Despite a trifecta of airline, railroad, and local transport strikes, I somehow managed to find myself in Dortmund, Germany on 5th March for our first onsite ReaLiTea meeting. ReaLiTea, as I may have mentioned elsewhere in this site, is an Erasmus+ project that aims to help teachers develop research literacy skills.
Developing resources for Research Literacy of Teachers
Our aim at the ReaLiTea project is to develop a range of resources that can help teachers become more competent and more confident in engaging with research and in research. We used the meeting to make sure we better understand how the various strands of the project interact with each other, and to make sure that there will be no bottlenecks in the production of outputs. We expect these to be ready by the end of 2026, but I am very pleased to say that we have been making very strong progress in a number of directions.
Understanding
how teachers write about research
For one, we are close to completing the corpus of publications on teacher research. This includes examples of research reports, conference abstracts and reflections, written by teachers about their practice. We envisage that when this is complete and analysed it will not only provide readers with a useful set of examples for their writing but will also help us to tease out some features of writing that can help us all become more effective in communicating findings of our classroom research.
Creating a Virtual Community of Practice
We have also made strong progress in developing an online space which can serve as a virtual community of practice for language teachers who want to discuss their classroom inquiries and share ideas and insights. We are still working out some technical details and making sure that everything will comply with data protection and privacy laws. However, we are confident that all this work and piloting will be completed soon and we are looking forward to launching the space within 2024!
A holistic approach
to teacher research literacy
Another exciting outcome of the meeting was that we explored ways in which to integrate the various ‘strands’ of our work more strongly and more meaningfully. For example, we already have access to a very valuable set of article summaries (the OASIS database), we are developing resources to help teachers write more effectively about research, and we are working on a discussion space for teachers to discuss interesting research they come across. But what if we brought all this together, by directing teachers to OASIS, or encouraging them to write summaries that they could submit there, or creating space for collaborative discussion about these summaries?
Sharing with the community
We do not view the ReaLiTea project as a consortium of experts who can dictate, top-down, what teachers should do. Rather, we see ourselves as parts of a broader community of teachers with a common interest in bringing together theory, research and practice.
It is with this in mind that we invested some time to explored various alternatives to share developments, outputs and news about the project. We already use Twitter (@ReaLiTea_Info) and Bluesky (@realitea.bsky.social), and we would like to invite you to join us, if you haven’t done so already. We actively looking for more ways to reach out to anyone interested in our work, without stretching out our capacity or becoming too ‘noisy’ online, and welcome any ideas – what are your preferred outlets for reading professional communications?
Another thing that we discussed involved making sure that our outputs promote diversity, equality and inclusion. We are fortunate, in this regard, to be able to build on the experience of the English Language Learning and Neurodiversity project (ELLeN). This has helped us to create a consistent set of guidelines for our communications –bearing in mind the diverse ways in which inclusiveness is linguistically enacted across languages. However, we are also aware that a diversity and inclusion agenda is more than establishing a set of ‘best practices’ and ticking the boxes that will satisfy a funding agency. As we continue working in this direction, we are always open to input from all of you, our community of teachers, which will help us best implement our commitment to inclusion.
What comes next?
I think I can speak for the entire ReaLiTea team when I say that this meeting has helped us to move forward with the project in ways that were both substabtial and meaningful.
We will continue to work on our tasks in the months to come, and hopefully there will be more tangible outputs to share before long.
However, such work is most useful when we carry it out in an open and collaborative way. To ensure that whatever we do is relevant to everyones strengths, needs and interests, I would like to encourage anyone interested to help shape our thinking while the outputs are still at a formative stage. With this in mind, I’d like to invite you to follow our webpage and social media accounts, and feel very free to suggest how we can make our work more relevant to you.
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