LITMIR.BIZ

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would then need to be assessed and scrutinised. Whatever the outcome, it would undoubtedly lead to more questions.

      However, working within a newly established centre for teaching excellence, as one of its first Fellows, I was also working within certain expectations and under a spotlight of institutional scrutiny. Whatever my own limited expectations of my work, the institutional ones were that I should feed into developments around institutional teaching practice and policy, make recommendations and suggest changes. SoTL is, after all, about impact. This institutional push felt, at times, to come too early and I was persuaded to go public via blogs and online videos before I felt I had something concrete to contribute. This external push did, however, also force me to formulate ideas where I might otherwise have procrastinated.

      One such push was the need to succinctly explain the purpose of my project to others very early in the process. I initially outlined it as: ‘understanding the significant roles language plays in shaping discipline specific knowledge and understanding’. The specific ‘research’ question then became: How do taught post graduate tutors and students experience the intersection of language and disciplinary knowledge communication. What impact does this have on their identity?

      However, underlying this question were layers of other complex, inter-related questions that all impacted on my approach to the investigation as it developed. These included:

      • Why do I need to understand this?

      • Who else needs to understand the role language plays?

      • How much more do I and these ‘else’ need to understand than is already known?

      • How do ‘we’ currently understand the role language plays?

      • How significant do we believe language is in shaping our disciplinary knowledge?

      • What (kind of) language do we think is significant within our discipline?

      • Do we think about language at all?

      • Is language considered within teaching and learning practices?

      • What does our understanding of language and a discipline say about the way the discipline is taught and learned (and assessed)?

      • Is there consensus of understanding around the role of language: across disciplines; between teachers and students; between EAP teachers and content teachers? If not, is consensus necessary? If necessary, how can it be reached?

      • What is the role of the student, the content teacher and the EAP teacher in developing an understanding of the discipline and its language?

      • What do we mean by language?

      Each one of these is in itself a complex question that continues to be debated in the field of applied linguistics and EAP. Language competencies alone are ‘complex, dynamic and holistic’ (The Douglas Fir Group, 2016: 26). I do not, then, attempt to provide comprehensive answers to any of these questions in isolation; rather it is necessary to highlight that a focused question created for one SoTL project does not emerge in isolation to others. The Douglas Fir Group have provided a useful framework that demonstrates the ‘multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching’ (2016: 24). If we are truly working to understand a real situation, we cannot construct a true picture if this complexity of intersecting issues is not considered.

Methodological Approach

      As an ‘accidental scholar’ the theoretical and methodological influences on my thinking expanded as the project progressed. The aim was not to find a fit within a specific research paradigm or to find a disciplinary home. As an EAP practitioner it is necessary to have knowledge of wider academic communities in order to act as a bridge or an opener of thresholds for our students. As a practitioner it is necessary to know enough; engagement in scholarship forces a widening and deepening of your understanding and requires you to draw on this as you develop your thinking around practice. This is particularly the case when you make your work public and are required to conform to the social and cultural norms of academic knowledge communication. Throughout the process the sense that I was engaged in scholarship for practice and for practitioners and students, rather than research about practice remained at the forefront of my approach. The question ‘How useful is (this) theory for practice?’ was a constant, and frameworks or theoretical perspectives were chosen for their explanatory power in relation to practice within that context and time, rather than to provide theorised positions. This results in what could be viewed as a rather motley collection of theories, frameworks, perspectives and approaches.

      First and foremost, it is important to recognise the influence I, as investigator, had in the collection of, as well as interpretation of, data. Working within the practitioner research paradigm, my approach was heavily influenced by Exploratory Practice (Allwright & Hanks, 2009) as this is where my journey into scholarship began (Hanks, 2015; Bond, 2017a, 2017b). I was not aiming to find clear answers to the questions I was asking, but simply to better understand the situation. I was working towards an understanding based on the principles of quality of life and collaboration that have been developed by Exploratory Practice research (Allright & Hanks, 2009; Hanks, 2017). As the principle investigator in this project, but also as a participant, the understandings I reached were intended to have a direct impact on my own student education practices as well as (hopefully) those of others. In fact, I viewed the heightening of awareness and the consequent co-construction of knowledge through the interaction between the researcher and interviewee (Guba & Lincoln, 1994) as one of the first means of having impact on the educational practices of my institution through this scholarship project. In this way I hoped to fulfil the SoTL requirement around the ‘dissemination of analyses of practice to inform others and developing intellectual communities and resource commons’ (original bold script; Fanghanel et al., 2015: 7).

      As an investigation born out of practice and practice-based questions, the methodology used also emerged from this practice. It was by necessity rather than intentional design, ethnographical. As Swales has recently argued for EAP in general: ‘We can and should aim for an insider “emic” approach, even if we cannot always achieve it, because the effort involved in trying to become something of an insider will often produce pedagogical and educational benefits’ (Swales, 2019: 11). I was already deeply immersed in the context and institution under investigation and taking an ethnographic approach allowed me to recognise the intersubjective nature of the project I was undertaking. Ethnography, as ‘participant observation’, ‘involving detailed descriptions of small groups and of their social and cultural patterns’ (Street, 1995: 51) acknowledges my status as both investigator and participant. Academic Literacies (Lea & Street, 1998) provides a theoretical framework for ethnographic studies around language and literacies development, use and power and is also one of the knowledge bases that EAP draws on (Ding & Bruce, 2017). I therefore followed an Academic Literacies approach to data collection, which included observations of classroom interaction and analysis of student writing, as well as paying attention to the lives and roles of students and teachers outside the classroom. In this way, I built a detailed understanding of, and acknowledged the interaction between, classroom practice and the wider academy, and the role each plays in staff and students’ academic, social and cultural experiences as each of these areas themselves impact on the others, adding to or detracting from the power of individuals and groups.

      My approach also drew from other methodological constructs and theoretical perspectives. I draw parallels between the Academic Literacies concept of there being three ‘levels’ of approach to literacy development in Higher Education (skills development; socialisation and transformation) and the outlined phases of Threshold Concepts (Pre-threshold; liminal and over the Threshold, Meyer & Land, 2003). However, the overarching theoretical perspective I took was one of Critical and Social Realism, following Margaret Archer (1995), who argues that it is necessary to focus on the interplay between structure, culture and agency or between the individual and collective. This Critical Realist lens allows for a distinction to be made between what is observable and what is real; it accepts that all understanding is subjective. Archer emphasises the importance of temporality and argues strongly that society does not converge with the individual, or vice versa.

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