We are pleased to announce our first event of the academic year with the university of Greenwich’s Dr Anna Costantino. We’re looking forward to catching up with you there.
Date: Monday 28thOctober, 18:30-20:00
Room: C3.15 @IOE 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
Navigating expertise in language teaching and learning:
disseminating practitioner understandings
Dr Anna Costantino, University of Greenwich, London
Professional learning is critical for language teachers to understand the complex contexts of their practice and to expand theoretical and practical knowledge in the scholarship of language learning and teaching. Practitioner research offers one pathway to engage in professional learning. Ongoing practitioner enquiry fosters a particular type of expertise, understood here as artistry (Schön, 1987), which blends autonomy with creativity, emphasising teachers’ ability to adapt, take risks, and draw on their personal practical knowledge to navigate the complexities of classroom environments. Developing expertise as artistry might enable teachers to theorise personal practical experiences and practicalise theoretical knowledge (Tsui, 2003). In this talk, I focus on dissemination, a critical dimension of such expertise, as it provides the basis for peer scrutiny, ensuring rigour and potentially generating impact or influence (Norton, 2019). Drawing on recent editorial experience with a journal focused on practitioner-driven research, I discuss the affordances and challenges of disseminating—and ultimately embracing—an open-ended and often elusive form of expertise. Finally, I propose a discussion on reimagining spaces for language teaching expertise and its dissemination.
References
Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. Jossey-Bass.
Tsui, A. (2003). Understanding expertise in teaching: Case studies of second language teachers. Cambridge University Press.
Norton, L. (2019). Action research in teaching and learning: A practical guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities. Routledge.
Anna Costantino is a language educator and applied linguist at the University of Greenwich and Regent’s University London. She leads and teaches Materials Development and Language Testing and contributes to the Research Methods module in the MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the University of Greenwich. As a practitioner-researcher, she is a member of the Centre for Research in Language and Heritage (CREL) at the University of Greenwich. Her research and scholarly interests focus on teacher and learner development and practitioner research.