Newsletter #9 (24th December 2020)

Hi Everyone

I am trying to get back into regular, monthly Newsletters.

Although this is a strange time of ongoing pandemic, there is quite a bit of news. First, congratulation to Ivy and Felix on their new appointments as Senior Tutors within MIE, and congratulations, too, to Olga for her Teaching award from her university students in Moscow. These awards follow on the heels of Outstanding Teacher awards for Diane and Gary within the TESOL team.

This autumn has seen us welcome to new doctoral students to our ranks – Xian Zhao and Jing Wang – and their arrival has been the stimulus for ‘rebooting’ LANTERN. In addition to renewed activity here on the blog, we have had seen a series of talks by alumni (Khwan, Susan, Magda, Olga) and friends to our community (Tinghe Jin and Eva Polymenakou) to the new/current student body. Further talks are planned (and we already have dates for Made De Stefani and Huran Mirillo). It has been wonderful to see the dynamics between new, and current and alumni, and research associates … and this reminded me of why we set up LANTERN in the first place and what role it has played for our doctoral researchers over the years. I hope that this renewed LANTERN energy will be supportive for the researchers whose viva is upcoming (Ivy) or later in 2021 (Felix, Huran, Helen).

As part of this ‘reboot’, please send me your updates (for your profiles, for news posts, for publications lists etc). Thank you to Achilleas whose new profile is a lovely read.

A further project that this reboot has stimulated is a workshop (and associated resource development) for the University of Stavanger (Norway) on the theme of “Publishing during and from a doctorate” (the details are in the Events dropdown menu). The resource contains case studies by Mira Bekar, Susan Dawson, Zhuo Min Huang, Achilleas Kostoulas, Nahielly Palacios, Eva Polymenakou, and Khwan Tantiniranat. I have high hopes that this will develop into something more in 2021.

Two further projects are in my mind:

• the Transforming Lives, Transforming Practice project (see projects menu) in which Gary Motteram, Susan Dawson and myself are working with the teachers at Cornerstone, a local refugee education charity, to explore how the move online (because of COVID) is changing the teaching and learning.
• Intercultural Musicking (see my projects submenu in the projects menu) involving Zhuo Min Huang, me and colleagues from the Music department exploring world music ensemble pedagogy (klezmer) through arts-based methods and considering in particular the contribution of such musicking to students intercultural personhood.

As the updated Publications pages reveal, this continues to be a time of writing success – please keep sending in your publications plans and successes.

I am sure there are many other things to be celebrated but this should be enough to spur us on into 2021 -:)