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The EAP Practitioner in the Academy: A Watershed Moment

20th May 2017 @ 10:30am - 4:00pm

An EAP in the North Symposium hosted by Durham University English Language Centre.

Guest speakers:

Dr Alex Ding (Leeds)

Dr Gregory Hadley (Niigata/Oxford)

This one-day symposium will explore the changing nature of the EAP practitioner’s roles and responsibilities in the reality of today’s marketised higher education. In the words of our first guest speaker, Dr Gregory Hadley (Niigata/Oxford), EAP professionals “…are being reshaped and resocialized through discourse and practices that derive from the corporate world”. We will explore the effects of these macro-level global influences on policies at the meso-level (institutions) and on the micro-level of practice in EAP units and classrooms. As our second speaker, Dr Alex Ding (Leeds) will then explore, however, the EAP profession may be partly complicit in the precariousness that many of us experience. Practitioners tend to operate “at the margins of academia”; however, most of us “…are also only, at best, marginally academic”. It is an understanding of individual and collective agency that can offer a way forwards. This capacity for academic and professional agency provides both a cause for optimism and a basis for action.

In an afternoon of discussion, we pick up the themes of the morning to explore the ways in which EAP professionals working in university settings might act to shape stronger academic identities, to steer a course though professional liminality, to exploit our hybridity and to forge the cultural capital needed to effect change in higher education.

Speaker abstracts and bios can be found here.

Tea/coffee and biscuits will be available on arrival; however, please note that lunch will not be provided at this event. Participants are asked to make their own arrangements and the lunch break allows for time to head into Durham, should participants wish to do so. Participants are asked not to bring into College their own food/drink.

Please note that spaces at this event are limited to 50 and will be allocated on a first-come basis.

Please register via the event website link below (as this event is not run by BALEAP).

Details

Date:
20th May 2017
Time:
10:30am - 4:00pm
Event Category:
Website:
https://www.dur.ac.uk/conference.booking/details/?id=770

Organizer

Alex Ding
Email
a.ding@leeds.ac.uk