session, where they had the opportunity to meet their mentors (in many cases this was their first face-to-face meeting) as well as to interact with Champion Teachers from the sister programme in Chile.

To understand the context where these teachers work, it is important to indicate that, except for a few pilot schools, English is not taught in primary public schools in Peru. In 82 percent of public high schools, students are exposed to roughly 80 minutes of English per week. Only 18 percent of public high schools have more than two hours of English language teaching per week. In this challenging context, it is possible to say that the teachers whose work is presented in this collection are outstanding, resilient and innovative professionals. They work in contrasting socio-economic and cultural contexts where gradual implementation of a national bilingual policy called “English, Gateway to the World” (“Inglés Puertas al Mundo”) is taking place.