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potential to offer an optimal blend of practice and theory, rather than a more academically-focused PhD. I’d like to pretend that I spent long hours researching different doctoral programmes before carefully selecting Sheffield, but the Sheffield website was my first port of call, as I knew former colleagues who had had positive experiences with other Sheffield postgraduate courses.

My main expectation for the EdD programme was that it should enhance my theoretical knowledge as, although my field was language learning and teaching, I felt that the field had drifted from its roots in sociology and education. On a practical level, I also hoped that the programme would help me design surveys and conduct interviews – which was how I perceived “research” at the time. I was astonished, however, how the EdD swept me up and carried me in directions I would never have imagined. Indeed, this process began, right from the first evening of my first weekend study school, with a guest speaker’s insistence that “all research is autobiographical.” Researcher positionality was not a term I had come across before the EdD. Nor had I realized that a research project requires deep and honest introspection, together with the awareness that research is a cooperative endeavour between researcher and researched, where the researcher may learn as much about themselves as about those they are researching. Perhaps most surprisingly, I discovered that I had an aptitude for policy analysis, and I developed one of my second-year assignments on French education policy into an article that I co-published with my supervisor.

It’s four months since I completed the EdD, so it is a little early to determine what sort of effect it will have on my professional life, in terms of employment possibilities [but what it has already given is] significant personal growth and a more empathetic and aware outlook on one’s professional life.