They say, the most difficult thing is to start. Whether it's starting a new workout regime after being for months in lockdown, the first line of a new paper, or indeed to start the day by snoozing the alarm and getting up, for whatever it may be. Not a new experience, but I found it quite difficult to start coming up with the first bit of information that I want to include here. Without further ado...

To kick-off this blog-like adventure, I am sharing an image from my last presentation which took place in UCC and was organised by the CASiLaC Research Cluster Language: Cognition, Practice, Policy and Ideology. The guest lecture by Dr Sal Consoli was entitled Restoring humanity in Language Education Research: A 'Life Capital' lens. It expanded the ideas from some of Sal's work, (e.g. 2022: Life Capital: An Epistemic and Methodological Lens for TESOL Research), and looked at how we as researchers could potentially add more 'humanity' to our research: appreciate ourselves and our research participants more holistically as human beings. While I can't give the talk or the paper justice with a one-liner, I'm trying my best to put it in a nutshell. 

Anyway, how did I and my research fit into this? As you may know, I am looking into teacher cognition and what you see on the lovely image above is what I thought might be an attempt to restoring humanity. In my presentation, I did not focus much on genesis of the questions etc. but tried to apply a 'life capital' lens to my approach and see how my teacher portraits, which are based on body-mapping research (for an overview see de Jager et al. 2016) and are very much inspired by language portraits (Busch, 2018). So much so that I used the language portrait bodies from www.heteroglossia.net which provides a lot of material, background info and project descriptions on the use of language portraits. 

Again, to put it in a nutshell: By drawing body images of themselves as teachers, my participants were able to reflect on a deeper level about themselves and what makes them the teacher they are. They reflect on where these elements of being a teacher are located in their body, they also see quite literally an image of themselves in front of them and therefore get to see themselves from a distance - in turn they can reflect more deeply if that's really who they are etc. I can't and don't want to go into too much detail here, but in any case, I am hoping to do my participants justice by approaching my research with this kind of instrument and to also enable them to engage with themselves more holistically and creatively. So that in the end, my participants get to paint "a fuller picture" (Consoli, 2022, p. 1402) of themselves. 

And yes, pun fully intended. 

Want to discuss, comment, say something about what I say above? Use the comment section below or get in touch. 

Busch, B. (2018). The language portrait in multilingualism research: Theoretical and methodological considerations. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 236, 2-13. 

Consoli, S. (2022). Life Capital: An epistemic and methodological lens for TESOL research. TESOL Quarterly, 56(4), 1397-1409.

de Jager, A., Tewson, A., Ludlow, B. & Boydell, K. M. (2016). Embodied ways of storying the self: A systematic review of body-mapping. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-17.2.2526