Richard Pinner
About
Applied Linguist and Language Teacher interested in authenticity and motivationSessions
Long Presentation (45 minutes) Reflecting on Intuition in Language Teaching and Research more
Sun, Sep 17, 14:15-15:00 Asia/Tokyo
During the course of a single lesson, language teachers make hundreds of on-the-spot decisions about how to proceed. If concurrently engaged in practitioner research and teaching, even more so. Intuition plays a vital role in the optimal distribution of mental resources, allowing experienced practitioners to make such decisions quickly, based on tacit knowledge and an accurate sense of what they feel is best in a given moment. Developing this sense of intuition takes years of practice, although our actions based on intuitions may not always be the most facilitative for the circumstances at hand. In this workshop, we will commence by looking briefly at the anatomy of intuition, drawing out its many different qualities. Based on past research from general education, as well as tentative findings from the presenters, the majority of the workshop will then prompt participants to consider and discuss their experiences of different forms of intuition. We anticipate that the session will be empowering for participants, encouraging them to recognize the ways in which metacognitive strategies such as reflecting on, or examining classroom data about, intuition can play a part in improving both our teaching/researching, as well as our mental health.
Standard Presentation (25-minute) Alienation and teacher well-being: a research agenda more
Sun, Sep 17, 15:25-15:50 Asia/Tokyo
In this talk, we outline the basics of Rahel Jaeggi’s examination of Alienation, which she defines as the “absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others” (2016). Jaeggi’s work is situated in the tradition of critical social theory, based on a revision of Hegelian-Marxist philosophies. These ideas will be familiar to anyone who has ever felt estranged from their own life, anyone who has wrestled with a sense of indifference, isolation or meaninglessness. We argue that these issues are of heightened relevance to foreign language teachers now in the aftermath of the global pandemic, which highlighted the precarity of international borders and redefined many of our social interactions. In particular, as foreign teachers working in Japan, we explore some of the issues that have led to feelings of alienation in our own experiences. In this talk, we will outline the types of research that could shed further light onto this issue, (such as autoethnography, introspective techniques, reflective practice) and describe a forthcoming project which is designed to examine the concept of alienation first-hand from the perspective of foreign teachers living and working in Japan.
