Aspbury, Edd

I’ve been an EFL teacher and an academic skills tutor for some 13 years and I still teach English now and then to keep my hand in. I taught in Italy, Czechia, Spain and finally in the UK, where I started working in Higher Education. I really enjoyed this and went off to do a Masters in TESOL in so I could stay teaching in universities.

While studying for my Masters at the university of Manchester, I realised I really enjoy being a student and the whole academic caper and decided to stay on. I’m now doing a PhD in education right here in Manchester.

Despite the fact that I was on the Educational Technology pathway, during my Masters, I became more and more absorbed in a deceptively simple question: why do teachers do the things they do? This is the overarching concern of my PhD which explores teacher agency, normativity, authenticity, teacher cognition and teacher development, by drawing on cognitive neuroscience, Ecological Psychology, Enactivism and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. I try to tie all of these approaches together into what I am grandiosely calling the Skilled Teacher Approach.

Despite this very esoteric focus, I am still think of myself as a teacher and I’m always interested in what’s happening elsewhere in our field and always keen to learn and improve my own practice and expand my own horizons and all that jazz.