How-to session by Sarah Mercer
How to make research part of my professional practice
Despite the existing power structure in academic discourse, Sarah Mercer (University of Graz, Austria) argues that academic research should not be viewed as superior to informal classroom research. Her key message is that there are different types of research—in the sense of finding out information—for different purposes as well as audiences.
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Plenary session by Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić
Reimagining language education for peace in our divided world
In today’s plenary session, Larisa Kasumagić-Kafedžić recalls her harrowing experiences of living through the Bosnian War (1992–95), part of the Yugoslav Wars, as a result of the breakup of the multi-ethnic Federation of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As an eighteen-year-old in a war-torn country, she began to explore the role of language in promoting peace.
She outlines the key transitions in the Western Balkans since the end of ethnic conflicts:
- Political-ideological: from war to peace and towards internationalisation
- Socio-cultural: cohesion achieved in some newly independent countries but ethnic division remains in other former Yugoslavian states
- Structural and educational policies
- Peace pedagocial: moving on from being stuck in the past
Nevertheless, she laments that the Yugoslav Wars are still taught from an institutional perspective as this topic remains an integral part of the curriculum. She argues that little has been done to focus on the individual experiences during the conflicts.
At the same time, she cautions against the emphasis on STEM subjects at the expense of the humanities. This has led to challenges in our ability to tackle divisive rhetoric in political and social discourses. She points out that language is often weaponised to marginalise or dehumanise certain groups of people. Toxic narratives, moreover, continue to be driven by those with power; such narratives are insufficiently challenged and have been a precursor to physical violence as history teaches us.
She advocates that education holds the key to tackling the above challenges. For example, teachers can highlight the political dimension of language. Research bodies can adopt a pluralistic approach to epistemology where justified, rather than draw exclusively on Western epistemic knowledge. She further argues that pluralism should not be promoted solely for its economic benefits, such as profitability and employability.
On peace education, she describes how it has been implemented across the Western Balkans. Institutions collaborate with each other in the form of “peace hubs”, in order to develop frameworks for embedding peace pedagogy in education. Based on her examples, she illustrates that the pedagogies for peace education are compatible with content-based or topic-based instruction. In the context of higher education, learners are encouraged to discuss and reflect on how people can embrace a culture of peacemaking.
Finally, she outlines the critical roles of language teachers. While some teachers have faced dilemmas as to whether they should include sensitive topics or discuss controversial views in the classroom, they try to remain neutral in the classroom. She also mentions that learners can be encouraged to reflect on their attitudes towards discussing sensitive or controversial topics, i.e. whether they remain an “avoider” on one end or a “risk taker” on the other end.
She concludes her talk with Hadley’s (2018) powerful quote: “we live in a world where peace is unprofitable.”
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Talk by Anna Wierstra
Challenging teacher training trainees: Raising their awareness, targeted feedback and staying sane
Anna Wierstra (International House Rome) recalls her experience of dealing with an extremely challenging teacher trainee on her intensive CELTA course. She supported this trainee by planning lessons with her collaboratively, giving her extensive spoken feedback, and using colour coding in written feedback. Despite her overwhelming support, the teacher trainee showed little evidence of progress.
Her discussion is based on Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication. She mentions four ways in which teacher trainees may react to negative feedback, such as self-blaming, shifting the blame, and reacting defensively. When moral judgements are included in the trainer’s feedback, it causes the trainees to become resistant to ideas immediately. To this end, teacher trainers should avoid making sweeping generalisations in their feedback, e.g. you never, you always, don’t do this, etc.
She suggests that teacher trainers can facilitate trainees’ self-reflection by encouraging them to mention how they felt at a particular point of a lesson and by posing ‘why’-questions. Two other useful techniques are eliciting the trainees’ self-reflection and checking the trainees’ understanding by summarising the trainer’s feedback.
Finally, she brings up the issue of negative self-talk among teacher trainees. This is usually revealed by language expressions such as I should (have) and I have to. To steer the trainees away from a negative mindset, she provides sentence frames in the trainees’ self-evaluation form, e.g. I choose to do ____ because I want my students to ____.
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Talk by Christiane Lauschitzky
Beyond language didactics: Tapping hidden research for ESP and EAP teaching
Christiane Lauschitzky (FH Technikum Wien, Austria) shares her experience of using journal articles and academic papers from other fields in ESP teaching. As an ESP tutor of university students, her primary concern is how she can help them to develop the ability to express their specialised knowledge in English.
She mentions that elicit.com is a useful AI-powered website that helps academics to find relevant research papers.
To prepare the source texts for use in the classroom, she uses a jigsaw method that shares similarities with Tyson Seburn’s Academic Reading Circles (2016). Christiane Lauschitzky’s method represents a cooperative learning strategy that involves each student acting as the “expert” of a specific aspect of the text, e.g. a physical section or specific type of content within the text.
To go further, when the learners present their findings, they not only summarise the ideas in the source text but also add their personal take on it.