The 'conf' in conferences

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 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.

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 and one which I could treat as a testing ground for presenting my research and with the hope that I would be challenged, guided, and informed by people such as Ken Hyland. A few weeks before this I should also 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 from them. So in my annual review I was rushed and maybe slightly complacent and not as mentally prepared as I should have been in the sense of having spent the previous months deep in data analysis; having written my initial chapters much 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 my 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.

Okay, so back to post-review and pre-Finland. I realized that what was lacking in my review was a clearly signposted structure to my 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.

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 as Finland. Since my own study is based on a theoretical framework of TPACK intersecting with teacher identity, I was looking to engage with those interested in similar or related fields.

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 benefit.) 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 have 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. In the pre-panel discussion sitting down with Gary and Julian I never got going, like in a game of 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 gave me the boost to get into gear so that when I did sit down and face questions from the panel, 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.

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 Warschauer and others. It was really great to be able to discuss my research with somebody whose name appears in the earlier chapters of my thesis. Others too were very interested and this gave me a confidence boost, hence the title of this post.

Conferences then 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 with regard to my own 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 in the areas of academic writing, writing for Science, and Content & Language Integrated Learning. 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).

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 home I did stop by the post office and requested a Santa Claus letter for my brother’s children and friends’ children in Belfast. There had to be some leisure at the end of a very beneficial weekend 🙂