Author: Juup Stelma

I am a staff member in the Manchester Institute of Education, with an interest in ecological and complex systems theory used to understand language education, teacher professional development, multilingualism as well as researcher development. I am the Programme Director for the MA TESOL at the University of Manchester and lead course units on the ‘Psychology of Language Learning’ and ‘Developing researcher Competence’. I was born in Trondheim, Norway, grew up on a small island called Kirkøy – also Norway, my parents are both Dutch, my name is Frisian, I have a Chinese great great grand parent, my wife is from Turkey and our son is British. We have been in Manchester since 2005 and work and live in the great company of colleagues such as Gary, Diane, Richard, Zeynep, Susan and a great lot of B, M and D level students. My TESOL background includes an RSA/Cambridge certificate at International House Hasting in 1993, working and living in Seoul, South Korea for a few years, after which I found my way onto a MEd TESOL programme at the University of Leeds. I enjoyed the academic environment and went on to do a PhD. I also did some teaching at Leeds, including teaching UK undergraduate students and working on a teacher education programme for Omani primary school English teachers. Post PhD I worked as a research fellow for Professor Lynne Cameron on a project focused on metaphor in Conciliation talk, departing then for a while from the TESOL focus.