Welcome to BALEAP 2023 - Caution! EAP under DEconstruction Our hope with this conference is that we encourage a critical look at every aspect of EAP. We hope that the community will feel bold and brave enough to challenge the status quo, offering ideas, opinions, research, practices, and suggestions that can take the field in new directions. We have a range of formats that afford greater participation. We hope to hear new voices, offering perspectives on how we might break with tradition and disrupt norms. We encourage you to get involved and share your visions of how the field might be dismantled and reconstructed.
This paper (part rant, part opinion) hopes to answer the call to be bold with a critical reflection on the summer pre-sessional. High-stakes, intensive summer pre-sessional programmes typically represent UK universities’ flagship EAP courses. These are periods when we welcome vast numbers of students to the care of dedicated teaching teams, often staffed predominantly by fixed-term, precariously contracted, “seasonal” colleagues. While, as EAP units, we rightly celebrate our pre-sessionals as an important means to prepare students for university study, our own language reveals a disturbing reality for colleagues. We talk of “recovering from the pre-sessional” - “we got over the line”; it’s an experience to “get through”, to endure. This paper argues that there are serious and potentially injurious problems inherent in the summer pre-sessional, and the apparently unending drive for bigger courses. I borrow from Brookfield’s (2017) conceptualisation of the ‘four lenses’ of critical reflection, drawing on evidence – some formal, some more anecdotal - from student voices, colleagues’ perceptions, personal experience and research, to pose (hopefully) challenging questions regarding the suitability and sustainability of the current summer pre-sessional model:
- Whose interests does this model serve: students, teachers, institutions?
- What impact does such intensive periods of work have on the mental and physical wellbeing of staff and students?
- Do summer pre-sessionals offer choice and reliable annual posts, or do they in fact reflect the worst forms of insecure, precarious employment that plague the wider sector?
- Is teacher autonomy – a cornerstone of professional identity – really possible in such tightly-bound settings?
Having taught on many pre-sessional courses, my role has evolved to include convenor and recruitment duties on a large summer programme (>1200 students, >60 teachers in 2022). Recent experience – exacerbated by the acute challenges of the pandemic - has led me to question the viability of the current pre-sessional model. I worry that an unhealthy culture is emerging, if not already fully established. Success, it increasingly feels, is measured primarily in enrolment numbers. Student learning and teacher esteem and identity are inevitable victims. There is a real risk of the assumption that because a course gets “over the line”, it ought to be continued. Flawed perception becomes precedent. This paper does not claim to offer solutions or alternative models. Instead, it is hoped that a space might emerge to hear from colleagues of their experiences and to engage in a discussion on impacts, both personal and professional; to explore possible adjustments, innovations or alternatives; and to stave off a growing feeling of a cog in a runaway wheel.
