Teaching-informed scholarship: A conversation between two EAP practitioners and researchers of Asian descent
Language Centre, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds
Department of Rhetoric and Language, College of Arts and Sciences, University of San Francisco
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses how teaching contexts shape the scholarship journeys of two practitioners of EAP / ESL of East Asian descent. Adopting a critical co-constructed autoethnographic approach, our dialogue illustrates and reflects on our diverse experiences in various contexts of teaching, with the aim to engage fellow educators and scholars in similar conversations regarding teaching and scholarship. Specifically, we explore how various teaching contexts, including geographic locations, programme levels, and module types, have influenced our scholarship and research directions. We challenge the false dichotomy between research and teaching, emphasising that teaching can facilitate and enrich research with our own examples in corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics. Our own experiences have demonstrated the reciprocal feedback loop between teaching and scholarship. These diverse teaching experiences have allowed us to engage with students at various levels and draw inspiration from these interactions to benefit our scholarship journeys. In addition to the lessons learned, we also discuss challenges faced throughout our journeys, drawing on contexts of language teaching and raciolinguistic research. Our conversations call attention to the need to notice not just individual facets of identity but rather the dynamic intersections of migration history, race, gender, and age of practitioners of EAP / ESL and how they influence the ways in which they impact research and scholarship in the field. Doing so can assist and enrich the ways we understand the connections and natural feedback loop between teaching and learning in EAP, fostering a sense of humility and empathy among educators, positively influencing their pedagogical approaches.
KEYWORDS: academic writing, discipline-specific EAP, autobiography
INTRODUCTION
In this paper, we draw on raciolinguistic research and adopt critical co-constructed autoethnography (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2012, 2020; Warren-Gordon & Jackson-Brown, 2022) as a methodology to delve into some key moments in our academic lives that forefront the ways they have impacted our pedagogies. In this piece, we recount experiences where our teaching contexts have influenced our scholarship. While we both enter academia with clear paths of scholarship and research in mind, our teaching engagements turn out to have greatly influenced our scholarship. We hope the discussion of our experiences that are diverse in different ways will be productive for fellow practitioners and instructors. In this piece, we address how our teaching contexts have shaped or guided our scholarship. Here we define “teaching context” broadly to include geographical locations, programme levels, and the nature of the modules. We also want to highlight the false dichotomy between scholarship and teaching. There already exists a vast body of literature on research-informed teaching or teaching-informed research (Sharkey, 2018; Rose, 2019), which is not in any way a contested notion to our knowledge. On the other hand, though, there is a persistent notion that great researchers should not spend too much of their time on teaching -- which likely comes from the “publish-or-perish” culture. We would like to use our own examples to showcase that teaching can in fact be facilitative to scholarship and research; in the case of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), hands-on teaching is even more crucial. Meanwhile, researcher-teachers constantly get inspiration from teaching and supervision. We consider it natural to have a feedback loop between teaching and scholarship.
Both of us have taught in a wide variety of contexts, as well as skills and content courses. We perceive teaching contexts broadly in terms of geographical location, level of students, size of the institution, and any other factors that affect our teaching practice. Collectively, we have taught in the United Kingdom, United States, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In terms of teaching, each of us has worked on a very wide range of modules. Charles was trained in formal and experimental linguistics, but took up teaching and supervision duties in applied linguistics and EAP modules that have shaped his scholarship towards corpus and English linguistics. Genevieve was trained in educational linguistics, specifically in language and cultural maintenance in Chinese American communities. She has spent most of her academic career teaching academic speaking and writing classes in EAP programs in universities in the U.S. The variety of teaching allows us to interact with students at different levels and be inspired by such interactions. We also discuss the challenges and lessons learned through our journeys.
METHODOLOGY
Theoretical/Methodological foregrounding
In many academic spaces where it is more “valuable” to produce single-authored publications, it is not common or considered “advantageous” for scholars to collaborate, let alone reflect together on shared pedagogies and classroom experiences. Despite this, work on critical theory, critical pedagogy, and critical co-constructed autoethnography has noted how providing researchers with the collaborative space to reflect on the tempo, uncertainty, complexity of research relationship and how friendships might facilitate this process is an important and needed part of the teaching and collaboration process (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2012; 2020). Following Cann and Demeulenaere’s methodology, the two authors of this paper used this technique to engage each other in a collaborative interview and writing process to discuss our stories and experiences, focusing on our racialized and multilingual selves across different points of time and space. This was particularly helpful because as academics and teachers, we have never been based in the same parts of the world, though there have been definite overlaps in our student populations; we model this collaborative autoethnography after others that draw on friendship as a method of inquiry with the potential to transform space and time via counter storytelling to challenge dominant power structures (c.f., Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Tillmann-Healy, 2003; Toyosaki & Pensoneau-Conway, 2013). We started the dialogues on Zoom and continued on a shared Google document. Analysing the chapter template and prompt together, we responded in the form of a Q-A narrative, with the goal of supporting each other. We feel the latter is particularly important to address because as Warren-Gordon and Jackson-Brown, two Black female faculty members working in a predominately White institution, illustrate in their 2022 work, the value of using co-constructed autoethnography lies in articulating voices of those who have traditionally been underrepresented in academia. In choosing to collaborate in this way, we, like other scholars before us, seek allyship in each other through this process.
The autoethnographic approach
Generally, an ethnography refers to "the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution" (Simpson and Coleman, 2017). In the present autoethnographic account, we are the participants as well as the observers, providing the advantage of thorough understanding of our own experience and motivations as practitioner-scholar in language and linguistics, allowing us to reflect on our practice and journey of teaching and scholarship.
Specific to EAP, the recent contribution by Collins and Holliday (2023: 177-179) points out how the “expansion of ethnographic possibilities” reveals knowledge that was previously unrecognised. By stressing the use of ethnography beyond a data collection method, Collins and Holliday also show how the ethnography can provide a different perspective to offer new insights in the meaning-making, following Blommaert (2018). To differentiate the autoethnographic approach from traditional quantitative and qualitative methods, Canagarajah (2012: 114-115) lists several features of autoethnography, such as "self as the basis for knowledge", "role of narrative in constructing knowledge", "learning from emotions'', "the validity of constructivism" and "the objective of social change", which also serve as the foundation of the present study. Of particular interest is a recent study by Schmor et al. (2023) that discusses three plurilingual EAP instructors through trioethnographic interviews. They explore how their lived experiences shaped plurilingual teaching practices, revealing a progression from linguistic and cultural microaggressions (e.g., accent-based microaggressions) to “microaffirmations” (e.g. reframing monolingual ideologies to acknowledge plurilingualism). Moreover, as Tejada-Sánchez (2020) notes, an autoethnographic approach answers questions such as, “What were the key milestones in my professional development? How did I become a critically reflexive teacher, and what have been my guiding notions in the construction of a professional self?” (p. 104). These previous studies, taken together, highlight the significance and relevance of the ethnographic approach to understand practice in EAP. However, most of these studies focus on student education and have not discussed scholarly work or identity of EAP practitioners. This study therefore attempts to complement the previous studies by advancing the discussion beyond practice in teaching and learning.
Critical co-constructed autoethnographic exploration
Below is a process of us asking each other questions that we have had on our minds but were not able to fully process in an academic manner until now. The anecdotes we have chosen to share have been intentionally selected to illustrate the systematic and institutional issues related to our field at every stage of the academic pipeline. We hope that by sharing our lived experiences and reflections, we show how forms of systematic constraints within higher education and language teaching affect not only our - but our students’ - abilities to navigate academia.
HOW OUR SCHOLARSHIP HAS BEEN INFORMED BY TEACHING ACTIVITIES
Charles: Thanks for agreeing to have this conversation! Do you remember how we met each other?
Genevieve: I think we first met at an academic conference on Cantonese linguistics at the Ohio State University in 2016! We didn’t really talk too much during the actual conference, but I believe a bunch of us went out for ice cream with the conference organizers after the conference was over, and I remember you being very friendly. I also remember that you were very nice to my graduate student, and that stood out to me because ordinarily faculty don’t pay attention to graduate students because they’re the lowest on the totem pole. The fact that you even paid attention to my student was really something that was meaningful to me. I thought, “Wow, this guy seems like a cool dude.” Over the years we’ve kept in touch, co-presented together at conferences, co-authored various publications, and been good academic friends and allies. You even hosted me and my student once when we were presenting at a conference in Hong Kong, which was extremely generous. I also have to say, as a Chinese American scholar doing work on Cantonese, you have always been supportive and understanding - you have never imposed a perspective that I had to be like or sound like a “Hong Konger,” which I have always appreciated. When my maternal grandmother passed away in 2016 and I had to give the eulogy in Cantonese, you offered your help in proofreading and wordsmithing my bilingual Cantonese-English script, which was invaluable because I could not ask my own family members for help because they were all grieving from my grandmother’s unexpected passing. I am not sure if you knew how much this help and validation meant to me as both a researcher and fellow Cantonese speaker from the diaspora. In my academic lifetime it has been rare to be accepted unconditionally by researchers from Hong Kong.
C: That’s very nice to hear, thanks! I was fascinated by the works of your student and you from the perspective of Asian Americans. I was then a newly appointed assistant professor in an English department, definitely navigating my way as a faculty member. Being in a Cantonese-focused linguistics workshop actually attracted some questions within my department. I think it’s revealing about the many presumed and oversimplified dichotomies in language studies: target languages of research, quantitative vs. qualitative methodology (I happen to appreciate both approaches, not to mention mixed-method research), theoretical vs. empirical (I personally do not see how you can do one without understanding the other). My training was in formal linguistics under the Chomskyan generative tradition, which is by nature non-colonial because of its position that different languages are equal manifestations of the human language faculty. I have always felt like a black sheep that my interests involve both English and Cantonese -- wherever I go, there’s another part that does not seem to belong. However, it actually worked out well, because I also got to teach a linguistics module on comparative grammar. While this is well-aligned with my own research at the time, I did struggle a bit with the preconception that English is somehow a better language (mostly from students) --- which my training in the United States did not fully prepare me for.
Your teaching and research also involve different languages, how’s your experience? I think part of the reason we became academic friends was how we both embrace multilingualism in our teaching and research. It is not often to find colleagues who can share similar experiences.
G: True - I think you and I became fast friends because we both knew what it was like to be at the sort of “periphery,” in multiple senses of the word. Though I was hired to teach in an English as a Second Language (ESL) department in 2012, which was later renamed Academic English for Multilingual Students in 2014, I’ve always felt like my “real” research wasn’t ever squarely about this population of students and that much of my time was spent pretending that I belonged in this department. Like the case of many universities, there was a time when we were recruiting a very large population of international students, mostly from mainland China, who were willing to pay full private school tuition (which is now upwards of $80,000 USD), without fully thinking through how to best support these students academically. Even at my job interview, when the committee stated they had a high influx of Chinese international students and that many students spoke Mandarin, I specifically told the interview committee that my research looked at Cantonese-speaking Chinese Americans. Either they did not have the knowledge that this was a different population, or they just assumed one “Asian” faculty member was fine to address all “Asian” students’ needs. As a Chinese American child of immigrants from Hong Kong and Southern China, part of me wanted to scream, “I’m not like my students!!! I’m an American!” but at the same time I feel a sense of responsibility to make sure these students are not being exploited like other immigrants have been before them in so many other U.S. contexts.
And when I see some of the shortcomings in addressing these needs, it really becomes an issue of equity. How can we draw on our international students’ assets if we only see them as cash cows? How can we help our international students graduate in four years as promised if we cannot ensure there are classes and linguistic and academic supports for them to succeed? Can we more equitably ensure that our international students have a more positive experience at our university? I definitely think we can do a stronger job at supporting these students.
C: I like what you just said about the sense of responsibility for these students. In a way I’m more like them in terms of the learning experience. I grew up in Asia and studied in Europe and the U.S. I feel that my personal experience is relevant for my students (especially those in postgraduate programmes), even for international students who are not from East Asian backgrounds, I still find it useful and encouraging to see an instructor that shares their own experiences.
Definitely we can do a better job in supporting students. In my context of teaching, I think what students often need is far beyond the basic level of grammar or writing correct English. Rather, they need to see how they can express themselves in the academic world. I have once heard a colleague suggesting that their students’ English was not good enough to hold daily conversations, insinuating that they should not be in postgraduate programmes. That made me think: “Hmm, the daily conversation or the small talks are often the hardest part for me, especially with a native speaker from the host country.” I had often assumed that this is common knowledge, though it probably is not the case. I think it goes back to some basic understanding of second language learners and this myth that students can only move to the next level until they have mastered everything at what is considered the lower level. It certainly surfaces as an education and social justice issue, but my training in formal linguistics keeps reminding me that better understanding of the science of language might also be relevant.
G: It always kind of shocks me when I hear fellow linguists - folks who are (supposedly?) trained in the nuances between descriptivism and prescriptivism - take such an uncritical and deficit view towards students whose first language isn’t English. Actually, my first language is not English, either - I spent the first five years of my life speaking primarily Cantonese, though my parents were advanced degree holders and could speak English perfectly fine - they just thought it was important for me and my younger brother to foster our Cantonese first. When it was time to go to public schools, we were put in ESL classes and it was immediately apparent to me that English was the language of access and privilege in school. I turned off my Cantonese pretty much immediately in public. I think that is what makes our positionalities so important - yours coming from someone born and raised in Asia and mine as the child of immigrants from Asia - for both our colleagues and for our students.
C: You would hope that the power imbalance between English and other languages is better understood where English is not the dominant language (at least outside of the university setting), but I cannot say that’s true in my experience. I’ve started teaching EAP since 2015, initially within the English department for undergraduate linguistics writing, but it gradually expanded to teaching more generic EAP modules for first years. In Hong Kong, students are typically very experienced learners in English. Most subjects in the secondary schools are taught in English, both at secondary and tertiary education settings. Teaching academic writing had definitely got me thinking more deeply about language teaching beyond the grammar or sentential level, especially when the materials I received were quite prescriptive. There was a pervasive notion that students need to build a good foundation (read: to write perfectly grammatical sentences) before they can handle more complex areas of writing (read: to learn about paragraphs and discourse). I ended up incorporating a lot of materials that I considered scientifically sound and grounded in linguistics. I actually had a good experience teaching writing, drawing on my own experiences and challenges as an academic writer.
G: That’s great you found these connections. I think I really resisted calling myself an “EAP” practitioner for a long time because although I have done this type of teaching for pay, this was not really what I was trained to do as a sociolinguist and researcher of language maintenance. Maybe it’s a disciplinary thing, but when you are in a service department like mine, you oftentimes are only seen as “just” teaching first-year or remedial writing. I spent a lot of time trying to carve out a space that showed others I don’t “just” teach international students remedial English, that I actually teach domestic students, too, and content, at that. But honestly as I began teaching across different populations, especially mixed classes where domestic, international, and 1.5 generation students were in class together, I realised quickly these “boundaries” were really quite blurry. It took a while but finally I realised I could craft different writing assignments where my students can still write about topics they/I both care about. In my food writing class, we do interviews with family members and write about treasured family recipes. We also do an “origin story” assignment where we do a research paper on the history of a specific food item. Almost always, students, regardless of where they were born or what their residence status is, draw on their multilingual, rich immigration histories and family stories to craft their assignments. When I think about my work through this lens, it makes contextualising my work much easier.
C: Food writing class?! That is really cool! Was your article on linguistic landscape and food a product of the class? Or did the class draw on the article? Either way, it is just fantastic to connect your teaching and research.
G: This is a good question and the connection is actually something I never really thought about before until now. The project on the linguistic landscape of Philadelphia Chinatown and the one on intergenerational soup making talk came way before the food writing class was developed. I think it’s because I used to think that writing classes had to be based on canonical texts or “serious” writing and teach from an assigned textbook. I guess this was just how I experienced writing classes as an undergrad. (And come to think of it, I really hated those writing classes - the class I took to fulfil the writing requirement was a course on some sort of obscure poetry, and I never understood the content or the writing assignments at all.) It wasn’t until I started doing more content/theme-based classes like Language and Power that I realised I could play around with my readings more, including a mix of academic and personal writing, and that my students actually enjoyed this way of doing class much more. The theme of food was just to get students excited about the class (who doesn’t like food, right?) but maybe deep inside, that class was just waiting to be crafted all along because it was based on research I was already doing. I’m actually doing a summer immersion class taking students to Taiwan this summer to look at food and cultural ecosystems! How fun is that? It took me a while to connect all the dots, but I’m glad things finally all aligned. It has been a nice way to integrate teaching and research. And how about you? It seems your research on corpus is also directly related to some of the content you’ve taught before?
C: Yes, the link is actually rather direct. I was first hired to teach comparative grammar and corpus linguistics in an English department. With corpus specifically, I think a lot has been said about research-informed teaching, given that attested data can directly facilitate writing instructions, for example, teaching students what the frequent words and common phrases are for specific genres and disciplines. However, the teaching-informed research seems to receive less attention. I had, for example, written about how the English language curriculum in the “World Englishes” context should be adjusted to suit the needs for learners of academic writing. It was interesting to reflect on the practice of teaching students of language studies that are more familiar with humanistic argumentation but less confident in digital skills. This project was directly inspired by my English-major students who had interests in literature. Since then, I have been an advocate for using literary texts to pique students' interests in corpus and quantitative studies - which I consider an essential skill for all career paths.
EVERYDAY POLITICS WITH GENDER AND RACE
C: In addition to the subject matter as the teaching context, I think another important factor affecting our scholarly activities has to do with the power dynamics with other colleagues. I feel I’m often seen as a young scholar, both within my institution and mingling with the research community, but being a man seems to be to my advantage. How has your experience been?
G: I’m glad you bring this up. Even though I have been teaching English for 20 years now, I still get “mistaken” for a student by my colleagues despite the fact I am clearly wearing “teacher” work clothes and an ID badge that only faculty wear. When I correct my colleagues, they almost always respond that it’s because I “look so young” and try to spin it as a compliment. I’ve had a colleague tell me I remind her of her daughter and then proceed to give me unsolicited feedback about my apparel and how to interact with students. I regularly get these types of comments about my clothes - to the point where I feel like I need to say I always make sure my work clothes are not overtly marked as “juvenile”! My go-to outfits are always slacks or a knee-length skirt, a button-down shirt, and a sweater. I’ve also had a colleague comment that my office looks “so Asian” (to this day I have no idea how an office “looks Asian” - the only Asian thing in my office was me!) I’ve had students ask whether they should call me “Mrs.” or “Ms.” without even considering “Professor” was also an option. I wonder if you have received similar comments, but I suspect many of the comments I have received expose ideologies situated at the intersections of age, gender, and race. I would be surprised if you got comments about clothes at the same frequency I did.
For my students, I understand that my correcting them might be a good learning moment for them in their socialization and professionalization into academia. For my colleagues, I think this also stems from larger structural inequalities that include very limited representation of Asian/Asian American female faculty in the field. Did you know that according to 2022 U.S. statistics, of all associate professors in the U.S., only 5.7% identify as Asian female? For full professors, it’s even lower: 4%! Not that it absolves the comments I get, but if our institutions do not see people like me represented in the faculty, we will always be dismissed as not-faculty.
C: The gender imbalance is particularly evident when you look at graduate students in both master and doctoral programmes. There are definitely more female students, and I do not think it is a recent development, but the faculty does not seem to reflect the similar proportion -- at least in some of the places I’d worked at. In my experience in East Asia, white male colleagues are unfortunately still seen as more legitimate in some implied hierarchy, regardless of the topic in question. I’ve had multiple incidents where I was explaining something about the local culture to a new colleague who was white. The attention of this new colleague completely shifted to another colleague who interrupted in an attempt to give additional information. You guessed it, this other helpful colleague was, too, a white person. The colleague who accidentally cut me off from the conversation was actually a good friend and ally. We discussed it afterwards and he felt bad. I was almost amused by how systematic and predictable this behaviour is -- by the new colleague.
My experience in the UK has been more positive. One institution I worked at is rather small and caters to a very local population. Understandably, students are mostly white and there are not many East Asians on campus. One might expect that it would be a difficult experience for me as the absolute minority as a faculty member, but I never had any issue with my colleagues or students. The difference really got me thinking how much this sort of twisted hierarchy was learned / acquired / perpetuated. It seems as though, in a setting where I look too foreign, I am judged more as an individual without being associated with any particular prejudice -- well, other than being mistaken for a student on campus once. Of course, I should also point out that the colleagues in my department have significantly more international experience and are all in linguistics, which tends to be a more liberal discipline.
That said, I should point out that being a man has its privilege in various settings in higher education. For example, I did not feel I was expected by students to provide as much emotional support as some of my colleagues who identify as women did, which saved me from the constant oversharing that these colleagues experienced. I think the contrast is particularly stark when project supervision is involved, or in smaller departments or institutions, where faculty members are assigned to be mentors for the entire four or three years of study.
G: That’s interesting that you’ve experienced privilege and marginalisation in these different settings. I don’t think enough has been talked about in terms of teacher identity along these interrelated lines. And the emotional labour you describe is totally real. Even before the pandemic, students were regularly coming into my office seeking someone with a sympathetic ear. There would be students of colour coming into my office crying at least once a week, sometimes about finances, not fitting in as first-generation students, course content struggles, relationship troubles, thoughts of self-harm. Much of their conversations with me had nothing to do with writing, language, or advising - and many of their concerns I was not trained to address and I could only refer them to our campus psychological services office. Now, especially coming out of the pandemic, I’m finding that students are experiencing mental health crises much more often. It not just affects their ability to do well in the course but also succeed in the university. I’m not sure if my male colleagues experience the same degree of having to do this kind of emotional work, but it’s draining. I sometimes find myself having to take a break from “work” in order to process and decompress from conversations with students.
When this first started happening I was really resisting - I kept thinking, “When I was a student I would not have the gall to talk to my professors about these kinds of concerns. What’s wrong with students these days?” After a bit of reflecting, I also realised throughout my many years of tertiary schooling, I never had any advisors, let alone professors, who looked like me or even had experiences remotely similar to mine as a student of colour. So perhaps this level of empathy - coupled with my students’ bravery to reach out to a faculty member of colour - can also fall in line with transformative teaching. If we truly aim to change the institution, we need to first meet our students where they are and understand what their basic needs and concerns are. I just wish the distribution of labour in doing this were divided more evenly.
C: Speaking of transformation, I do feel that the culture in higher education is gradually changing. Like what you just said, faculty members need to acknowledge that we should meet our students where they are. It seems that institutions are at least taking “student experience” more seriously and willing to see how it might work out when students are getting more support. Did you get to turn some of these challenges, or shall we say learning experience, into scholarship and useful lessons for fellow scholars?
G: Most certainly - I think it helped me find community in scholars who first and foremost understand what it’s like to be “me,” and by that I mean understanding the many intersecting identities that comprise “me”. It doesn’t mean they have to have my exact lived experiences, but it helps that they approach work with some of the same lenses I do. It also helps when we feel fired up about the same things, including when we find ourselves feeling similarly indignant about various issues related to teaching and/or research. This has helped me co-author various pieces related to critical applied linguistics and autoethnographic experiences around raciolinguistics, which has in turn helped me ground my own teaching practices.
C: For me, I think my teaching contexts have inspired some of my scholarship projects quite directly. In the process of introducing the linguistic diversity to students in a comparative grammar class, I got to revisit some old research interests, and include how different forms were used to express the same (e.g., different strategies of showing plural), or how the same form across languages can bear different meanings (think reduplication in English “He ordered a salad-salad”, cf. Ghomeshi et al [2004]). I feel that students often appreciate instructors finding relevant examples in addition to what appears on textbooks or prepared materials.
The other interesting project I have worked on was a collaboration with a colleague in literature who also has interests in digital humanities and data-driven studies in both teaching and research. The collaboration was largely borne out of our constant complaints about students’ averse attitude towards using digital tools. As a response, we ended up with an article discussing how we address the technophobia with a few successful examples. My department at the time was quite “theory-driven”, so I would be careful not to oversell the impact. I remember distinctly that a colleague asked me if I agreed that the quantitative lens to language would “ruin the beauty of language”. I think the question itself is a manifestation of what I meant earlier by false dichotomies about scholarship.
WHAT'S THE TAKE-AWAY?
C: One take-away I can think of is that, like it or not, our actual teaching practice and also research activities are always going to be impacted by various factors. Factors like location, taught discipline, level of the curriculum, student population – among many others – often shape how we teach.
If I already spend time understanding students’ needs through my teaching, it would only be reasonable to leverage the same knowledge to inform my scholarly activities, wouldn’t it? Therefore, I often see teaching-informed scholarship to be necessary, especially when time is a consideration. As we continue to conduct research, these factors prompt us to consider certain things more important than some others. In ESL or EAP, that might mean that we are prioritising certain areas of writing or language, or focussing more on students’ language needs.
G: Maybe this is too “bold” a claim here, but I think whenever I hear a faculty member say they “only” care about research, I oftentimes wonder how they can not also care about students. Similarly, for those who say they “only” care about teaching and don’t have enough bandwidth for research, I also wonder why those two categories cannot be both part and parcel. I think as we have both experienced, our own experiences teaching “international” students (or perhaps more specifically, students who share some heritage of migration and dislocation to us or our ancestors) actually grounds our research and teaching practices. For us, these two can’t be divorced from each other. In fact, as we’ve discussed in this piece together, they truly do inform each other and provide us with a sense of humility, perspective, and empathy that drives our pedagogy, and that can only be a positive thing, right?
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