Editorial Issue 14 - Special Issue "Developing Contexts of Scholarship"
Welcome to this special issue of the Language Scholar. Creating it has been a team effort of course, and my thanks go to all the contributing authors, our reviewers and our editorial team, particularly our journal managers Alba del Pozo García and Denise de Pauw.
The articles in this issue all address an under-discussed aspect of language teaching and learning scholarship – the actual contexts within which such work does or doesn’t happen. The pieces here provide critique, evidence and (sometimes uncomfortable) insights regarding practitioners’ current contexts, and suggest concrete ways forward, both as individual practitioners and as a community. The issue is also special in that it purposely exhibits scholarship that is innovative and diverse in nature and form, while maintaining academic rigour and forwarding debate. My final and repeated thanks go to the scholars within our community who talk to us here.
This issue begins with a thought-piece by Alex Ding, Co-Editor of the journal and Professor of English for Academic Purposes, in which he reflects on the journal’s manifesto and outlines some of his concerns around scholarship that have emerged since its publication in 2018. I think Alex’s piece provides a thought-provoking springboard from which to dive into the rest of the scholarship presented here.
The second article takes the form of a critical reflection, in which González and Abbatelli examine their experience of developing and running a pedagogy reading group, with the aim of forwarding and supporting scholarship in their school. This piece is followed by a critical, co-constructed autoethnography in which Lam and Leung discuss their different teaching and scholarship journeys and in doing so, challenge our perceptions of a research/teaching binary. Our fourth article is an autoethnographic narrative. Reschenhofer discusses the possibilities for, and benefits of, creating a context that allows teachers on fixed-term contracts on an English for Academic Purposes pre-sessional course to engage in scholarship. In the fifth piece, Driscoll, Hardman and Playfair use a collaborative autoethnographic methodology to reflect on the context within which they co-constructed practitioner development forums, discussing its limitations and relevance for other scholarship contexts.
In their autoethnography, Moyetta and Muñoz reflect on their national, institutional and disciplinary contexts and contribute to the debates around the status and identity of EAP practitioners as scholars. In the seventh piece, Timothy Chapman reflects on his scholarship which has taken the form of co-authoring a book. He examines the challenges and affordance of collaborative writing, focusing on issues such as finding and negotiating authorial voice, managing workloads, gaining confidence as a writer-practitioner and the demands of the publication process. Next comes a paper by Pocock and Haines, in which they evidence and examine their journey of scholarship that is the building of a context for scholarship. The authors present data that reveal issues of becoming, being, and belonging within the teacher-researcher community they have helped develop and discuss implications of their findings for future (and other) practitioner research scholarship projects. In the ninth and final article in this issue, Coderch discusses her experience as a scholar in a university foreign language department and compares this with the descriptions of SoTL in the literature. She concludes her paper by proposing concrete actions needed if we are to ‘reclaim’ scholarship.