Last week was a bit of a whirlwind: IATEFL, followed by the Roundtable on Complex Systems Theory and ELT, both here in Manchester,\u00a0and then the CultNet seminar in Durham at the end of the week. Apart from the many great conversations and meals (I think I have been to more restaurants in Manchester in the last week than the last 10 years put together!), it was a week that challenged and stretched me, although I have to admit to being very fed up with listening to myself talk about Exploratory Practice by the end of it.<\/p>\n
I could probably write several pages reflecting on the experiences, but rather than bore you all, I’d like to focus on just a couple of\u00a0things that I am taking with me into my own work and that I need to continue reflecting on.<\/p>\n
The first relates to having to prepare\u00a0several presentations on a similar theme at the same time, particularly the presentation which formed part of the Learner Autonomy SIG day at IATEFL, and the one for the Roundtable on Complexity Theory and ELT. The first was to my mind fairly straightforward: I explained Exploratory Practice, \u00a0talked about what the learners and I had done during the course, and then drew it together with a few thoughts at the end. The complexity one was in a different league – I had very little idea of\u00a0how to approach it or how to make my work\u00a0relevant to the aims of the day. I had several conversations with Juup, but found it difficult to get a hold on my line of reasoning. In fact, I was still changing things the day\u00a0before, trying to find that\u00a0coherent line of argument (aided by both Juup and Achilleas). And yet, that presentation was by far the most rewarding in terms of my own thinking. It pushed me in directions that I know I would not have explored to the same extent\u00a0without the pressure of having to explain my thoughts\u00a0to others. However, it also left me with the\u00a0nagging feeling that there were some inherent contradictions between what I was saying in the IATEFL presentation and the Roundtable\u00a0one, and although there was a lot of interest in my IATEFL presentation, I somehow felt that I had short-changed people, that there was something important missing. It is those uncertainties and doubts that I now need\u00a0to explore and try and pinpoint why I felt that way.<\/p>\n
The second concerns something that I have been puzzling about for some time now and that was brought into focus by\u00a0Miriam Firth’s presentation at\u00a0CultNet.\u00a0Miriam was using the term ‘intercultural communication’ to explain her data and she very clearly explained how she was using that term. However, there were many questions and comments related to her use of the term and whether what she was describing really was\u00a0intercultural communication or something different. In general, people, and I include myself because my thoughts throughout were very similar, returned to their own default understanding of the term rather than the one Miriam had given. One of the things that I have battled with in the classroom, and which has come up several times in my conversations with Richard in relation to his use of Exploratory Practice in the Researching Multilingually project, is the use of the term ‘puzzle’ in Exploratory Practice and the\u00a0common\u00a0understanding of that word as something which needs to be solved. It can of course be used in other ways; the verb has different connotations and EP also talks about ‘puzzlement’. Richard has gone with the term ‘curiosities’, but I have resisted using that in the classroom as it seems a more complex word for learners to grasp. However, my own and others’ response to Miriam’s presentation made me realise that however much I explain what I mean by ‘puzzle’ to my students, they too are likely to go with their own default understanding, or the first meaning they get when they look it up in their dictionaries. Also, \u00a0if I have to explain\u00a0what I mean by puzzle anyway, I might as well explain curiosity. Maybe there are lessons here for all of us in how we use common words and terms in our research and the work we need to do to get people on the same page as us.<\/p>\n
A great benefit of conferences and meetings like CultNet is the opportunity to meet new people and catch up with old friends. It also helps strengthen\u00a0relationships\u00a0with those who share some connection to Manchester but are not physically present with us. So,\u00a0I hope there will be three new additions to our online community soon: Elisa from Spain, who is hoping to spend some time with us in the autumn, and Judith and Melissa from Durham who are both supervised by Richard. Watch out for their profiles!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week was a bit of a whirlwind: IATEFL, followed by the Roundtable on Complex Systems Theory and ELT, both here in Manchester,\u00a0and then the CultNet seminar in Durham at the end of the week. Apart from the many great conversations and meals (I think I have been to more restaurants in Manchester in the last week than the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[162,164,227],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p865eh-1WY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7500"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7500"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7521,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7500\/revisions\/7521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lantern.humanities.manchester.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}