ESL in Ukraine: my experiences

It’s a hot afternoon in Lviv, Western Ukraine, as I make my way into an old soviet tower block on the outskirts of the city. “English class first floor,” the building’s porter tells me – he’s a boy of around ten years old.  (more…)

Research reflections from the CALD PG Pre-sessional and IFP Text Response programmes

by Jo Kukuczka (Doctoral Student, Open University) & Donna MacLean (EAP Tutor, CALD, University of Bristol)

This blog post reflects on the fruits of our research and teaching collaboration across boundaries, and we don’t just mean institutional boundaries. The pedagogical research we report on here took place in the post-pandemic academic year of 2022/2023, the year disrupted by ongoing national HEI industrial action and the cost-of-living crisis affecting all involved. Only the support and dedication of CALD leadership and pre-sessional and IFP Text Response teams and students made this intervention possible under such circumstances, and ultimately enabled closer collaboration between the researcher (Jo) and the teacher (Donna) leading to this reflection. Read on to hear our story.  (more…)

Since 2021, I have collaborated with students to create four blog posts.  Collaborative blogging with students has since informed my Students as Partners research direction as part of the Centre’s Research and Publication project, led by Deputy Director, Kevin Haines. The first blog was titled ‘Gen Z,  Post-95ers/95后  satori generation さとり世代 and teachers’ use of emojis’ (2021).  It was written during lockdown in collaboration with Pre-sessional students, and identified that the connotation of the 🙂 emoji was no longer a positive one.  The second blog ‘Co-Creation of a Blog with CALD Pre-sessional Students’ (2022), was an opportunity for Pre-sessional students to interview an IFP student about her approach to a summative reflection task which the PS students had to complete themselves.  This resulted in a poster style ‘artefact’ which has since been incorporated into teaching materials at CALD.   

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by Deb Catavello

“Complete, relevant, fairly sophisticated response to task”. This is how the first descriptor in the 70s band of the International Foundation Programme (IFP) marking criteria reads. But what do these words – to which we could add “criticality”, “thorough” “in-depth” “systematic” analysis – mean to my students on the IFP? Although we’d discussed some of this language in class – sometimes using this visual of Bloom’s taxonomy – I wanted to provide my IFP students with a toolkit they could use to go about doing analysis. (more…)

by Donna Mac Lean

I joined CALD’s Research and Publications Project with the idea of co-creating a blog post with Pre-Sessional 10-week students for publication on the CALD blog. I was originally interested in “students as agentic actors rather than objects of research” (Charteris, 2020), so I hoped that meetings with the students would suggest the topic of the blog post and provide pedagogical insights to research further. This research idea evolved through a blog post I had co-authored with PS6 students in 2021, as well as in discussions with Kevin Haines around contextualising the idea broadly within Students as Partners research, among other critical perspectives. (more…)

by Kerry Boakes

A sociomaterial perspective views a ‘learning space’ as consisting of a range of actors that shape educational practices which are material and social. ‘Space’ is a social construction, according to French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1991); it is a product and a process defined by the power distribution of its social context. Therefore, rather than a static container to be filled, a ‘learning space’ can be considered a ‘sociomaterial’ process that exists through the interconnectivity of human and non-human actors. It allows us to see these different actors not in isolation but in the way they interact with one another. Digital platforms are often seen as tools that we utilise for a particular outcome, but learning space theorists claim that what is happening is more complex (Lamb et al. 2021). (more…)