Within EAP, pre-sessional courses have become as synonymous with the British summer as washouts at Wimbledon, picnics in the park and saucy postcards from the seaside. The majority of UK universities provide a glossy menu of such courses for international students whose proficiency falls below standard entry requirements (Pearson, 2020, p.420).
If you type the term “pre-sessional” into a search engine, you are confronted with branding as slick as food delivery marketing. But … imagine a world where restaurants waited for Deliveroo or Just Eat orders to come in before they thought about hiring chefs. Sadly, across much of the HE sector, this is the way in which pre-sessionals are delivered. Generally, teachers are hired from outside the university to deliver these courses on non-permanent contracts, and even staff on permanent contracts associated with these courses sometimes have secondary status within universities. Such practices facilitate accusations that these courses are no more than an exercise in “linguistic corner-cutting for financial gain” (Pearson, 2020, p. 420). Does anybody actually understand the workload involved in pre-sessionals other the managers, teachers and students who have direct involvement with them? Probably, because of their taking place over the summer and the status of those who teach on them, the answer is an emphatic no. Paradoxically though, if higher education takes the form of Achilles, then pre-sessionals are a heel that needs to be well-covered. These courses are a gateway to thousands of international students entering the UK at the end of every summer. Despite this importance, very little has changed in terms of the status of those who work on them in over two decades (Turner, 2004; Copland and Garton, 2011; Pearson, 2020). Peopled with part-time staff, these courses exist in the margins of someone else’s space. Those who work on them are othered. Even as a teacher on a permanent contract, I have witnessed how contractual agreements need to be made as regards the specific needs of people involved with these courses – whether full-time staff or hired hands. Institutions that pride themselves on their sense of compassion often have a blind spot as regards the need to apply the same principles to staff on pre-sessionals. One example from my own experience comes in how I was made to work from home in the week when a family member died. This was because the university had no formal process for compassionate leave, even though I had already made sacrifices in holiday and research time in a way that colleagues in other departments were not expected to. The image of someone checking emails on the day of a funeral is a far cry from the yoghurt and yoga offerings of corporate wellbeing. Unfortunately, I am not alone in such an experience and I don’t say this in any attempt to cite Hamlet’s “Oh, woe is me” speech. I’m doing it as a means of holding a mirror up to the UK Higher Education sector and asking whether it’s time to make sure this kind of thing stops happening because in some quarters that’s not the exception. It’s the norm for those associated with pre-sessional courses because of their status in the university. At the same time there are many good outcomes from these courses. To begin with, for many teachers their first foray into pre-sessionals is the equivalent of being asked to perform in a West End theatre. It’s the chance of a big break, with decent wages for the duration of the show too. Simultaneously, others could argue that this is a false economy. I know people who have built their working lives around the summer bonus of pre-sessional teaching to the detriment of professional development. However, working on these courses is not just about monetary reward – otherwise many conscientious people would simply walk away. Working on pre-sessional courses is incredibly tough but rewarding, especially for people who have a genuine passion for education. These courses put into practice many of the values that today’s universities espouse. They require interactivity and innovative pedagogies. They offer scope for teaching-informed research. They are student-focused. They are international in outlook and characterised by awareness of diversity. Yet this is not really appreciated in universities or sometimes even within Academic English departments themselves. Very often, universities are devoid of other academic life when pre-sessional courses are happening (Copland & Garton, 2011). Thus, when summer ends, these courses and the people who teach on them largely disappear as if they were never there. Paradoxically though, in 3 months, these temporary pre-sessional staff will have taught more than some staff members employed on research contracts year round. That has to be recognised and valued. We also have to move beyond the culture of victim blaming. When I first wrote a draft of this article, the focus was on how people can enhance their employment prospects in universities after pre-sessional courses. That was to be my attempt at supporting social justice for practitioners on pre-sessional courses. But in doing that I realise now that I was also falling into a trap of victim blaming in suggesting that people somehow always need to do more in order to be accepted and that they should feel guilty about not doing enough to gain that acceptance. A position of true social justice is one that argues for fairness and equity. Therefore, if people are deemed good enough to come into universities and teach a huge number of hours for part of the year, they should be given a greater sense of belonging. If, on the other hand, they are not good enough then why are they not being given the professional development that they need? If they are not good enough to be there year round, then why is higher education not changing the mode of delivery to something more in line with its needs and values? On the whole then there is a lot of work still to be done in this area, even after several decades of these courses being delivered here in the UK. Decency should not stop at the door of pre-sessional staff rooms. Universities need to balance the need for recruiting students onto their degree programmes with the need to treat staff equitably. Teachers need to be developed properly in this profession. Senior managers need to recognise the stresses involved in running and teaching such courses. Often when they are complete, there is a university-wide culture of acting as if nothing important has happened over the summer. The courses are gone and forgotten, alongside the efforts of those who worked on them. In line with ideas from Argyris and Schön (1974), universities need to find a balance between ‘espoused’ and ‘actual’ practice when it comes to wellbeing. Proper contracts and greater opportunity for work throughout the academic year would be a good starting point, though something more than that is required. The value of pre-sessional courses has to be recognised and that reflected in their status within universities. In their present format, they are largely successful because of the efforts of people who go above and beyond the call of duty outside the regular academic year. There needs to be more recognition of that and also systems designed to make them a more essential part of university life. They are a huge source of revenue and a gateway for so many international students who might not otherwise get to study here, so need to be given the respect across the sector that they fully deserve. In some places that does happen, thankfully, but if it was universal, there wouldn’t be such a need for temporary delivery drivers of EAP’s staple diet. by Anonymous EAP Practitioner We invite you to contribute to Padlet based on this blog release. We have set up the page so that contributors remain anonymous, and would ask you not to name any institutions in your posts (or include any details which would identify an institution). The main purpose of this Padlet is to share experiences and build a picture of current practice across the sector with a view to moving the discussion forward. We hope you find the post useful and engaging, and please do feel free to share the link to the blog post ands the Padlet with any pre-sessional tutors on non-permanent contracts who you know who may not be on this list. We would love to reach them and hear from them too: https://padlet.com/eap4socialjustice/qbhl176vxbaz0a12 REFERENCES Argyris, C., and D. A. Schön. (1974). Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Copland, F. & Garton, S. (2011) “I felt that I do live in the UK now”: International students’ self- reports of their English language speaking experiences on a pre-sessional programme. Language and Education, 25(3), 241–255. Pearson, W.S. (2020). The Effectiveness of Pre‐sessional EAP Programmes in UK Higher Education: A Review of the Evidence. Review of Education, 8(2), pp.420-447. Shakespeare, W. (2007). Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623: Third Series. A&C Black. Turner, J. (2004) Language as academic purpose. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3(2), 95–109.
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Like for many in our EAP community, our minds are still buzzing from the wealth of insights gained from the rich range of sessions offered at the recent online BALEAP 2021 conference hosted by the University of Glasgow. Ever keen to identify social justice (SJ) related aspects of EAP practices and pedagogies, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on what SJ insights can be teased out from the conference. Some of these insights are more overt than others, such as in the visionary, inspirational talk given by Dr. Maha Bali, the first plenary speaker, who advocated for the widespread adoption of a pedagogy of equity and care in her talk entitled Creating Equitable, Caring Communities Online. But, as social justice goes by many names, we were also interested in identifying other, less overt references to practices and pedagogies which may be regarded as being aligned with social justice principles. This feeds into one of the key aims of our SIG – to widen the visible parameters of the field of social justice by demonstrating the range of initiatives which can be shown to fall under the SJ umbrella.
As Maha’s keynote symbolically seemed to set the tone for many of the other sessions at the conference, it seems useful to reflect this in this blog post by using some of her observations as a framework to talk about other SJ resonances from a sample of the sessions that we attended and, in the process, to show how a pedagogy of equity and care can be seen to underpin much good practice currently being developed in the EAP classroom. Overview of Maha’s key points The keynote was introduced by Iwona Winiarska-Pringle, who quoted an extract from one of Maha’s blog posts from 2015, which usefully summed up the importance of care in the classroom: “Sometimes the most valuable thing we can offer our students is genuine care for them, their well-being, their happiness. Not just their grades. Not just their learning. But their whole selves” (Bali, 2015). This unapologetic focus on an aspect of teaching which has traditionally been undervalued in terms of institutional recognition and recompense, but which many teachers and students instinctively do and appreciate anyway, was very refreshing, as was the fact that the Glasgow BALEAP Conference team gave Maha the space to spotlight these important issues in the first keynote of the 2021 biennial conference. However, Maha was quick to emphasise that care without equity is not enough, as, for example, equity without genuine care may lead to empty tokenism, while care without equity may lead to care being given selectively. She demonstrated the interplay of these two elements through the following Equity/Care Matrix (Bali & Zamora, 2020): She then proceeded to show that care and equity can work on a number of levels in the classroom, and that it is important to intentionally attend to how we might enact these principles at each level: Of particular note is the fact that Maha enacted the very principles of which she spoke in the way in which she chose to deliver the plenary itself; to put it in her own words, she “walked the talk”, which is a vital principle of all social justice work. For example, she started the session with a “chatterfall”, in which she asked the audience a number of questions related to their well-being – such as “What gives you energy these days?” – and invited them to respond in the chat box. She encouraged the sharing of reflections at various points throughout the plenary, and responded to many of these, thus enacting her principle of facilitating equitable participation and responding accordingly. She also enacted her recommendation of keeping online activities short in order to keep people’s energy levels up. Another principle that was reflected in her plenary was to give participants the option of commenting on her PowerPoint slides during or after the session. This is reminiscent of an approach which she uses with her students in which she invites them to annotate the syllabus – to literally add notes to the syllabus document regarding things which they find interesting, confusing, etc. This enactment of the key principles outlined in her talk was a powerful testament to the value of adopting such an approach, and she encouraged the audience to explore a wealth of further activities adopting these principles through the Equity Unbound website she co-curated, and, indeed, invited us to add to these if we wished to: https://onehe.org/equity-unbound . Having outlined Maha’s approach, we will now go on to weave these together with points made in other sessions throughout the conference. Removing the doors: Tackling systemic inequality in our sector Maha shared a powerful analogy of what we need to do to tackle systemic inequality in our sector. She suggested that simply opening doors is not enough; we need to remove these doors completely, as an opened door can still be closed by someone else at a later point: This reflects the fact that it is important that measures taken to tackle inequality are not simply dependent on the goodwill of individuals; the systems and processes adopted by the institution and organisations as a whole need to undergo a paradigm shift in order for such measures to be truly sustainable. That said, it is often through the work of pioneering individuals that such doors are even opened in the first place. This was reflected in the EAP for Social Justice SIG’s EAP for Refugees session, which was inspired by the visionary widening participation work of the late Carol Irvine, along with colleague Dr. Bill Guariento, at the University of Glasgow. In his testimonial to Carol and her work, Bill outlined how Carol decided to use her own position within the English for Academic Study unit at the University of Glasgow to lobby for the provision of free places for refugee students on their summer pre-sessional programme, and she was successful in this venture. Not only this, but she and Bill were also very generous in terms of sharing their good practice with others in the field of EAP, which influenced the resultant practice of at least one other university – the University of Leicester. To expand on this, we then heard from Phil Horspool, who outlined how the University of Sanctuary work at the University of Leicester started with the work of a few individuals in its English Language Teaching Unit, and has now been extended into a university-wide sanctuary initiative, through which change has been written into systems and process in many areas of operation, though it remains the case that the model of practice employed still places language provision and EAP at the core of the university-wide sanctuary work. Examples of how this work has been embedded throughout the institution include the provision of up to 12 places for new refugee-background students on pre-sessional courses each term, and the creation of a number of sanctuary scholarships for both face-to-face and distance learning degree programmes. A pictorial representation of the network of internal and external departments / services / organisations involved in this provision can be seen here: Has the door therefore been removed from its hinges in this instance? Phil was clear that there is still work to be done in this regard, both within the university and in terms of working together with other universities. Whilst the degree of communication between universities about sanctuary work is certainly improving, partly through simply having conversations about their respective sanctuary work, and partly through the existence of the Universities of Sanctuary JISCmaillist, which provides a useful forum for the sharing of information and good practice … more can be done in terms of putting in place inter-university systems to remove unnecessary doors. For example, Phil is keen to set up a process by which universities can recognise the exit grades that sanctuary students may have gained through other institutions’ pre-sessional programmes, thereby expanding the degree of choice that refugee-background students have as to the institution they might join and the course they might take. This flexibility may be particularly helpful for people seeking asylum, who may be moved to a different city by the Home Office at short notice. It is clear, then, that more can be done at sector-level to remove more doors. One successful initiative which is already operating at sector level (and has been since 2016) is the CARA Syria Programme, led by Michael Jenkins. The main purpose of this scheme is to enable Syrian academics in exile in Turkey to continue their academic activities to enable them to retain and continue to develop academic skills and capital, which will allow them to play a vital role in the rebuilding of Syria (when it is safe for them to return there) and the education of a new generation of professionals and academics. Michael outlined how the EAP component of the CARA Syria scheme operates, with volunteer EAP practitioners providing weekly 1:1 online lessons to Syrian academics in exile in Turkey. Another component of the CARA scheme, outlined by Baraa Khuder and Dr Bojana Petric in their presentation entitled Established Academics’ EAL Academic Literacies Development in Exile: Research-Based Materials for ERPP Teaching, involves CARA participants working alongside UK academics to help them publish in international journals. In their study of a number of these co-authorships episodes, however, Baraa and Bojana found that collaborative writing involving asymmetrical power relations is not always unproblematic, and that “the mentoring aspect of collaboration is crucial and its neglect (as a result of prioritising the publishing goals or lack of understanding of the nature of academic literacies development) could lead to negative feelings and misunderstandings, negatively impacting development” (Khuder & Petric, 2021). An example was cited of a CARA mentor asking a Syrian academic with whom she was co-authoring a paper “why anyone would be interested in reading about a plant in Syria”. Quite unsurprisingly, this comment was received negatively by the CARA participant, who felt that the implication was that people would not know about or be interested in Syria in its own right, an implication which he found very upsetting, and he therefore deleted the comment in question. However, once the mentor and mentee sat down to discuss their feelings and perspectives about this feedback, the mentor elaborated on the rationale behind her comment, explaining that the feedback was related to audience considerations and was an attempt to limit the potential “parochialism” implicit in his linking of a plant to one specific country in a paper intended for publication in an international journal. The CARA participant felt able to accept this explanation and the pair were subsequently able to move forward from this episode. To attempt to reduce the likelihood of negative encounters such as this occurring again, Baraa and Bojana developed workshop materials and activities based on real-life co-authorship episodes in which negative feelings emerged, in order to encourage participants to reflect on their own practice, to draw their attention to such issues arising from potential misunderstandings and hidden emotions and how they might use an intervention model to address these effectively. This session highlighted the importance of not only removing doors from their hinges but of doing so with care and sensitivity. Furthermore, incidents such as the one outlined above clearly also raise the issue of asymmetrical power relations in teaching and learning contexts. Exploring these dynamics was not the focus of this research project, but please see the Teacher as Host sections below for examples of how asymmetrical power relations have been successfully challenged in other contexts. Fostering psycho-social well-being (both students’ AND teachers’!) The need for care, sensitivity and trust in the EAP classroom was another theme which was emphasised by Maha and echoed by others throughout the conference. Maha emphasised the idea that “building community online is more important than ever due to the trauma of the pandemic”, and she proceeded to outline a number of trauma-informed pedagogical strategies that she employs to this end, including talking to students about how trauma affects the brain and the learning process to demystify this phenomenon, and giving student strategies for tackling it. One such strategy is to build in class activities which are less anxiety-inducing, such as giving students the opportunity to introduce themselves asynchronously rather than synchronously, which gives them more time to reflect on how they wish to present themselves to others (which puts this process more in the students’ control). Another strategy is to ask students to keep a “gratitude journal”, which is often used in the field of positive psychology, and has been found to lead to greater levels of psychological well being (Seligman et al, 2005, in Falout, 2016:115). Students are then invited to share only the parts that they feel comfortable sharing with others in the class. There are many other suggestions for community-building strategies included in the website which Maha co-curated: https://onehe.org/equity-unbound/ This emphasis on the importance of community building to students’ sense of psycho-social well being was echoed in Dr Ide Haghi’s session, focusing on Students’ Affective Engagement with, and Well-being during, an Online EAP Course. She found that the students surveyed found the experience of attending an online pre-sessional course relatively stressful, and felt a reduced sense of belonging as compared with face-to-face classes. She therefore recommended that, in order for students to establish a good sense of belonging to their class and to smaller study groups, teachers should build guided relationship-building activities into a course early on. She also found that students miss opportunities for out-of-class interaction with classmates and teachers, so suggested that occasional out-of-class live sessions might be provided to help meet this need. Another recommendation was that, where pre-sessional courses are divided into smaller blocks, students should be kept in the same class when they move to the next course, in order that they may continue to develop their bonds with their classmates, bearing in mind this is more difficult and time-consuming to achieve in an online class, partly due to the lack of informal spaces to chat and build relationships. This relates to findings reported by Andrew Northern and Rebecca White in their session entitled Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times: Investigating Pre-Sessional Teacher Emotions on an Online Summer Pre-Sessional Course. In a survey of online summer pre-sessional tutors at Imperial College London, they found that the tutors missed personal contact with their students and also other tutors; in terms of the latter, though there were attempts by the managers to encourage the building of an informal online support network among the tutors, in an attempt to reduce the occurrences of tutor stress and burnout, this met with limited success. It is unclear as to why this was the case, but one participant speculated that “to build a staff community, there would be a benefit in having a space that can work by different rules – the only channels to post to everyone are ‘official’ and it can restrict what you feel you can say”. The implication here is that a less formal medium of communication such as WhatsApp might be preferable as a means of social and emotional connection between tutors, but the tutors in this study did not naturally use this method either, potentially because of screen fatigue, or a reluctance to intrude on people’s personal time. The question as to how to build a sense of social connection between tutors on an online course was left open, but the implication was that it is something which tutors missed and felt that would have benefited from. It would be interesting to see whether implementing some of the recommendations for community building amongst students (as outlined by Maha and Ide above) might be effective amongst tutors too. Teacher as host: Equitable hospitality With regard to equitable community building and ensuring that all students feel valued in the classroom, Maha furnished us with a powerful metaphor; teachers need to recognise that they are the host in the space of the classroom, that they own that space, that they have power in it, and that they are actively responsible for making students feel at home, as welcome guests. The perception that all members of a class are always naturally able to participate as equals in that space is an illusion; marginality can be both visible and invisible, and equitable conditions need to be actively and consciously created by the person who wields the most power in that space, and who therefore has the responsibility to wield it with intentional equity – the teacher. What might intentional hospitality look like in EAP? Might it involve inviting students to employ “translanguaging” in this space? Translanguaging was the focus of the paper given by Dr. Yan Zhao, Xi’an Jiaotong and Qiwei Zhang, entitled Translanguaging and Identity Construction as a Resource for Learning in the EAP Classrooms in China. They argued that, by allowing students to “evoke and integrate different types of knowledge, discourses, norms and perspectives which they have previously gained through their bilingual experience” (Creese & Blackledge, 2015) and use their mother tongue for certain activities in the EAP classroom, the Chinese EAP students in their study were able to bring useful aspects of their out-of-class identity into the EAP classroom, leading to improved learning outcomes. For example, students’ demonstration of critical and analytical thinking skills increased when they were permitted to write initial written reflections in their mother tongue. Another way in which the intentional hospitality analogy might be extended through a focus on language practices can be seen in Sue Teale and Rina Vokel de Vries’ session entitled EAP as a Lingua Franca: moving towards a more inclusive, internationalised standard. They reported that many English-speaking HE institutions take the deficit approach of expecting conformity to native English norms and Western academic culture (Jenkins & Wingate, 2015) and, as a result, international students’ communicative confidence can actually drop after joining the English-speaking academic community. To achieve true internationalisation, Sue and Rina advocated approaching academic English as a Lingua Franca by applying the more inclusive definition of mutual intelligibility – because, as they claimed, “after all, most HE institutions specify the intended graduate attributes of being able to operate in a globalised world, with different culturally determined communication styles and Englishes”. They held that the above has consequences for the pedagogical approach in EAP, as they defined proficiency as being able to communicate in an intercultural, international setting rather than attaining (near-)native ‘perfection’ when redesigning their Pre-sessional EAP course by integrating stimulating topics of culture, internationalisation of HE, and students’ mental health, which allowed students to explore content of their new reality in a more reflective way. By emphasising writing and speaking fluency, and offering native and non-native language exemplars, the EAP practitioners provided a more inclusive, international outlook, hoping to increase students’ confidence. It was great to see that this innovative, confidence-building approach worked and supported the authors’ original focus on lessening the dominance of native-English speakerism in academia, as the scholars shared results of the post-course survey and focus groups in which students stated that the approach taken was engaging and challenging as the vast majority indicated their academic language and general social English skills had improved. By the same token, the intentional hospitality analogy might also be applied to teachers’ responsibility to develop equitable conditions when planning for interaction in the international classroom, as outlined in a paper presentation from the same EAP practitioner, Rina Vokel de Vries and her co-presenter, Kevin Haines, in a session entitled EAP for content lecturers in times of internationalisation: integrating intercultural and linguistic dimensions into CPD. The scholars emphasised that this interaction requires adjustment from lecturers and students alike as “lecturers need to forge pathways towards a more inclusive, internationalised approach by promoting intercultural exchange, providing equitable access to language, letting go of native speaker norms, and allowing for diverse communication styles” (Jenkins & Wingate, 2015). Rina and Kevin reflected on their involvement in integrating these skills into lecturers’ repertoire and its implications for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) which targets training in intercultural awareness and competence among staff. It was fascinating to hear that Birmingham managed to identify space for EAP tutors to play an active role in assisting educationally mobile students in adjusting to a different cultural and academic context and developing the ability to interact successfully in an English-speaking HE setting. The presentation demonstrated the use of CPD materials and illustrated how EAP tutors can help with facilitating lecturers’ CPD. The scholars revealed their CPD utilises The EAP Toolkit including pedagogies such as grading language, scaffolding knowledge acquisition, and evaluating different communication styles. The scholars also commented on using materials found in EQUiiP, a recently completed Erasmus+ project, which offered a support platform for educational developers and content lecturers aiming to ensure quality in international and intercultural classrooms in HE. This open-access CPD resource consisting of specially designed modules on ‘Intercultural Group Dynamics’ and ‘The Role of Language in the International Classroom’ looked very appealing. Teacher as host: Fostering student agency and awareness In the manner of a good host, Maha invites us to always consider who may be excluded or disempowered by any choices which we make in the classroom. In the EAP classroom, this exercise can be taken further, with students themselves being encouraged to reflect on how ways in which academic arguments and texts are constructed are inclusive or exclusive to different readers. This theme was developed in Sanchia Rodrigues’ session entitled Challenging Colonial Legacies in EAP: Lessons and Limitations from a Pre-Undergraduate Programme. Sanchia described how she used the Academic Reading Circle model (Seburn, 2016) with her pre-undergraduate programme students to encourage them to challenge Anglocentrism in academic writing by identifying contextual references in the text and unpicking what assumptions are made through these about the expected reader, and deducing which readers may be excluded or marginalised as a result. This gave a useful insight into how the ARC model can be implemented to direct students’ attention to Anglo- or Euro-centric writing practices and to critically examine their implications for different readers. This theme of fostering student agency by encouraging them to uncover and question underlying systems and power structures was also picked up in Symposium 2, entitled Facing the Internationalisation Challenge with Agency: The Pedagogical Work of the Laboratory of Academic Literacy (LLAC), by Dr Marilia Ferreira, Gabriella Pavesi and Daniela Cleusa Carvalho from the Universidade de Sao Paulo. They outlined how staff at the LLAC work to facilitate the development of students’ agency both through helping students become more aware of rhetorical structures at the levels of sentence and genre (Hyland, 2009; Swales & Feak, 2012) but also by questioning the activity of academic knowledge production and dissemination of which these academic conventions are a part (Engstrom, 2015). Marilia showed that, by implementing principles of Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy and encouraging students not only to notice but also to question academic rules and conventions, students are able to implement both theoretical and critical thinking with agency to make more informed choices in their academic writing. The concept of student agency and also that of equitable community building were further scrutinised by Dr Steve Brown and Dr Tomasz John in their paper entitled Navigating No-Man’s Land: Facilitating the Transition of International Scholars towards a PhD Study (also, lockdown!). Reporting on the insights from a case study investigating the transition international doctoral students navigate through when first starting their PhD journeys, the speakers gave us some thought-provoking insights into the concepts of Trans-National Education, the myth of the “international student” and the role of EAP in doctoral education. They proposed that, when designing a fit-for-purpose doctoral induction programme with an EAP component, there are different interpretations of the role and purpose of EAP that can lead to very different outcomes. Programmes concerned primarily with repairing the linguistic “deficits” of students follow an indoctrinatory model that seeks to assimilate international students into the current, hegemonic structures of the international academy. It is difficult to see how this model can allow international students to make any meaningful contribution to knowledge, as they are only valued for their ability to reproduce what is already deemed “acceptable”. Alternatively, a focus on individual empowerment may allow students on EAP programmes to achieve greater success within the current structures, but this model still fails to engage with systemic injustices and power imbalances. A third approach, however, seeks to emancipate international students from their deficit positions by addressing structural inequities through a model of inclusion, rather than one of integration. These different educational approaches – indoctrination, empowerment and emancipation – and their corresponding outcomes of assimilation, integration and inclusion, are presented in an ‘Emancipation Continuum’ (Brown 2021, forthcoming), which is offered as an analytical framework for exploring the emancipatory impact of ESOL on migrant communities. Steve and Tomasz proposed that a similar framework can be applied to EAP programmes to explore the extent to which they promote or restrict the freedoms of international students to contribute meaningfully to the international academy. The above reasoning and theoretical frameworks were taken into account when designing the content of the 12-week long intensive doctoral induction programme. What emerged from Steve and Tomasz’s study was that the doctoral students became ‘border crossers’ as they engaged in an exploration of their own history and to reach an understanding of self and their own culture in relation to others in the new Western context. By the same token, the students actively challenged the stereotypical label of international students by adapting to the new role of ‘transformative intellectuals’ who challenged themselves to cross the imposed barriers on the borders of disciplines and cultures (Giroux, 1992, 15). Steve and Tomasz reported that the students benefited from the DIP, as the programme allowed for experimentation within a new, fit-for-purpose curriculum, effectively fuelling creative explorations across these ideological borders. Students appreciated that the programme embraced the knowledge they brought with them, effectively accommodating their particular cultural trajectories by de-centring ownership of knowledge through criticality and reflection on their PhD proposals. Students also started to regard uncritical acceptance of existing hegemony as a symptom of deference; as their own critical thinking skills developed, they became increasingly interested in using their own praxis as researchers to disrupt the status quo rather than to comply with it as “this attitudinal shift implied that the programme had some kind of emancipatory impact, allowing students’ perspectives to become included in wider academic discourse” (Brown and John, 2022). The papers outlined above indicate that approaches which foster student agency, critical awareness and questioning and disruption of existing hegemonies can and have been used successfully in different EAP contexts … but, coming back to the teacher-as-host analogy, it is the role of the teacher to first lay the groundwork and then invite students to bring different perspectives and ways of relating into their academic engagement. Conclusion It has been the intention of this blog post to identify social justice related strands running through the BALEAP 2021 conference, and to weave these together in a way in which resonances between different sessions can be highlighted. As can be seen just from insights gained from the sample of sessions explored in this piece, there is much exciting SJ-informed work being conducted and developed in our field at the moment, much of which reinforces the benefits of employing a pedagogy of equity and care. Of course, we are also mindful that there were some talks that took a cautionary approach to the concept of pedagogies of care. For example in Dr. Alex Ding and Bee Bond’s session entitled What Do Considerations of Pedagogy Tell Us About the Profession and the Practitioner?, a suggestion was made that “we need to move away from a pedagogy of care that is only a pedagogy of care … if it’s caring for students but without a focus on learning, without a focus on knowledge”. This assertion appears to overlook the theoretical underpinnings of pedagogies of care promoted by scholars such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Henry A Giroux. Central to their work is that care is an essential element of creating the conditions for holistic and transformative learning and teaching. Indeed, these pedagogical principles can assist both students and teachers to:
It is clear that there are more discussions to be had about conceptualisations of social justice praxis (including a pedagogy of equitable care) in our field, and what might and might not be regarded as falling under the SJ umbrella. A move is currently being made to investigate the range of conceptualisations of SJ in our field by SJ SIG committee members Dr Weronika Fernando, Iwona Winiarska-Pringle and Jo Kukuczka. They reported on their initial findings in their session entitled Social Justice and classroom practices: towards an EAP pedagogy of transformation and empowerment, revealing a richness and complexity in tutors’ understanding of, and employment of, SJ-informed pedagogical principles in the EAP classroom. Further expansion on the results of this study will be shared in their forthcoming paper, but, in the meantime … … we’d love to hear from you! If you’d like to join the conversation about the SJ strands running through the BALEAP conference and their implications for EAP pedagogies, please share your thoughts on our Google JamBoard. We’re very aware that we haven’t been able to capture all possible SJ-related insights from the conference, so we invite you to share any that we’ve missed on the JamBoard (click here) or simply add your thoughts in the comments section under this blog entry. We’re also aware that, while this piece has woven together different SJ insights, it hasn’t critiqued them fully – please feel free to add critical perspectives too. References Bali, M. (2015) Pedagogy of Care – Gone Massive, Hybrid Pedagogy, 20 April. Available at: https://hybridpedagogy.org/pedagogy-of-care-gone-massive/ Bali, M. & Zamora, M. (2020) Equitable Emergence: Telling the Story of Equity Unbound in the Open. Open Education Conference, 10 Nov, online. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEeZvM6_8UE Brown, S. (forthcoming), The Emancipation Continuum: Exploring the Role of ESOL (English for Speaker of Other Languages) in the Settlement of Immigrants. British Journal of Sociology of Education (Volume tbc). Brown, S. and John, T. (2022), Navigating No-Man’s Land: Facilitating the Transition of International Scholars towards a PhD Study at a Scottish University (also lockdown!). In Lock, D. (Ed.), BORDERLANDS: THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHING PRACTICES, Springer Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. 2015. Translanguaging and identity in educational settings. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35: pp. 20-35. Engstrom, Y. (2015). Learning by expanding (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Fallout, J. (2016). The Dynamics of Past Selves in Language Learning and Well-Being. In: P.D. MacIntyre, T. Gregersen and S. Mercer (eds). Positive Psychology in SLA. Bristol, UK. Multilingual Matters, 112-129. Giroux, H. (1992). Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York, NY: Routledge. Hyland, K (2009). Academic discourse: English in a global context. Continuum. Jenkins, J. and Wingate, U. (2015). ‘Staff and Students’ Perceptions of English Language Policies in ‘International’ Universities: A Case Study from the UK.’ Khuder, B., & Petrić, B. (2020). Academic socialisation through collaboration: Textual interventions in supporting exiled scholars’ academic literacies development. Education and Conflict Review , 3, 24-28. Seburn, T. (2016) Academic reading circles. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. Swales, J.M. & Feak, C.B. (2012). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks as skills (3rd ed.). University of Michigan Press. - Aleks Palanac -
The argument for classrooms to be set up as physically and viscerally safe spaces for refugee students and others who have experienced potentially traumatic events is not new (e.g. Horsman, 2004; Kerka, 2002), and the application of this work to English language learning contexts is beginning to gain more momentum and visibility through initiatives such as the recent British Council commissioned Language for Resilience programmes (British Council, 2018; Capstick and Delaney, 2016). But, with COVID-19 lockdown restrictions prompting a sudden need to move our teaching and learning online, it has become necessary to ask how this advice might translate to synchronous online settings. This is particularly pertinent in light of the fact that platforms such as Zoom have recently come under fire in the media for their live sessions being vulnerable to breaches of privacy such as trolling and unauthorised recording by participants, which might be particularly damaging to refugee students needing to protect their identities to safeguard themselves and often also family members back home. How, then, might we take measures to minimise these threats and to foster the creation of safe spaces in cyberspace for refugee students? As I outlined in a recent article synthesising insights related to trauma-informed ELT pedagogy for refugees (Palanac, 2020), there are many factors which combine to render a classroom a ‘safe space’, and many of these can be transferred to synchronous online learning contexts. One of these is giving students the opportunity to exercise a degree of control in the space of their classroom. One way of doing this in online contexts is to overtly familiarise students with the features of the synchronous online platform which you are using, which will enable them to make decisions about the degree to which they wish to be ‘present’ or ‘visible’ in the online space of the classroom. This might entail allowing them to experiment with: changing their on-screen name (to their first name only, or a pseudonym); turning their video on and off; muting and unmuting themselves; using the chatbox to communicate with the class if they cannot or do not wish to switch their audio on; changing the view of participants to grid view so that they can see all of their classmates (if their videos are turned on), or at least get a better sense of who is in the virtual classroom with them; sending a private message to the teacher to express a concern; and using a virtual background (if they do not wish for others to see their home). However, on this last point, see Barrett-Fox’s (2020) recent insightful blog on the limitations of using virtual backgrounds, which includes concerns about these not functioning properly on all devices and potentially not fully preventing other people from appearing on the screen. Another transferrable strategy from face-to-face trauma-informed ELT pedagogy is to set clear expectations and ground rules from the outset (Furneaux, 2018). This might include: a procedure for turn taking (e.g. raising one’s hand in the video or through the ‘raise hand’ function of certain platforms); agreeing rules about whether and/or when it is permissible for them to record and/or take screenshots of sessions, and what use these screenshots might then be put to; explaining the procedure for using break-out rooms so that, among other things, they know to expect that you may be popping in and out; agreeing whether students are permitted to share the session link and password with others, and, if so, who. On this last point, there are various further measures which can be put in place to secure the boundaries of the synchronous online classroom against undesirables. For example, with reference to the Zoom platform, guidance compiled by U.C. Berkeley (2020) suggests: the meeting ID and password for the session should not be shared on public forums, but instead sent to participants directly; the ‘join before host’ option should be unchecked, as should the function which allows students to record the session through their app; and private chat and screen sharing by participants should be disabled. If an undesirable does somehow end up in the session, it is important for a teacher to be aware of the actions which they can immediately take to minimise the risks, including switching a participant’s audio and/or video off and removing them from the session. Whilst it can be seen that some strategies from the trauma-informed ELT pedagogy for refugees can be usefully applied to the synchronous online classroom, these measures are by no means a perfect solution to creating a ‘safe space’ in online classes. For example, the options of being able to switch one’s video off and change one’s online name may help a student feel more comfortable in some respects (in terms of protecting their own identity), but the flip side of this is that others in the class may feel uncomfortable not knowing exactly who is in the room with them, which may then reduce their own sense of safety, and may also negatively affect quality of inter-personal interaction and relationship-building. The latter is another key tenet of building a sense of safety in the language classroom, in which students need to feel comfortable enough in their social environment to take risks and make mistakes (e.g. Stone, 1995). At present, therefore, the indication is that, while there are certainly ways in which teachers and refugee students can mitigate the risks contingent in using online platforms for synchronous EAP teaching and learning, the measures used for increasing the sense of safety of one student may inadvertently lead to other students feeling less safe, or to a potential deterioration in the quality of classroom interaction. Ultimately, as with good face-to-face trauma-informed teaching, a flexible approach should be taken, with teachers making themselves available to listen to students’ concerns and needs, and being ready to respond with flexibility and creativity. References Barrett-Fox, R. (2020). ‘A reminder of who is hurt by insisting that students share images of their personal lives’, Any Good Thing, 6 March. Available at: https://anygoodthing.com/2020/04/06/a-reminder-of-who-is-hurt-by-insisting-that-students-share-images-of-their-personal-lives/amp/?__twitter_impression=true (accessed 8 May 2020) British Council (2018) Language for Resilience: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Available at: https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/language_for_resilience_-_cross-disciplinary_perspectives_0.pdf Capstick, T. & Delaney, M. (2016) Language for Resilience: The Role of Language in Enhancing the Resilience of Syrian Refugees and Host Communities. Available at: https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/language-for-resilience-report-en.pdf Furneaux, C. (2018) ‘Trauma and second / foreign language learning’ in T. Capstick (ed) Language for Resilience: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Available at: www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/language_for_resilience_-_cross-disciplinary_perspectives_0.pdf (accessed 8 May 2020) Horsman, J. (2004) ‘”But is it education?”: The challenge of creating effective learning for survivors of trauma’. Women’s Studies Quarterly 32/1-2: 130-146 www.jstor.org/stable/40004396 (accessed 8 May 2020) Kerka, S. (2002) ‘Trauma and Adult Learning’ ERIC Digest 1-8 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED472601.pdf(accessed 8 May 2020) Palanac, A. (2020). ‘Towards a trauma-informed ELT pedagogy for refugees’ Language Issues 30/2: 3-14 Stone, N. (1995) ‘Teaching ESL to Survivors of Trauma’ Prospect 10/3: 49-57U.C. Berkeley (2020). Settings for securing Zoom. [online] Available at: https://security.berkeley.edu/resources/cybersecurity-and-covid-19/settings-securing-zoom (accessed 8 May 2020) |
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