December 2025: Notes on Teaching, Research, and Writing

The end of November and the start of December have been unusually dense, in the way that the academic calendar can sometimes become when writing, events, and collaboration all converge in the space of few weeks. Much of my energy has gone into thinking about language policy: how it emerges, how it responds to pressure, and how easily it reproduces inequality. Less visibly, I have also invested a lot of work into the less visible work of editing, coordinating projects, and learning (?) how to let go of control.

This post brings together some of the above: recent publications, workshops and conferences, readings that unsettled me, and a few reflections on what it means to sustain collective academic labour without burning out.

Scholarship

Most of my scholarship this month focused on language policy. To me, language policy does not belong just in the abstract realm of intentions. It also includes the things people believe about language and language education (their linguistic ideologies). And it also encompasses the things they do with and for language.¹

Emergency language policy

Building on Spolsky’s foundational definition of policy, but viewing it as a complex system, led Eleni Motsiou and me to develop what we called ‘Emergency Language Policy’. We note that in relatively stable conditions language policy seems to operate much like a system at rest (or dynamic stability). But in conditions of crisis, such as the influx of large numbers of refugees in Greece in the mid-2010s, the same components reconfigure.

This study, which we presented at a conference in Poitiers devoted to complex dynamical systems theory in education, involved an extensive meta-analysis of publications on language education in Greece, spanning ten years, from 2015 (the onset of the refugee crisis) to the present day. This was a massive amount of work, and Eleni’s ability to patiently process vast amounts of data is something I am envious of and grateful for.

Emergency Language Policy in Greece: Notes From a Decade of Crisis

Language policy in higher education

Coincidentally, over the past month, Eleni Motsiou and I also published another article on language policy. In a paper² in the Polish journal Neofilolog, we examine the ideologies, management practices, and everyday language use at the University of Thessaly. We argue that language policy there has evolved in an emergent, reactive, and largely ad hoc manner. We also suggest that this had the unintended³ consequence of further marginalising less widely spoken languages. Our conclusion is that universities —especially those that claim a commitment to social justice— can (and should adopt) a more intentional stance, i.e., one that actively supports minoritised languages.

This is an issue I care about deeply, and one I would like to be associated with. At the same time, I am keenly aware of the limits of academic awareness-raising. That is why I have been experimenting with ways of translating these ideas for wider audiences. One such experiment (which I made with the help of NotebookLM) is the video below. It is the first AI-generated video I’ve made, so I hope you will not judge it too harshly, but I think it is not too bad.

European Journal of Education and Language Review

Speaking of things I’d never done before, this week I also wrote my first-ever editorial, for the new journal that I co-edit, the European Journal of Education and Language Review. Laying out the vision of what the journal will be about was an empowering moment, and one for which I felt a strong sense of responsibility.

I soon realised that editorials are curious texts. Unlike the research articles and opinion pieces that I knew how to write, these are public statements of values, priorities, and boundaries. Writing this editorial forced me to think with some clarity, and then articulate with as much precision as I could, our vision for the journal. it meant thinking about what conversations we want to enable, what work we want to take seriously, and what intellectual outlooks we would rather avoid. This exercise helped me to realise that journals do not merely reflect fields; they actively participate in shaping them. That is both a privilege and a commitment I do not take lightly.

By the way, here’s a snippet that did not make it into the editorial because of space, but I thought it was too nice not to share:

At a time when fear is increasingly mobilised through language, and linguistic resources are put to use to legitimise social injustice, the task of language education cannot be reduced to skills, outcomes, or efficiency. It must instead be understood as an ethical practice, one that carries responsibility for how difference is named, how belonging is made possible, and how harm is either reproduced or resisted.

Events and Project Updates

Other than writing and publishing, my ongoing projects have been moving towards an end-of-year crescendo that is taking a toll on my well-being, but is in many ways too absorbing to disengage from.

The AI Lang workshop

One of the highlights of 2025 was the ECML workshop for the Artificial Intelligence in Language Education project. You can read a detailed description of the workshop in the link below, so I will not go over the content or purpose of that meeting again.

The point I want to make, however, is one about the value of such meetings. When investing time and effort in a project deliverable, such as the guidelines we are drafting for AI use in language teaching and learning, or the Moodle course we are developing, it is easy to lock yourself in tunnel vision, where your personal understanding of the goal tends to overshadow others. Meetings such as the ones facilitated by the ECML, where experts from all Council of Europe member-states came together to critically scrutinise our output and articulate their own needs and expectations, are immensely useful in recalibrating our thinking, and keeping us in a useful course.

The Artificial Intelligence in Language Education (AI Lang) workshop

The Tzarzaneia conference

Immediately upon my return from Graz, I was invited to appear in a language teachers’ conference in Tyrnavos, Greece. The Achilleas Tzartzanos Conference, dedicated to a leading classicist scholar, focused on supporting the professional development of language teachers. So, this connected well with our ReaLiTea project, as well as the ongoing efforts to update the Modern Greek curriculum. Plus, I enjoy being back in school classrooms, so I was looking forward to this, even if it meant delaying my return home.

I have mixed feelings about this conference. I cannot help registering some disappointment at the disappointing turnout of language teachers, which makes one wonder why teaching is so less attuned to theory and professional development compared to other professions. Perhaps what was even more frustrating was the anti-theoretical ideology that was evident in some of the questions from the audience, as some teachers pushed back against the introduction of new theoretical concepts (or not so new ones, like Grice’s cooperative principle) in the materials we are designing for language teaching.

What surprised me a lot, however, was the remarkable number of my former and current students, some of whom had travelled a long way to be present in the event. It’s hard not to feel humbled at times like this, not in the sense of receiving personal recognition, but because it has mades me reflect on how the work we do in education can matter well beyond classrooms, syllabi, and assessment cycles.

Empowering Language Teachers

Another highlight of this month was the joint ReaLiTea and AI Lang workshop that we held on 6th December in Larissa, Greece. The workshop, which we called Empowering Language Teachers through AI and Research Literacies, helped bring together two things that we often think of as disjointed: both the ability to engage with research and the ability to actively and critically use AI are ways in which language teachers (re)take control of their own classrooms and reposition themselves as decision-makers in language education.

I have written about the actual content of the event elsewhere in the blog, so I will use this space to say a few things about how I experienced it. Organising an event for teachers is a stressful experience, even when (perhaps especially when?) it is one you believe in deeply. Added to the familiar low-level anxiety about logistics, timing, and technology, there’s the unsettling worry about whether what you can offer will actually land, rather than simply add one more layer of well-intentioned noise to the participants’ already crowded schedules.

What made this day different was the sense, almost from the start, that something was clicking. From the beginning, we were slowed down by the right kinds of discussions: those that bring centre stage questions of purpose, evidence, and consequence. AI, in turn, destabilised comfortable routines and forced us to confront how much of our decision-making now resides outside our classrooms. Not unlike a challenging workout, these discussions left me drained by the end of the day, in the way that comes from sustained attention rather than depletion.

I was also uneasy that we had not delivered everything we could; just initiated a conversation, leaving participants with ideas to test, resist, adapt, or discard on their own terms. For a workshop that set out to talk about empowerment, that felt like the right kind of outcome.

Empowering language teachers through AI and research literacies workshop

The Teacher Research Literacy book

One of the outgrowths of the Research Literacy of Teachers project, which I may have mentioned before, has been a volume that I am editing for Routledge with Kenan Dikilitaş and Christina Ringel. Editing a book has a funny rhythm: for a long period, you forget about it, as authors work on their respective chapters. Then, suddenly, your inbox is flooded with content.⁴ It’s not quite a book yet, but it’s a pile of pages that will become a book when you manage to sort them out. So anyway, that’s where we are with this now: just like a child in a candy store, I find myself surrounded by a richness of chapters, and so excited that I can’t decide which to read first. First world problems…

Readings

One good thing about travelling to different conferences and workshops is that the time spent at airports and planes is actually a great opportunity to catch up on reading.

The curriculum as junkspace

One article that left me thinking a lot recently came from outside the world of language education. In a paper⁵ published in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, Constantinos Xenofontos invokes the architectural concept of junkspace as a metaphor for understanding current practice. In architecture, junkspace is fragmented (“a layered accumulation of disconnected elements”) and it produces “placeless and interchangeable” environments. Junkspace is endessly extendable, lacking visible conclusions, and it is “shaped by managerial decisions and market logic that make the role of the architect almost redundant”. You can read Xenofontos’ compelling and well-written argument about how the mathematics curriculum exhibits properties of junkspace.

Alternatively, or additionally to that, you may want to reflect, as I did, on just how easily this description might apply to the language education curriculum. Language education is fragmented, as we keep embellishing it with add-ons (some STEM, some CLIL, some framed around well-being) and imposed top-down without much consideration for specificity. We rarely interrogate outcomes beyond the comfort of meaningless metrics (e.g., when did we try to find out, in earnest, how pre-schoolers really benefit from early English?). And just like the teachers’s in Xenofontos’ article, the language teachers’ professional capacity for decision-making is constantly eroded.

Countering colonialingualism

A book that I am very much looking forward to receiving is Countering Colonialingualism in Language Education, edited by Paul Meighan and Leonardo Veliz. As a brief reminder, colonialingualism is a term Meighan (2023) coined to describe the intersection of linguistic imperialism, human exceptionalism and white epistemological supremacy.⁶ While I am at times sceptical of some of the claims Meighan makes, I am highly interested in engaging with the book, as it promises to unsettle some of the most deeply normalised assumptions in language education research.

ELT Classroom Research

One last thing I wanted to share: if you haven’t come across the ELT Classroom Research Journal, you may want to take a look at their latest issue. What makes this journal stand out is that it remains explicitly grounded in the teaching world: this is a journal with a clear focus on the “needs of busy English language teachers and their classroom”, but it’s just as valuable to academics, who take seriously the constraints, concerns and contexts of language education. Free from performative theory, this journal is auseful reminder that rigour is not primarily about methodological sophistication; it is about conceptual clarity, reflexivity, and ethical responsibility.

Calls for Papers

For those among you who might have a paper to publish, here is a selection of calls for papers which I found interesting, and I hope you find useful:

• Marc Jones and Gretchen Clark are putting together a volume that will showcase how duoethnography can inform language education. They are keen to receive chapters that highlight different aspects of duoethnographic research, including work that challenges perceptions of what research should look like.
• A special issue on the topic of “linguistic racism in the age of AI” will appear at the International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Veliz, Dovchin & Ollerhead, eds.). If you have an interest in topics such as how bias in generative AI impacts marginalised communities, or how Large Language Models encode social hierarchies, this may be a good venue for your work.
• Taking a broader outlook, TESOL Quarterly is also planning a special issue entitled “Rethinking ‘Criticality’ in TESOL and Applied Linguistics” (Sah & Dovchin, eds.). The editors are keen to receive papers on a range of topics, such as posthumanist and indigenous perspectives, LGBTQI+ in language education, critical digital and AI literacies, and topics connected to migration and refuge.
• Lastly, Thomas Farrell and Jaber Kamali are inviting papers on technology-mediated reflective practice for an upcoming special issue in TESL-EJ. Our own work at the ECML positions reflective practice as a core principle of of AI-supported language education, so this is a topic that I find very promising.

And just as a reminder, if none of the options above work for you, and you need a friendly journal to publish your paper, you can might want to drop by the European Journal of Education and Language Review or contact me for an informal chat.

Behind the scenes

I try to conclude these posts with something that I recently learned or which has had an impact on my life. If I had to pick just one, among the things that happened to me in the last four weeks, I guess that would be something about the value of letting go.

Over the last months, I found myself coordinating multiple parallel projects, all of which had major events and deliverables due towards the end of November and December. Coordinating work is challenging, especially if you are uncomofortable sharing control. I have been eternally grateful to count on the support of strong teams and committed colleagues, but I’m also aware that the effort they put into their work produces outcomes that are not exactly how I would have done it myself.

Managing this tension has involved a learning curve for me, but it has been quitely instructive. Because I had no choice but to rely on ways of working that are not my own, I had to let go of a degree of control, and I had to grudgingly accept that coordination does not require uniformity of approach. The projects are moving forward not because everyone shares the same habits, priorities or visions, but because the work is held together by trust. I realise, in retrospect, that given everything I have read and written about resilience and complex systems, I should have known that collective work gains resilience precisely from flexibility and embracing different tempos, styles, and thresholds of comfort. I am still learning that, and I suspect that I will continue to do so for a while longer.

Looking ahead

The festive season is a time for embracing the present, rather than thinking about the future. But there are exciting things to which to look forward in the coming year. Preparations are already underway to receive our guests at the Revitalising Linguistic and Cultural Heritage project in March, and I can’t wait to share our website and logo; our ReaLiTea materials are nearly ready to publish; we are preparing a series of online meetings on the use of AI at the ECML; and most importantly, the volume I am editing with Kenan Dikilitaş and Christina Ringel is increasingly beginning to look like a book.

For now, though, there is room to pause, to enjoy the quieter rhythms of the season, and to take stock of how much collective effort has already gone into getting us here. If the coming year builds on this momentum, it promises to be a good one.

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Footnotes

1. Some of you might recognise, here, Bernard Spolsky’s influence. Spolsky (2004) conceptualised language policy as consisting of language ideology, language management and language practices. ↩︎
2. Motsiou, E., & Kostoulas, A. (2025). Towards more intentional language policy in higher education: A case study of a Greek University. Neofilolog, 65(2), 273–286. https://doi.org/10.14746/n.2025.65.2.2 ↩︎
3. I struggled with the word ‘unintended’ here. In one sense, it is unintended, as I really doubt there was a deliberate planning meeting where people decided to actively minoritise a language and officially articulated this decision. On the other hand, intention is a tricky concept, and (as G.E.M. Anscombe has pointed out) we often infer intention retrospectively, by reconstructing it from patterns of action. ↩︎
4. That is one thing that happens. The other thing that happens is that you flood other people’s inboxes with passive-aggressive reminders about the deadline. ↩︎
5. Xenofontos, C. (2025). The mathematics classroom as junkspace: a conceptual critique of educational spatiality. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2025.2600966 ↩︎
6. Meighan, P. J. (2023). Colonialingualism: Colonial legacies, imperial mindsets, and inequitable practices in English language education. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 17(2), 146–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2022.2082406 ↩︎