Keynote Speakers of the SSN ICTR 2022

Dr Richard Smith

Abstract of the talk

Exploratory Action Research: A Personal Journey

In this talk, I share the story of my own involvement with teacher-research, from its beginnings in my practice as an English teacher in Japan in the 1990s to work with pre-service teachers in England in the 2000s and subsequent leadership of teacher-research mentoring schemes in Latin America and South Asia in the 2010s. The particular form of teacher-research I’ve been developing and favouring – namely ‘exploratory’ action research – will be explained with reference to the contexts in which it’s arisen and been found relevant. Finally, the way it has been taken up and further spread by teachers and mentors in various Global South contexts will be analysed, critiqued and celebrated.

Bionote

Richard Smith is Professor of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, in England. He has been a teacher educator for over twenty-five years, working with teachers from around the world. Before coming to Warwick he worked in Japan for thirteen years. He is known for his research in the field of history of language learning and teaching as well as for his work in the fields of learner autonomy, ELT research capacity-building, and teacher development for teachers in difficult circumstances, with a focus on teacher-research. In this area his best-known publications are Voices of Experience: Teaching in Low-Resource Classooms (edited with Amol Padwad and Deborah Bullock), A Handbook for Exploratory Action Research (co-authored with Paula Rebolledo) and Mentoring Teachers to Research Their Classrooms: A Handbook. All of these publications are freely available from the British Council’s web-pages. The last two of these publications arise from quite large-scale projects with secondary school teachers in Latin America and South Asia, specifically India and Nepal, which Richard was responsible for advising on. He is also the founder of the International Festival of Teacher-research and he conceived the IATEFL Research SIG Teachers Research! series of conferences, the last of which was held online in December 2021.

Dr Rama Mathew

Abstract of the talk

Teacher research projects: where are we and where are we going?

In this presentation I aim to look a little critically at the teacher research projects I’ve been involved in, in the last 10-15 years. While all the projects helped teachers to interrogate their own classrooms, they had different mentoring models and ranged from one year to three years from the time they were launched and differed from one another depending on the country context, teachers’ and mentors’ expectations and so forth. What benefits were perceptible as a result of the work among different stakeholders – teachers, mentors, students and others on the periphery? More importantly, what was the long-term impact of this deep engagement especially after the projects wrapped up?

We need to ask and answer these questions so we are clear what things we need to repeat or replicate and what we need to avoid. I’m going to draw examples from young learners as researchers (BC, England) ARMS and ELTRMS (both BC projects), English in Action in Bangladesh and Leh Wi Lan in Sierra Leone both UK Aid projects. Closer home more recently, the Delhi Government’s (SCERT) on-going project is an interesting example of what we can do and what we can’t given our unique context. I’ll share my reflections on all these and hope that you’ll find it as interesting and useful as I do.

Bionote

Rama Mathew is an ELT consultant and retired as Professor of Education from the University of Delhi where she was also Dean of the Faculty of Education. She taught at the EFL University (Hyderabad) for several years. She was Head of the Research, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of English in Action project in Bangladesh. She has been involved in several teacher development and assessment projects, and published articles and books in the area. She was a lead mentor for ARMS (Action Research Mentoring Scheme) and for ELTRMS (ELT Research Mentoring Scheme), both British Council funded schemes. She has just completed work on a project in Sierra Leone where she supported teachers to carry out classroom-based research. Her research interests include language assessment, teaching English to young learners, CPD of teachers, multilingual education and making English accessible to learners online.