January 2026: Notes on Teaching, Research, and Writing

Typically, we frame January as a new beginning, but January is rarely a month of clean beginnings. It often feels like a continuation of what was, under slightly different lighting: projects resume after the holiday break, conversations pick up where they stalled in December, obligations that were politely deferred now reassert themselves, with some urgency…

In this post, I gather together what I wrote, shared, and worked on over the past month. It’s not so much because these items cohere neatly, but because –if one takes them together– they sketch the contours of where my professional attention and my thinking lie at the moment.

Publications

Not every month sees a new publication, but work towards publication never stops. Since there are no publication announcements to make, this may be a good opportunity to shed some light on the less visible aspects of the publishing process.

Revising and resubmitting

I am currently revising an older article, which is looking for a new home. Responding to peer-review comments is rarely a straightforward task, but it’s even more complicated when revisions require interpretive work rather than correction. It’s difficult to know how to engage with feedback that is not quite wrong, but is differently calibrated: attentive to issues that might matter to the reviewers, but not to the argument I thought my co-authors and I were making.

Editing a book

In what seems like ironic symmetry, I’ve also worked through the first set of chapters of the Empowering Language Teachers through Research Literacy volume, which I am co-editing with Christina Ringel and Kenan Dikilitaş. Editorial work is infrastructure: people only notice when it’s absent or badly done. In past projects, I tended to micro-manage editing, down to word choice, because I believed that doing so produces more cohesion. Increasingly, I have come to appreciate that diversity of voice is a strength in such collections, and try to focus my editing more on managing scope and expectation. I don’t know which approach is best, but perhaps that will become clearer once the finished volume is in readers’ hands – when that time comes, you can tell me if it worked.

Planning future projects

Finally, two longer projects are in earlier, more speculative phases. For one, I’m working with a close friend on putting together a formal book proposal. For the other, I’ve received a tentative indication of interest from the publisher and am now thinking through what kind of book it could realistically become. There’s some tension there too, between working collaboratively, a process that I find rewarding on many levels, and working alone. Sometimes one just needs that too.

Project updates

While I sometimes feel the need to write alone, I have never felt ambivalent about collaboration in research. It helps that I am fortunate to work with colleagues who are talented and quietly ambitious. Being in such teams is more than just dividing labour; it’s a way of keeping my thinking sharp and my commitment to this kind of work alive.

AI Lang

Over the last month, our main focus at the Artificial Intelligence in Language Education project has been on expanding our Moodle course with additional resources that teachers might find practical and relevant to their needs. We have also partnered with the ICT-REV project, another ECML initiative focusing on the use of online tools that support teaching and learning, and we are exploring points of overlap between the two projects, particularly around the kinds of pedagogical reasoning that sit behind tool use.

We have also been delighted to be invited to take part in the Winter School on Artificial Intelligence for Language Learning, Teaching and Assessment hosted by the Università per Stranieri di Perugia. Organised by Letizia Cinganotto, the event gave project members Anne-Dubrac and Aleksandra Ljalikova had the opportunity to present our work and engage in sustained discussion with colleagues interested in the intersection between artificial intelligence and language education.

All this is still work in progress, but what we are increasingly finding is that teachers do not really need more demonstrations of specific AI tools. Instead, we have been focusing on showcasing workflows and processes of AI-supported language education: these often involve more than one tools which teacher can deploy in different steps of their lesson; but beyond that, they also involve a certain mindset for using AI, and that’s what this project aims to develop.

ReaLiTea

Progress has been slower in the Research Literacy of Teachers project, as we enter our final year, but it has been important. Every work package of the project includes a quality assurance check by one of our critical friends, and while such scrutiny is not always comfortable, it does keep us focused on producing resources that are coherent, usable and faithful to the aims of the project. Earlier this month, we got the final ‘green light’ for one of our core outputs, the Language Teacher Research Literacy framework. This is something in which I had invested considerable effort, and I am pleased to see it endorsed with some high praise:

What stands out is the conceptual clarity, which will be helpful for language teachers who want to understand what research literacy might entail. Another strength is that the five components or facets seem to make the reflection process manageable.

LocalLing

The most pressing commitments in my calendar these days are about the kick-off meeting of the Revitalising Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Heritage project, in early March. Both logistically and administratively, this is proving a daunting task, but as more and more participants seem to get their visas, tickets and accommodation sorted out, stress subsides and anticipation grows. Plus, I am happy that we managed to secure a room that’s not too unpleasant, after all!

Readings

Most readings that stayed with me in the past month did so less because of their novelty, and more because they resonated with concerns that have in my mind for some time. Here are some of the ones that stood out.

The Teacher Well-being Turn

A while ago, I co-edited a book on the psychology of language teaching. This was motivated by an unease about the stress many teachers experienced in the face of dehumanising accountability regimes. Even as I moved away from this strand of scholarship, such concerns have remained. More recently, they have been amplified by what I perceive as alarming trends in the ‘teacher wellbeing’ discourse, to frame structural problems (such as stagnating wages and the loss of agency) as personal deficits (such as a lack of coping strategies). This line of thinking was particularly present as I read an article by Wilkins et al. (2025) that appeared in Critical Studies in Education. It’s a difficult article to condense, but here are some important thoughts:

Crisis management depends on the delicate practice of framing problems (and their solutions) to meet or influence agreed definitions and outcomes that satisfy national politics and projects (Clarke et al., 2015). The causes of some crises may be global, sometimes economic in nature, but the construction of ‘problems’ (assumptions concerning the underlying causes of the crisis) and their solutions may be irrevocably cultural and political in character. […]  Sociotechnical imaginaries which pathologise or responsibilise risk as an inherent property of individual decision making can therefore be considered something uniquely cultural and historical, emblematic of a wider neoliberal politics of articulation and translation that recasts problems of society into problems of the individual.

Linguistic landscapes

Some of my more recent work has focused on the way language and power are inscribed in the physical environment around us (the linguistic landscape, or schoolscape). With this in mind, I quite enjoyed reading the blog post From “Howdy” to “Hayakom”: A shifting university linguascape by Sarah Hilman Aishwaryaa Kannan, and Tim Tizon. They describe how their academic home, the campus of the Texas A&M University at Qatar is gradually changing its linguistic identity as it prepares to transition from housing a US-affiliated institution to becoming the home of the local Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).

At TAMUQ, Howdy has reigned supreme for more than twenty years. As the official greeting of Texas A&M, faculty, staff, and students at the main campus use it to welcome one another and to greet campus visitors as a sign of Aggie hospitality. On the Doha Campus, Howdy appears in signage, emails, and posters for Student Affairs events such as “Howdy Week.” […] Now, however, Howdy coexists with Hayakom [the Arabic word for welcome]. HBKU has introduced its own greeting, one that foregrounds the local linguistic and cultural context. […] This bilingual, bicultural overlap reflects the liminal moment both institutions currently inhabit.

Acts of Kindness
in the Peer Review Process

The last reading I wanted to highlight this month is an editorial by Silvia Masiero, who shares her thoughts on “implementing fair, kind and considerate behavior to […] authors”. In the editorial, she draws attention to often overlooked practices, such as highlighting strengths of the papers that one reviews, and reminds us of practicalities, like ensuring that the confidential comments to the editor and the comments to authors align in content, if not in tone. Here’s an extract that I thought was important, in the use of AI in reviews:

In the light of keeping a scientific conversation among humans, who are the end users of our research results, being the real reviewer of a manuscript is an act of kindness that remains sorely needed. It is not only about refraining from delivering a cold, impersonal review generated by AI tools. It is about staying human when interacting with our counterparts, which beyond being colleagues in science are, first and foremost, human beings. It is not (only) about adhering to policy: ultimately, it is about being true to ourselves.

Calls for Papers

If your work involves thinking about how Artificial Intelligence can be used to promote social justice in language education by foregrounding community voices and diverse kinds of knowledge, you may be interested in this call for chapters for a new book. The editors, Ching-Ching Lin, Leonardo Veliz, and Paul J. Meighan invite proposals for chapters that engage with the question How can AI be leveraged to amplify and recenter community voices, particularly those that are marginalized, surface diverse epistemologies, and advance social justice–oriented language education?

Also, as a reminder, if you’d like to submit your work to the journal I co-edit, feel very free to reach out!

From the blog

In the past month, I wrote about the publication of the first issue of our new Journal, announced the launch of our LocalLing project, shared some reflections prompted by feedback from our AI Lang workshop, and published a teacher-accessible summary of an article I wrote for Elsevier. In case you missed any of those posts, you can find them below.

Behind the Scenes

There’s a scene in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, where the aging professor Isaak Borg is tormented by a nightmare: he is taking an oral examination, and his examiner wants to know what ‘a doctor’s first duty’ is. Borg cannot answer, and an angry examiner tells him that ‘a doctor’s first duty is to ask for forgiveness’. I have always found this scene made me uneasy without being able to understand why.

I think I understand it better now – what I think Bergman wants us to realise is that you cannot care for others without embracing your own vulnerability; a doctor’s first duty is to ask for forgiveness from himself for having demanded invulnerability.

A project that failed

What triggered this realisation was, perhaps inevitably, a failure that everyone had seen coming except for the people involved. For the last three years, I had been part of an multi-team project working on a contract for the Ministry of Education. There were fundamental problems underlying the project, which everyone could see. Still, I (and, in fairness, quite a few people) believed that someone would take care of these issues at some point, or that –somehow– they wouldn’t matter in the end. Confidentiality means I can’t go into much detail, and details don’t matter much anyway. What matters is that I walked out of that project a few weeks ago.

This decision came as a surprise to many, perhaps including myself. Because my team had consistently delivered to specifications and on time for years, in a context where this was not the norm, many people pointed to us as evidence that the project was going better than it actually was. This led to a paradoxical situation where good output and outward progress masked administrative struggle and legal stalemate.

Extracting myself from this situation damaged relations with those who trusted me to bring the work to completion, and hurt my pride but protected my integrity and my health. For a long time, I had viewed endurance as a sign of responsibility, rather than what it is: a way of denying limits when a situation becomes unsustainable, and a way of refusing to acknowledge when a situation becomes misaligned with one’s values.

And a lesson learnt

Asking oneself for forgiveness, then, is not about absolving mistakes or rewriting the past. It is about accepting that judgment is always provisional, that good faith does not guarantee good outcomes, and that care for others must balance with care for oneself. Learning when to step away (and learning to live with the consequences of that decision) may not look like success from the outside. But it feels, increasingly, like a form of honesty; and maybe that, too, is a lesson Isaak Borg’s teacher would have wanted us to learn.

Looking ahead

With a few hundred students awaiting grades and two project proposals in preparation, this section was always going to be a little sparse. Still, there are a couple of things on the horizon that I’m genuinely looking forward to. On 9 February, I’ll be in Athens for a workshop on language education for refugees and migrants, and a couple of weeks later (24–25 February) I’ll be presenting our ReaLiTea work at the Literacies and Contemporary Society conference in Cyprus. If you happen to be at either event, do come and say hello.

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