“Educational Futures and Fractures” conference

Dear all,

I would like to share with you information about an interesting conference that is going to take place in Glasgow in the end of February. The title of the conference is “Educational Futures and Fractures”. The conference is hosted by Professor Yvette Taylor – a leading researcher working at the crossing of sociology and education. The conference will explore the questions of what, who and where is the future of Higher Education. More information is available through this link:

http://socialtheoryapplied.com/2016/08/17/call-abstracts-educational-futures-fractures/

It also happens that I will be among the presenters at the conference with a talk titled “TESOL within British higher education: Reflecting on the now and thinking about the future”. As the title says, within the talk I will be reflecting on the current state of TESOL within British higher education. I will focus in particular on how it happens that TESOL programmes in the UK are mostly taken by teachers born and bread elsewhere and intending to work upon completion of their studies in their home countries. Relying on the data from my PhD research, I will look at this trend through the prism of colonialism. I will then speculate about where this trend leads and share my opinion on how a positive future for everyone can be built.

I will be very happy if you find a chance to come and support me at the conference. I hope you will enjoy my talk and if not, I am sure that you will be compensated far and beyond by other presenters. There has been a very rigorous selection and I am sure that other presenters are going to be very interesting. I think there will be no one else except me working in the area of language teaching but I also think that this is exactly the reason why the conference is worth attending. It will give an opportunity to reach out and get an idea of what is being talked about more generally in education and who knows may be even to find new avenues for research.