"A growing body of literature on EAP and its practitioners (e.g., Hadley, 2014, Ding and Bruce, 2017, Ding, 2019, Hadley, 2015, Bruce and Bond, 2022) has highlighted tensions arising from the positionality of the field in response to the powerful forces operating in higher education, such as neoliberalism and managerialism, on the one hand, and the difficulties faced by the EAP centers and practitioners to communicate the value of their work within their institutions, on the other. Caught between a rock and a hard place, EAP as a profession seems to be the beneficiary and the victim of its own success, devoting as much effort to maintaining its commercial success as, increasingly so, to challenging some of its unethical assumptions and practices. This session's main goal is to engage with those unethical assumptions and practices through a series of pre-recorded ‘provocations.’
Prior to the session, we will use journals, mailing lists and social media channels accessible to the EAP for Social Justice SIG to invite colleagues from across the EAP community to offer a
short text, video, or audio recording voicing their ideas and/or experiences of where EAP as a profession falls short of its ethical obligations. This could be in the areas under-researched and under-reported in the field, such as, among others, race, parenting and caring, gender, unionisation, multilingualism, recruitment policies and practices, professional development opportunities (or lack of), mental health, but we will also welcome provocations related to other areas pertaining to the positionality and the development of the profession more broadly.
To ensure colleagues who may be unable to join the event can also voice their concerns and in full support of the conference organisers' desire to welcome contributions from precariously employed practitioners and those working on the fringes of EAP, we will host the provocations on the EAP for Social Justice SIG website in the weeks ahead of the conference. We hope this will foster a more inclusive approach in stimulating reflections to inform discussions on the provocations at the event. All provocations will be anonymised.
During the session, a selection of provocations will be shared in accessible formats and the participants will have a chance to discuss how those and the other provocations they have engaged with relate to their professional experiences and beliefs. The participants will then be encouraged to reimagine EAP and collectively formulate a set of demands for a more socially- just EAP profession. Again, as part of our commitment to inclusivity, after the event, we will share our collective demands on the SIG’s website to foster further conversation around them with colleagues who were unable to attend the conference.
Ref:
Hadley, G. (2014). English for academic purposes in neoliberal universities: A critical grounded theory (Vol. 22). Springer.
Ding, A., & Bruce, I. (2017). The English for academic purposes practitioner. Operating on the Edge of Academia.
Ding, A. (2019). EAP practitioner identity. In Specialised English (pp. 63-76). Routledge.
Bond, B., Bruce, I., & Bloomsbury (Firm). (2022). Contextualizing english for academic purposes in higher education: Politics, policies and practices (First ed.). Bloomsbury Academic."
