Trainees in this FORTHEM Alliance training school will be funded through Erasmus+. After being offered a place on the training school, they will organise funding with their own university's Erasmus+ funding personnel.
The training school will focus on intersectionality (the interplay of multiple social factors at once) and capability theory (a borrowing from economics focused on people's ability to improve their life own life circumstances) as they apply to language education policies. All this helps us to better articulate goals of equity, inclusion, and social justice.
Trainees will be actively conducting research into language education policy. We define this very broadly – not just formal government policies about school curricula, but any policies in any organisation, community, or family, aiming to influence how people learn and/or use particular languages. A 'policy' can be written or unwritten, and can be interpreted differently by different people (in many cases these diverse interpretations are where the most interesting research questions lie).
Trainees do not need prior experience of the specific headline terms and concepts named above. The objective of the training school is to educate trainees about these terms, and the relevance of these terms to trainees' research.
In addition, through the use of trainee pecha kucha presentations, trainees will have the opportunity to showcase their own work, and learn about each other’s. A followup virtual exercise will facilitate further dialogue – requiring participants to link taught lecture content to the content of each other’s pecha kuchas, in a collaborative online meeting and associated discussion forum. Altogether this in turn will increase their presenting and networking skills.
Trainers
Dave Sayers, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Andrew Shorten, University of Limerick, Ireland
Bogusława Gosiewska-Turek, University of Opole, Poland
Brygida Lika, University of Opole, Poland
Helder De Schutter, KU Leuven, Belgium
Mateja Centa Strahovnik, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
