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Scholarship on our own terms: evaluating the impact of an EAP Teachers’ Forum

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Jeni Driscoll
University of Liverpool

Wil Hardman
University of Liverpool

Rob Playfair
Birkbeck College, University of London

 

ABSTRACT
This article provides a reflective narrative and evaluation of an example of co-constructed grassroots EAP (English for Academic Purposes) practitioner development, Teachers’ Forums (TFs). In line with the theme of this special issue, rather than examining the approach in isolation, we aim to describe the specific contexts from which it became possible, evaluate the boundaries of its impact on our practice and consider its future and relevance to other contexts. Underpinning this evaluation is our ambivalence towards defining this approach as scholarship, which we have tried to convey in the title – the tension of wanting to engage in scholarship on our own terms while working within contexts which may simultaneously afford, reward, ignore and obstruct this. To develop our evaluation, we drew on elements of collaborative autoethnography (e.g., Rolinska et. al., 2021) to systematically reflect on the development of TFs. This included a reflection on the specific contexts which made them possible, the often tacit ethos that underpinned their development as well as the various impacts they had on our EAP practice. After providing a narrative of the development of the TFs, this paper presents four broad strands of evaluation, drawing on a range of social theories for additional insights: the ethos of the TFs, their role as part of our EAP teacher development ecosystem, the extent they can be considered a form of critical professional development and the risks and rewards of framing them as scholarship.

KEYWORDS: dialogic teacher development, teacher agency, contexts of scholarship, critical professional development, collaborative autoethnography.

 

INTRODUCTION
This article provides a reflective narrative and evaluation of an example of co-constructed grassroots EAP (English for Academic Purposes) practitioner development, Teachers’ Forums (TFs). These are regular semi-formal meetings where teachers can come together to reflect on their practice and are explained in more detail in the section ‘Developing the Teachers’ Forums’. In line with the theme of this special issue, rather than examining the approach in isolation, we aim to describe the specific contexts from which it became possible, evaluate the boundaries of its impact on our practice and consider its future and relevance to other contexts. Also pertinent to this special issue is our ambivalence towards defining this approach as scholarship, which we have tried to convey in the title – the tension of wanting to engage in scholarship on our own terms while working within contexts which may simultaneously afford, reward, ignore and obstruct this.

All three authors of this piece, Jeni, Rob and Wil, were involved in the TFs and it is our experiences and interpretations that we share here. We were all colleagues at the same institution in which the TFs took place, but Rob has since moved to a new position in a different part of the UK. After giving a presentation about the forums at a BALEAP Professional Interest Meeting on EAP Teacher Education (Driscoll et. al., 2022), we discussed a shared desire to reflect further on TFs and the theme of this special issue, with its focus on understanding the contexts of scholarship, provided the impetus – and all-important deadline – to develop our ideas further.

The methodology for this article was inspired by the ways that collaborative autoethnography has been recently used by EAP practitioners to explore their working contexts (e.g. Rolinska et al., 2021). Collaborative autoethnography (CAE) is an approach to research whereby a group of researchers collectively explore and analyse their personal experiences in order to understand broader cultural, social or organisational implications (Chang, 2016). After securing ethical approval, the first stage was to generate the stimulus for reflection and so we took as a starting point some of the questions included in the call for submissions, replacing ‘scholarship’ with ‘TFs’:

  • How has our context influenced the journey of the TFs?
  • What lessons have we learnt from conducting or trying to conduct the TFs in our context?
  • How might we make the TFs more inclusive?
  • What approaches and contexts can or should be developed to increase the impact of the TFs?

(Adapted from The Language Scholar)

We then recorded a one-hour online discussion between the three of us and then individually watched back the recording and made notes of recurring themes or points we felt especially relevant to the broad theme of this special issue: the contexts of scholarship in EAP. A key feature of CAE is questioning and commenting on each other’s reflections to prompt deeper reflection. So, through weekly online meetings we compared and discussed our notes and themes, refining these into the four sections of evaluation included in this article: the ethos of the TFs, their role as part of the EAP teacher development ecosystem, the extent they can be considered a form of critical professional development and the risks and rewards of framing them as scholarship. First though, we begin with the story of how the TFs emerged and developed.

IN SEARCH OF EAP PEDAGOGY
The setting for the TFs is the Language Centre of a large UK university. The Language Centre is located in a professional services department with all teachers on teaching-only contracts. When the TFs were created, scholarship was not included in workload allocation and the only opportunities to engage in this was in our own time. These features of the Language Centre in some ways characterise a ‘support service’ approach to EAP, which views its role as ‘language acquisition for general proficiency development’ with an emphasis on revenue generation, in contrast to approaches which view EAP as a research-informed activity (Ding and Bruce, 2017, p.7). We feel it is noteworthy that the term ‘EAP’ did not consistently feature in names of teaching roles, marketing or courses, although the centre is accredited by the EAP professional association BALEAP.

This lack of EAPness can be partly explained by the fact that in recent years the Language Centre had devoted a significant part of its resources to teaching General English, competing for students in the market with private language schools. However, a recent departmental review had shifted our focus away from being a profit-making department supporting students who speak English as an additional language towards providing language and skills support to all students enrolled in academic study at the university. Our sense was that discussions about EAP pedagogy were vital in addressing these changes, yet deficit and essentialising views of the purpose of language teaching in HE (e.g. Wingate, 2015) seemed to remain alongside ever-present underlying fears about the long-term future of the Language Centre in the marketized HE context.

As such, the remit and evaluative structures of the Language Centre were oriented more towards administration, logistics and policy concerns than pedagogic matters with team meetings and management discourse heavily weighted towards concerns such as student numbers, timetabling and institutional policy updates. This situation is not unique to the Language Centre, with studies of EAP teachers in other UK contexts reporting administratively-focused inductions and lack of time for a consideration of pedagogy (e.g. Campion, 2016, Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). If, as Taylor (2022) suggests, EAP practitioners share a collective identity as ‘effective teachers’, the reality of our situation seemed to take this for granted and did not encourage us to question or develop our knowledge and skills as EAP practitioners specifically. As we mentioned in many of our discussions preparing this article, the basic issue was that there was very little space for us to talk about our EAP teaching. That was why we decided to set up the TFs.

DEVELOPING THE TEACHERS’ FORUMS
The TFs were initially organised by and intended for teachers on the Language Centre’s in-sessional provision, in which EAP teachers work closely with specific academic departments or individual programmes across the university to design and teach contextually-relevant, discipline-specific EAP courses. This involves a range of complex tasks including liaising with subject teachers and programme managers, collecting and analysing student work, observing lectures and analysing communicative practices in the disciplines – all traits of EAP as a research informed activity engaging with disciplinary practices (Ding and Bruce, 2017). As in-sessional teachers, the three of us all found this engagement with often unfamiliar disciplinary practices to be stimulating and empowering while also at times isolating and uncertain. Difficulties gaining access to information about departmental practices, having the main responsibility for advertising our optional courses to busy students, and an occasional sense of being an imposter in other departments. This led to many of us wondering, ‘am I doing this right?’, echoing more recent descriptions of in-sessional EAP as ‘ill-defined’ and with ‘fuzzy’ boundaries (Tibbetts and Chapman, 2023, p.5). The limited opportunity to share or develop our practice within the support service-oriented Language Centre meant that while we were building individual expertise, there was a need to create spaces where challenges could be discussed and expertise could be developed collectively, giving rise to the emergence of the forums.

To get the forums started, the initial invitation email was sent out by Jeni, an experienced member of the Language Centre, to in-sessional EAP teachers only, with the following instructions:

Task

  • You should prepare to present:
  • 1 example of something that worked well
  • 1 example of something that didn’t work so well

Format

  • Each teacher presents individually followed by Q&A / group discussion

Timing

  • 10 minutes each including Q&A

During the session, one person took on the role of facilitator to set the running order and make sure everyone had equal opportunity to contribute.

After the first few iterations of the forums, however, we found that they took on a life of their own and the structure began to evolve. The individual turns were tending to take somewhat longer than the allocated 10 minutes, and teachers were using the forums in a variety of different ways. People went beyond simply sharing examples of their teaching to offer different types of contributions, such as explorations of new pedagogical approaches, challenging classroom puzzles or thought-provoking comments from students. To reflect these new developments, we broadened the scope of potential contributions and extended the time limit. Also, to make the forums more inclusive we decided to extend the invitation to all teachers in the Language Centre rather than just the in-sessional teachers. Thus, at the time of writing, the instructions are as follows:

Task

  • Prepare to talk about something related to your teaching. You are free to choose whatever you want with the aim of promoting reflective discussion on your practice. Previous contributions have included:
  • An example of something that worked / didn’t work so well
  • A puzzle / challenge / problem you are facing
  • A thought-provoking experience from your everyday practice
  • Ideas for future projects / approaches

Format

  • Each teacher presents individually followed by Q&A / group discussion
  • Facilitator sets running order and chairs the forum

Timing

  • 15 minutes each including Q&A

This brings us to the end of the narrative of the development of the TFs. The remainder of the article presents our analysis and evaluation of the TFs from multiple perspectives.

THE ETHOS OF THE TEACHERS’ FORUMS
The ethos of the forum, by which we mean the values and culture, was not something that, until embarking on writing this article, had ever been written down but rather something that had emerged organically. However, during the writing process we decided that attempting to analyse the forum’s ethos could be useful, not only to help us further understand why we found them so impactful, but also to allow others to replicate or build on them. We decided to articulate the ethos as a list of adjectives, so initially one member of the group produced an impressionistic list of characteristics they believed were integral to the forum’s ethos based on the discussions we had been having as part of the collaborative autoethnography process. These were then read and commented on asynchronously by the other two members and finally refined via dialogue and consensus into a definitive list. Here we should also acknowledge the theoretical frameworks of dialogic and critical pedagogy (Alexander, 2018; Freire, 1970/1996) which although we have not used directly, have undoubtedly provided some of the conceptual knowledge used to formulate them. It is important to emphasise that the ethos set out below is not intended to be a prescription of how the forums should be, but rather a description of how they currently are, and a work in progress.

Defining characteristics of the ethos

  • pedagogical (what we share emerges from our teaching practice and we are interested in matters of pedagogy, which includes the use of theory and empirical research to help understand our contributions)
  • dialogic (ideas are shared and explored through dialogue)
  • reflective (the format encourages critical reflection on pedagogical beliefs and practices)
  • supportive (teachers feel free to share ideas and experiences without judgement and feedback is constructive)
  • collaborative (forums promote the sharing of knowledge and have the potential to lead to future collaborative projects)
  • teacher-led (the forum is run by teachers and free from top-down control)
  • equitable (everyone’s contribution is given equal time and status and institutional hierarchies do not apply)
  • non-prescriptive (teachers are free to decide how they wish to use the space)
  • action-oriented (forum contributions both emerge from and feed into our teaching practice)

After coming up with these adjectives, we wondered whether applying a more systematic theoretical framework might provide a deeper layer of understanding. Other research exploring the nature of CPD has focused mainly on the form and content of the activities (e.g. Parkhouse et. al., 2023; Basturkmen, 2019) but we felt that a large part of what makes the forums successful covered aspects such as the nature of the interaction and the power relations between the participants. As such we turned to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), drawing on Halliday’s ‘context of situation’ (1985, p.12) to provide additional insights into the impact of the forums on our practice:

Field (what is happening, the subject matter)

  • EAP pedagogy, critical reflection and knowledge sharing: The field of our discussions was specifically focused on EAP pedagogy, including our teaching practices, methodologies, approaches, theoretical knowledge and classroom experiences. It is important to note that the specific aspects of EAP pedagogy being focused on were chosen by the forum participants themselves (i.e. the field was non-prescriptive). Critical reflection and knowledge sharing were also a large part of what happened in the forum, which can also be said to fall under the field.

Tenor (who is participating, their roles, their relationships and social distance)

  • EAP teachers, peers/colleagues/friends, non-hierarchical: Although we may have had different levels of experience as EAP teachers, different roles within the department and varying degrees of familiarity with each other on a personal level, we were all colleagues and participating in this forum on an equal footing in our role as EAP teachers, with everyone having the same opportunity to present their ideas. This meant that interactions were collegial, inclusive and free from hierarchical constraints. The fact that the forums were teacher-led produced a peer-to-peer dynamic and a sense of collective ownership among the participants rather than a top-down, hierarchical structure where participants might have felt disempowered.

Mode (how communication is taking place)

  • Oral presentation, Q&A, group discussion, sharing of lesson materials, online messaging: Generally, the turns would begin with an oral presentation supplemented by the lesson materials as a visual aid. This was followed by semi-formal Q&A and freer, more exploratory forms of dialogue, including online messaging in the meeting chat. Overall, dialogue was the most common mode of communication and even the more monologic presentational elements were always with a view to generating discussion.

From our SFL analysis of the forums we realised that the field, tenor and mode all contributed to their success. The opportunity to share and reflect on our EAP teaching practice on our own terms filled an important gap in our professional development at the Language Centre. Teachers talking about teaching may not seem particularly unusual and certainly not revolutionary, but in our context it did actually feel like that.

TEACHERS’ FORUMS WITHIN THE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT ECOSYSTEM
In our discussions about how the TFs have impacted our practice we often referred to them as part of a range of other developmental activities within the Language Centre and beyond, referred to here as a ‘teacher development ecosystem’. Within the Language Centre, a key comparison for all of us was the EAP Journal Club (JC). This was set up by the same people, in-sessional teachers, and at roughly the same time as the TFs in response to what we felt was the need for more opportunities within Language Centre structures to engage with our professional-academic field of EAP and to foreground EAP knowledge. JCs were designed with a similar ethos to the TFs, sharing many aspects of their tenor and mode: teacher-led, collegial and dialogic group discussions. The JCs met roughly once a month throughout the year to discuss an EAP-related journal article, suggested by members of the Language Centre. This also operated on our own terms, with no workload allocation and timed during lunch breaks.

Compared to the TFs, the field of the JCs was one step removed from our individual teaching practice and while we often moved the discussion between the theoretical claims of journal articles and our own teaching contexts, the focus was more theoretical and oriented towards the journal article. Another field-related difference between the TFs and JCs was that while our discussions in the TFs tended to be more focused outwards, towards making sense of the disciplines we were working with, e.g., Dentistry, Urban Planning, Computer Science, the discussions in the JCs looked inwards, towards EAP, for example engaging with corpus methods, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) or EAP teacher identity. As regulars at both TFs and JCs we found these differences complementary, with contributions in TFs prompting suggestions for articles to read in JCs, and discussion in JCs referencing and building on discussions in TFs. We feel that the interaction between these two activities – moving between theory-oriented and practice-oriented – allowed us to develop greater confidence in not only our practice but also how it can engage with and speak back to the academic field of EAP, also recognised in the Language Scholar’s manifesto (Ding et. al., 2018). While we felt they were complimentary, the JCs were generally less well attended than the TFs, despite sharing a similar tenor and mode. A possible explanation for this is that while the TFs were grounded in everyday practice, JCs may have been seen as being one step removed from the immediate concerns of being an ‘effective teacher’ (Taylor, 2022), or perhaps the additional time commitment required to read an article before attending was off putting.

In addition to the impact on us as a group of teachers, the TFs played a role in our individual scholarship journeys in different ways. For example, Rob had been reading about SFL for a while (Thompson, 2004), and had discussed a few SFL-related articles at the JCs (e.g. Caplan, 2019; Monbec, 2018) but had yet to incorporate this theory in his materials. He used the TFs to share his aspirations to do this, sharing initial ideas and then, later, the materials he had produced. These sessions allowed him to articulate his understanding of SFL and share his concerns and excitement about the potential he felt it offered. His contributions interested two other teachers, who contacted him after the TFs to discuss and eventually trial and review the materials. The interest from colleagues and subsequent opportunities to discuss and develop his initial idea inspired Rob to describe this experience in more detail in a blog post (Playfair, 2022) and as a result of the post, was asked to contribute to a cross-institutional collaboration, by contributing to a blog post on learning about SFL (Monbec, 2022). In this example, the impact of the TFs was to create a supportive space to articulate and share his professional hopes and concerns and inspire him to share these more widely with a professional community interested in applications of SFL.

TEACHERS’ FORUMS AS CRITICAL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Our discussions indicated a general reluctance to label the forums professional development (PD), which we associated with a managerial, one-size-fits-all approach, where teachers are positioned as passive recipients of decontextualised knowledge (we later discovered that many others share this view, e.g. Kohli et al. 2015 and Parkhouse et al. 2023). This top-down approach to PD resembles Freire’s (1970/1996, p.52) ‘banking model’ of education where students are treated as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge that is ‘detached from reality’ and ‘completely alien to [their] existential experience’. In contrast to the banking model, the TFs, based on dialogue and emerging from our own teaching contexts, seemed to share many of the features of Freire’s (1996, p.60) ‘problem-posing’ education. As such, we turned to Freire, as well as more recent literature on critical PD (e.g. Kohli et al. 2015; Parkhouse et. al., 2023), to see whether that might provide a useful framework for understanding the TFs.

One of the key features of Freire’s critical pedagogy is that education is a form of praxis, that is, ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (Freire, p.33). As far as reflection is concerned, the TFs, undoubtedly, provide a space for us to reflect on our realities by giving us the freedom to decide what we choose to share in the forums. Furthermore, although action is not explicitly encouraged, our discussions revealed numerous examples of the TFs’ potential to lead to action, including experiments with classroom activities, exploration of theoretical approaches and the undertaking of group scholarship projects. The very fact that we are writing this paper is testament to the TFs’ potential for transformative action. Reflecting on this, we feel that a move to raise more explicit awareness of the possibilities for action by adding a final group discussion stage focusing on possible actions could further enhance the forums’ transformative potential.

While the forums incorporated reflection and action successfully, another important element of Freire's praxis is that it should explicitly address systems of oppression and encourage participants to recognise their role within these systems (Parkhouse et al., 2023). The goal is to develop a critical consciousness that can enable participants to identify the root causes of oppressive systems by making connections to broader socio-political and historical realities, thus empowering them to challenge these systems. Reflecting on the forums, we realised that there have been multiple occasions where people's contributions have led to discussions of political issues, in particular regarding the marginalised position of in-sessional teachers within the university. Issues have included the structural barriers that some of us faced when liaising with subject tutors; and the perception of being on a ‘hamster wheel’ of teaching and assessment throughout the year with little time for reflection, development or scholarship. However, although political structures at an institutional level were discussed, our lack of an explicitly critical approach meant that we made no conscious attempt to explore the root causes of these issues more deeply. Furthermore, many of our contributions did not critically examine power dynamics, as we were simply sharing our lesson materials and asking for feedback. Parkhouse et al. (2023) warn that PD that fails to adopt a critical perspective runs the risk of legitimising existing inequities, excluding the student voice and reinforcing deficit narratives. This led us to reflect that by their very nature the TFs lack the students' perspective and in future we could place more focus on discussing potential issues facing students such as excessive workloads and deficit perspectives about their abilities.

Revisiting the ‘context of situation’ analysis, we felt that the forums’ mode and tenor were closely aligned with critical pedagogy principles in that they were dialogic and teacher-led, but that the field still required more explicit focus on integrating student perspectives, examining power relations and exploring the broader socio-political and historical realities that shape our contexts. These gaps echo previous critiques of critical PD studies, often found to be lacking in either in-depth political analysis or a problem-posing approach (Parkhouse et al. 2019). To address this, although we would not want to compromise the TF’s non-prescriptive ethos by making impositions regarding the content of the teachers’ contributions, critical perspectives could still be feasibly built into the dialogic process, by, for example, including asking questions related to the broader socio-political context in the discussion stage. Overall, we believe that adopting a critical PD approach can provide a useful direction in which to develop the TFs and unlock their potential for empowering EAP practitioners to challenge the status quo.

TEACHERS’ FORUMS AS SCHOLARSHIP
The key theme in this special issue is scholarship in EAP, which led us to reflect on what engaging in scholarship means for us as EAP practitioners and the extent to which TFs could be considered as a form of scholarship. From a wide range of possible definitions, rather than subscribe to one in particular, we have taken an eclectic approach to identify aspects of scholarship which most accurately capture our experience and aspirations. It also became clear from our discussions and reflections that we did not share identical notions of scholarship but that this in itself was not particularly surprising or problematic for us. A key point to emerge from our discussions was that scholarship carries different meanings for each of us and is influenced by our professional contexts, experiences of teaching and scholarship and our individual scholarly interests. A further theme was how scholarship can be manifest in different ways, ranging from more formal, public activities such as publishing a research-based paper to examples of less public and more informal (but no less valuable) practices such as discussing a published article with colleagues. Based on our reflections, the processes of and possibilities for scholarship emerged as various points along clines of formality and publicness, points which we occupy and move between according to our contexts, needs and preferences as well as external factors such as time and resource constraints.

Different definitions of scholarship from the literature struck a chord with us owing to their focus upon reflection (McKinney, 2003), knowledge transfer (Shulman, 2001; Atkinson, 2001) and pedagogical inquiry (Kreber, 2007; Felten, 2013). However, the description of scholarship which spoke to us most markedly was that of the Language Scholar’s Manifesto for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Ding et al., 2018). The key points below in italics which we felt were particularly evident in our experiences of TFs are taken directly from this manifesto, followed by an explanation as to how these points relate to our evaluation of TFs.

‘scholarship is about impact’: The impact of the TFs was primarily on us as EAP practitioners, our understanding of our own practices, those of our colleagues and a deeper appreciation of the contexts in which we worked. With the emphasis being upon our teaching, TFs also had an indirect impact upon our students in terms of the design and delivery of courses, materials and activities.

‘scholarship that is collegial, collaborative and conversational, but also critical, combative and cautious’: The democratic and dialogic nature of TFs provided an informal space where we could openly discuss the challenges we were facing in our teaching, whilst at the same time using our experience to challenge our thinking and EAP practice and learn collectively from our mistakes.

‘scholarship is a powerful tool for language educators’: Setting up TFs and making them a regular activity, open to all teachers has been transformative in giving EAP pedagogy a more prominent place on the agenda in our context.

These strands of the manifesto are particularly relevant to our analysis and reflections on TFs as a form of and space for scholarship. However, it also became apparent that there were certain aspects of the manifesto where we felt TFs do not currently align but could develop further. As mentioned earlier, TFs have the potential to include more explicit student focus and involvement. In fact, it could be argued that teachers talking about teaching in TFs without including students in that conversation is somewhat remiss. Furthermore, in seeking closer alignment with the maxim that ‘students deserve the best knowledge and understanding we can muster when teaching’, involving students in shaping that knowledge can provide valuable and powerful input.

In arguing that TFs can be seen as cultivating, encouraging and enacting scholarship, it is not to suggest that this is necessarily problem-free. Reflecting on some of the challenges of this position, a key question was whether we want TFs to be seen as a form of scholarship or not and whether the potential rewards of framing TFs as scholarship outweigh the possible risks.

In terms of potential rewards, the informal and open-to-all nature of TFs can foster a broader definition of and involvement in scholarship. TFs can demystify scholarship and create a more inclusive environment for scholarship, providing a space for ‘easing into’ scholarship through engagement with more concrete teaching practice. TFs promote knowledge-sharing amongst fellow EAP practitioners and recognition of teachers’ expertise at all stages of their EAP careers. A further possible reward of TFs is that they can provide a springboard/sounding board for other forms of scholarship and collaborations, both within the team and with colleagues in other institutions. Overall, we reflected on the positive impact of TFs in their contribution to our EAP teaching practice, EAP scholarship and EAP teacher identity.

In considering the risks of positioning TFs as a form of scholarship, one outcome could be that this creates a basis of division amongst practitioners. The term ‘scholarship’ could act as a deterrent to some who identify with ‘EAP teaching-only roles’ (Taylor, 2022, p.277) and might thereby discourage participation in TFs. Placing TFs under a scholarship umbrella could also bring greater expectations for teachers such as further outputs and the pressure to publish or present. TFs as a form of scholarship could also be prone to the threat of managerialism whereby TFs can become co-opted as a tick-box exercise, possibly leading to more surface-level scholarship akin to ‘sheep-dip’ PD. Another potential risk of TFs as scholarship is that they could become absorbed and governed by more formal management-led systems and policies. Not only might this lead to a loss of teacher agency and ownership of TFs, but such a top-down approach to the forums and management shaping TFs as scholarship would go against the very ethos of TFs.

Overall, the longevity of TFs in our context indicates that the rewards of framing TFs as scholarship outweigh the risks. TFs lend themselves to involving elements of scholarship, to greater or lesser extents, and still leave room to not be defined in this way. Our reflections have repeatedly highlighted the need to engage in scholarship on some level to be better equipped to do our jobs as discipline-specific in-sessional EAP teachers. This is borne out by the BALEAP TEAP framework which states there is an expectation that teachers engage in scholarship in order to be a better-informed EAP practitioner with knowledge of their students’ disciplinary practices (BALEAP, 2022). The need to create a space for this to happen was a significant part of the initial impetus for setting up TFs. The TF/scholarship intersection was a recurring theme in our reflections, as well as the observation that as TFs have evolved, the role of TFs in relation to scholarship has also evolved.

CONCLUSION
Reflecting on the TFs, we believe they have achieved their original goal of creating a space to explore and develop our EAP pedagogy. Our reflections have raised a number of points which can aid our understanding of why TFs have prevailed and their potential for growth. Firstly, TFs have functioned as a form of teacher-led professional development, allowing us to experience the benefits of simply talking about teaching with our fellow teachers. Further analysis suggests that the grassroots nature of the forums and the equal relationship between participants can position teachers as agents rather than objects of change (Kohli et al. 2015). Indeed, TFs have offered us routes to action, ranging from slight amendments to the design of an EAP teaching activity, countering the official positioning of EAP within our institutional context and enacting more scholarship-oriented roles which were not part of our official job descriptions, not least collaborating on this article. In addition to addressing challenges, TFs have been able to accentuate the positive aspects of our in-sessional work by alleviating the isolation which can occur in such a context, building an academic community within and beyond our institution, and strengthening our professional identity.

As our analysis has shown, TFs are not an isolated activity nor a panacea for teacher development – they stem from and feed into the particular contexts of our EAP teaching practice and our individual orientations. Setting them up has allowed us to reprioritise the knowledge, values and discourses which we felt were being taken for granted, representing an effort to reframe EAP on our own terms. Possible future directions might include introducing more explicit ways of incorporating students into discussions, adding critical perspectives to the task and format and foregrounding the possibilities for action in discussions. However, the actual way in which TFs evolve in future will be shaped by the teachers who participate in them, and in response to contexts in which they work. We hope that this article will inspire some practitioners to engage with TFs on their own terms and develop the TFs in response to their own contexts.

Addresses for correspondence: jeni.driscoll@liverpool.ac.uk, William.Hardman@liverpool.ac.uk and rplayf01@student.bbk.ac.uk

 

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