Sessions

Workplace Collegiality in ELT

In the field of ELT, collegiality in the workplace is a sparsely discussed and under-researched topic. In fact, other than Breen’s (2006) seminal article on collegial development, little documented information can be found in the ELT literature. Consequently, this presentation aims to generate interest, debate, and dialogue on collegiality in the ELT workplace, especially at the higher education level. Initially, the definitional problem of collegiality and my position on it are made known. Thereafter, collegiality types of varying quality identified in an ELT department at one Japanese university are introduced as a means to encourage audience reflection on the state of collegiality in one’s employment environment. This is followed by a discussion on some of the barriers to achieving high quality collegiality in the ELT workplace before providing suggestions on how to break these down.

Exploring a Full-Time Learning Advisor’s Autonomy

In self access, there has been much research on learner autonomy (Benson, 2007; Benson & Voller, 1997; Dam, 1995; Holec, 1981; Little, 1991,1999, 2007; Sinclair, 1999). Nevertheless, to our knowledge, there have been few to no inquiries into learning advisor autonomy (cf. Shirakawa, 2018). Having proposed a model for understanding learning advisor autonomy via teacher autonomy (Warrington & Parsons, 2019) and subsequently applied it to ourselves to test its feasibility (Warrington & Parsons, 2020), this presentation stands as an attempt to further address the aforesaid gap in the research literature. Discussion will first focus on what learning advisor autonomy looks like through the lenses of professional freedom (Pearson & Moomaw, 2005; Vieira, 2006), continuing professional development (Huang, 2005; Smith & Erdoğan, 2008), and the phenomena of the interconnectedness between teacher and learner and their mutual and simultaneous development (Jiménez Raya, Lamb, & Vieira, 2007; Little, 2007). Thereafter, attention will be turned to a case study which examined one full-time learning advisor’s autonomy using these lenses and the implications and future directions of this for his ‘learning advisor self’ and the underlying identities within it.