Hi everyone,<\/p>\n
I would like to share a recent experience with you all which was incredibly beneficial for me and can hopefully contribute to someone else’s development. Recently I attended a conference\/workshop session in the University of Helsinki in Finland which had as its central themes teacher identity, teacher education, and English Language teaching. The keynote speaker was Ken Hyland whose articles on EAP have formed part of the literature review within my thesis, and so I decided this would be a fantastic opportunity to present my research to an audience with no prior knowledge of the study which I was describing.<\/p>\n
In doing so, I came to learn some very important things in terms of my own self-development. Okay this wasn’t the first conference or workshop I had attended but it was the first post data analysis which was specifically connected to the areas of research in which I am interested\u00a0and one which I\u00a0could treat\u00a0as a testing ground for presenting my research and with the hope that I would be challenged, guided, and informed\u00a0by people such as Ken Hyland. A few weeks before this I should\u00a0also note that I had my end of year review. I’m not sure how much of this should be confidential but the great thing about this blog as I have said before is that we seem to share our successes and failures in equal measure and learn\u00a0from them. So in my annual review I was\u00a0rushed and maybe slightly complacent\u00a0and\u00a0not as mentally prepared as I should have been\u00a0in the sense of having spent the previous months deep in data analysis; having written my\u00a0initial chapters\u00a0much earlier and then putting them to bed in their electronic resting places. I didn’t feel that I did justice to the work I’d done, or the passion I feel for\u00a0my study. But I’m going to come back to that in a short while, because I am also wondering if anybody else has experienced one of the issues I am going to raise; feeling natural in presenting our ideas to others.<\/p>\n
Okay, so back to post-review and pre-Finland. I\u00a0realized that what was lacking in my review was a clearly signposted structure to\u00a0my research, and a presumption that my audience already knows much what I am going to say. As an EAP teacher, I was mirroring the mistakes my own students commonly make. Thus I went back to basics and mapped out the research study in summary for a brand new audience with no prior knowledge and expectations. I put this together in the form of a PowerPoint and set off for Helsinki where the weather was warmer than I expected and I hoped my reception would be equally warm.<\/p>\n
On the day of my presentation, there seemed to be small numbers at first. ‘Oh great,’ I thought, ‘all this money spent and nobody’s going to turn up to see me.’ I had paid for 90% of the trip myself, which shows the seriousness with which I treated this opportunity to be engrossed in a weekend of discussing teacher identity, and also learning technologies on which there was a great emphasis, as one would expect in somewhere as high-tech\u00a0as Finland. Since my own study is\u00a0based on a theoretical framework of TPACK intersecting with teacher identity, I was looking to engage with those interested in similar or related fields.<\/p>\n
Half past two, three people in the room. Seconds later it fills up. Sigh of relief, familiar EAP in-sessional feeling (you know those classes that aren’t mandatory and students turn up if they’re interested and getting\u00a0benefit.) Amongst the audience was Ken Hyland. I started to present and caught sparks of interest, considerable interest I should add, nods of approval, pauses to ponder possible questions, laughs too where I tried to be funny. I found then something that others may\u00a0have found – I love presenting my ideas like a teacher – standing up, interacting, sharing knowledge. I’m much happier at this than sitting down talking about my research. The same happened during my panel presentation, and pre-panel discussion.\u00a0In the pre-panel discussion sitting down with Gary and Julian I never got going, like in a\u00a0game\u00a0of tennis or any sport where you start badly and time keeps running and you never hit form. Then in the panel discussion standing up and presenting at the outset really\u00a0gave me the boost to get into gear so that when I\u00a0did sit down and face questions from the\u00a0panel, I was more ready, mentally prepared for it. I’ve had similar experiences in job interviews, and I just wonder if it’s a consequence of my identity as a teacher, and what that maybe says about me as a teacher.<\/p>\n
Anyway, not to digress too much, I then found that it was great to present my ideas and findings, and to be questioned on these. Ken Hyland asked me some questions and gave me a summary of what he took from the research study, as well as linking this into other studies such as those of Mark\u00a0Warschauer and others. It was really great to be able\u00a0to discuss my research with somebody whose name appears in the earlier chapters of my thesis.\u00a0Others too were very interested and this gave me a confidence boost, hence the title of this post.<\/p>\n
Conferences\u00a0then can provide confidence, direction, and clarity; ability to see the wood for the trees, or is it the other way round? Added to that it was a learning experience\u00a0with regard to my\u00a0own strengths and weaknesses, and I met some great people as well. My interests were in technology and teacher identity but there seems to be some fantastic work going on\u00a0in the areas of academic writing, writing for Science, and Content & Language Integrated\u00a0Learning. I guess the best way of summarizing the strengths of the three day event was that it was one of those rare (unfortunately) sessions where nobody seems to want to miss anything (like that hour after lunch or that first ungodly hour of the morning).<\/p>\n
This was a case of wanting to see everything and more at the event, and I did get to see a lot. But on the way\u00a0home I did stop by the post office and requested a Santa Claus letter for my brother’s\u00a0children and friends’ children in Belfast. There had to be some leisure at the end of a very beneficial weekend \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi everyone, I would like to share a recent experience with you all which was incredibly beneficial for me and can hopefully contribute to someone else’s development. Recently I attended a conference\/workshop session in the University of Helsinki in Finland which had as its central themes teacher identity, teacher education, and English Language teaching. The keynote speaker was Ken Hyland […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous-news-etc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}