Mentoring language teaching professionals in/through Exploratory Practice

This chapter tells the story of our experiences of starting Exploratory Practice (EP) in a new and vibrant setting (Professional Development in Turkey and Northern Cyprus). We explore in-service language teacher education with the introduction of EP as an inquiry-based tool for professional development. Engaging teachers as learners of ‘doing-being’ research can be a catalyst for developing from a focus on practitioners as passive recipients of knowledge to active generators of understandings and knowledge. However, this shift poses epistemological challenges for teachers who do not yet have or are still developing a researcher identity. Together with teachers, teacher educators and curriculum developers, we work to understand the complexities of our various educational contexts

Introduction: Exploratory Practice: Explorations in language teacher education and continuing professional development

This chapter introduces the theoretical concepts of Exploratory Practice. These include working for quality of life, understanding, puzzlement, collegiality, mutual development, sustainability and continuity, and integrating research into pedagogy. The Introduction gives an overview of the chapters contained in the volume, each of which applies one or more of these principles to practice, and thus develops the theoretical impact of Exploratory Practice

Language teachers making sense of Exploratory Practice

This article critically examines the implementation of Exploratory Practice in an English for academic purposes (EAP) context in a British university. The innovation involved challenges as well as opportunities for uniting learning, teaching and research. Particular emphasis is given to two teachers, who are the focus of this article: the story of one, ‘Jenny’, illustrates the processes of doing Exploratory Practice with learners of EAP, while the story of the other, ‘Bella’, provides insight into the notion of puzzlement, a central feature of the Exploratory Practice framework. For these practitioners, it was clear that the integration of pedagogy with locally relevant, small-scale research activity, held a wealth of opportunities for language learning and teaching