1. Here’s what appears to be an open-access article from the Times Higher Education, The UK’s redundancy crisis: four views from the front line https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/uks-redundancy-crisis-four-views-front-line

Higher education news feeds are currently dominated by near-daily announcements of large job cuts across the UK. But what effect is all this having on the atmosphere within the departments affected – and, indeed, across the sector in general? Four scholars give their takes.

And pretty grim takes, they are.

2. Another useful set of resources has just been published by the ECML (European Centre for Modern Languages), Building blocks for planning language-sensitive teacher education. Introduction to the concept here  https://www.ecml.at/ECML-Programme/Programme2020-2023/Buildingblocksforplanninglanguage-sensitiveteachereducation/tabid/5529/Default.aspx and a wealth of resources here https://www.ecml.at/ECML-Programme/Programme2020-2023/Languagesensitiveteachereducation/Resources/tabid/5882/language/en-GB/Default.aspx

Building blocks help teacher educators and curriculum planners working with teachers of different languages and subjects to embed language-sensitive education into teacher education curricula and courses of all languages and subjects. The aim of language-sensitive teacher education is to enable practising and future teachers to meet the language and communication needs of their learners.

3. Decolonising English language teaching: what does it mean and how can it be approached? was a TeachingEnglish online event on 28^th January that I’m afraid I missed. Here’s the recording https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/news-and-events/webinars/webinars-teacher-educator/decolonising-english-language-teaching-what-does

Ursula Lanvers, Programme Leader for the PhD Programme in Applied Linguistics at the University of York and Tetyana Lunyova, Researchers at Risk Fellow at the University of York, discuss the meaning of, and approaches to, decolonising ELT. With reference to their 2024 British Council English Language Teaching Research Awards (ELTRA), they talk through how considerations of decolonisation impact on pedagogy, the relative positions of different languages and teacher identity and wellbeing, with a particular focus on insight gathered from the secondary school context in Ukraine.

4. Here’s some challenging reading for the weekend, three open-access articles from the latest issue of the Language and Intercultural Communication journal https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rmli20

‘Blocks’ and ‘threads’: Chinese students’ constructions of ‘culture’ in their reflections on ‘critical incidents’ experienced during a short-term study abroad programme in the UK by Jane Carnaffan and Caroline Burns from Northumbria University https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.2024.2436902?src=exp-la

This article thematically analyses 65 written reflections on ‘British’ culture by Chinese science and engineering students on a short course on intercultural communication at a UK university. Teaching centred on a ‘critical incidents’ approach (Brislin, 1986), Gibbs’s 1998 (2013) ‘cycle of reflection’ and Holliday’s (2016) non-essentialist concept of cultural ‘blocks’ and ‘threads’. Student reflections evidence ‘block’ thinking, arguably inherent in ‘critical incidents’, yet some present promising ‘threads’. The study contributes to an understanding of student outcomes of short-term study abroad and advances non-essentialist pedagogies in intercultural competence.

Hospicing Gaza ( ﻏﺰﺓ ): stunned languaging as poetic cries for a heartbreaking scholarship by Khawla Badwan and Alison Phipps from Manchester Met and Glasgow University respectively https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.2024.2448104?src=exp-la

The article explores the notion of stunned languaging in the construction of poetic cries as a genre of grief in times of unspeakability while witnessing the online streaming of the Gaza Genocide. Weaving together conceptual, experiential, and poetic threads and traces, the article presents a hospicing project of heartbreaking scholarship as a form of bearing witness, collective accountability, and a caring commons. It discusses the role of language in mobilising the immobile through poetic cries that speak to failing intercultural projects and argues for the need for attending to the languaging of mourning and grief as hospicing work that is both post-human and post-secular.

The varicultural, translanguaging and deCentring by Adrian Holliday from Canterbury Christchurch University https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.2024.2430485?src=exp-la

Inability to discern separated cultures or native–non-native-speakerhood in a hugely diverse hospital setting allows deCentred observation of how cultural practices and values cross socially constructed cultural boundaries within a seamless varicultural flow. This enables inclusive and translingual threads of hybridity resourced by the everyday small culture experience we bring with us. Beginning with the small helps resist being colonised by the ‘us’–‘them’ essentialist blocks derived from the dominant separated cultures model. Much of this struggle is unspoken in the perceptions of silent onlookers, influenced by grand, personal, institutional and workplace narratives, and in how we perceive how others perceive us.

PDFs of all three articles below.

[file x 3]

5. And, finally, let us eat Moldovan cake https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/baba-neagra-moldovan-cake