September 2026: Notes on Care (Besorgen and Fürsorge)

September was meant to be the first month of a quiet sabbatical. Except sabbaticals are never quiet. Predictably, it was a month of manuscripts, meetings, visitors and plans, all easier to list than to make sense of. So, what you’ll find in the paragraphs that follow, is mostly that list. And the realisation I reached, as I was compiling said list, that the things I most want to remember are not the tasks themselves, but the people who made them possible.

Things written for publication

Writing for publication can mean very different things. Sometimes it involves going out into the world, speaking to people, gathering data and trying to make sense of what they have shared. At other times, it means sitting with a manuscript that already exists and attending —with steadfast resolution¹— to its smallest details. This month brought both forms of work into view.

Challenges of Russian Speakers Learning Greek

Earlier this month, I wrote about a chapter that Eleni Motsiou and I published, which looks into the challenges speakers of Russian face when they learn Modern Greek. For details about the chapter, you can read the actual post. One thing that I did not write there, however, because it’s only now beginning to register, is that this seems to be the last time I actually did proper fieldwork – with interviews, recorders, transcription and analysis. I still write a lot, but often this involves conceptual pieces, or working with data that other people have gathered. I miss the actual fieldwork, and I think that this is one of the reasons this chapter has a special place in my heart.²

Empowering Language Teachers

The reason I am not doing fieldwork is because I spend most of my ‘writing’ time editing. This month, this involved preparing the final manuscript of the Empowering Language Teachers through Research Literacy volume (co-edited with Kenan Dikilitaş and Christina Ringel). If you have done this work, you know how you keep discovering typos even if you’ve read the manuscript a dozen times, online and in print.³ Finding such mistakes, and caring enough to correct them is something I have tried to instill in all my students and research associates, not always perfectly balancing my patience and the time they need.

Whether this skill still matters in an age of automated referencing and AI-assisted editing is of course debatable, but I do take pride in presenting manuscripts that are pristine, and this one will be one of the best-edited books I’ve delivered. It is Besorgen (keep this word; we will return to it) on steroids; it’s Colonel Nicholson looking at the bridge over the River Kwai and congratulating himself on a job well done.

Things I am working on

September began, as Septembers tend to do, with a flurry of activity, across all three of my collaborative projects: ReaLiTea, AI Lang, and LocalLing. What follows is a brief account of where these projects currently stand: the final stretch of ReaLiTea, including some unexpectedly ambitious experiments with digital resources; an important policy moment and preparations for dissemination in AI Lang; and renewed international activity in LocalLing, both in Volos and across the wider partnership.

ReaLiTea

The last few weeks have seen me quite immersed in ReaLiTea work, as we near the final stretch before the formal end of the project in December 2026.

One of the most exciting developments on this front has been our last-minute decision to digitise the framework and self-access learning resources. Earlier in the project, I was reluctant to do this, because our only financially sensible (<– free) option was H5P, and I remain unconvinced that this is an improvement over paper-and-pen resources. Recently, however, we have been experimenting with Claude Code and Codex, which has opened a very wide range of new options that are both technically sound and aesthetically pleasing. For now, these are temporarily hosted on my university website (and you may get a security warning if you try to visit them), but I do think they are actually quite nice.

The other exciting news is that, after successful transnational meetings in Dortmund, Ankara, and Bergen, it is now time for me to host the ReaLiTeam in Volos on 29 and 30 September. There will be a post about this soon, I expect.

AI Lang

Early in September (9–10/9), I travelled to the ECML headquarters in Graz, for one of the regular expert meetings of the Artificial Intelligence for Language Education group, this one held in light of the recently adopted Council of Europe Recommendation on AI Literacy (2 September). This is a milestone document, the details of which deserve more space than this note allows, but I was very pleased to see that our ongoing work over the last three years seems to align very closely with the emerging policies.

Also gratifying was that we now have nearly complete versions of both our AI Guideline Framework (overview) and our Moodle course, which we are readying for submission. This enabled us to spend a substantial part of the meeting planning the layout and content of our upcoming website, which will function as a hub for AI Lang resources.

Another important part of the meeting involved our forthcoming dissemination activities: this will involve a talk, by me, at the EVõLxTI häkaton in Estonia (27 November), an ECML-hosted webinar on 28 January 2027, as well as a roundtable and a plenary talk at the 2027 CCERBAL conference in Canada. I am looking forward to it all!

LocalLing

After a brief summer respite, our work on the Revitalising Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Heritage project is continuing in full swing. Some of the highlights of this multinational collaboration include the visit of our Montpellier team to Colombia, where they participated in the VI International Colloquium on Sociolinguistics and Interculturality and visited the minoritised Emberá Chamí community; a guest lecture, by Prof. Mike Apuge (Buea University, Cameroon), to English majors in Tallinn, Estonia; and a visit to Tallinn of our Sri Lankan team.

For my part, I was delighted to welcome Gratien Gualbert Atindogbe and Michael Etuge Apuge, from Cameroon, as well as Messan Tossa, from Togo, all of whom stayed with us in Volos for a month and worked on our writing projects together. This is precisely how I wanted to start my sabbatical, and the next steps, which involve spending a month in Bucharest are just as promising.

Things I’ve been reading

One book I particularly enjoyed reading this month was Margaret Atwood’s memoir, which I picked up at the train station in Graz. Memorably entitled “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts“, this book has much to say about writing and literary life, of course, but also about childhood, family, friendships, travel, politics, ageing, and the peculiar experience of gradually becoming the person whom everyone else today recognises as “Margaret Atwood”.⁴

I’ve written about ‘becoming’ elsewhere; if Biehl and Locke’s book was the theory, this one is the actual demonstration of how ‘becoming’ unfolds, step by step. Plus, it’s actually rather amusing in places, in a dry and understated, and refreshingly unsentimental way. Highlights include the description of the ‘poison’ the Attwood siblings produced (reminded me of my own childhood experiments with household liquids), and her reaction to the suggestion she should write a memoir (who would want to read about a person who spends their life ruining good paper?). No more spoilers, though – let’s get back to me now.

Things I’ve added to the blog

Perhaps Attwood was able to summarise her writing activity in two words (‘wasting paper’); I think I’d struggle much more to describe the content and purpose of this blog in a single phrase. The truth is, I share whatever I find interesting or useful, without much thought about branding or strategic focus. Sometimes, this involves topical posts, such as the ones prompted by Peer Review Week 2026 and the 2026 European Day of Languages. Other posts, like the one about the chapter on Russian and Greek, are driven by a commitment to share my work with anyone who might find it interesting but does not have access to overpriced books or paywalled journals. And sometimes, posts come into being out of conversations with students, as was the case with the post where I describe one way to write literature reviews.

I suppose that different kinds of posts appeal to different people, which is why I increasingly hesitate to share them through the newsletter. Some, I imagine, might be more meaningful to me than they are to prospective readers, as ways to clarify my own thinking. That is fine, too. However, if there is any genre in here that is particularly helpful, do let me know – it’s useful to know what’s worth developing.

Things that have happened in the Journal

When I started editing the European Journal of Education and Language Review, I wondered how long it might take before we established a reliable pipeline of articles that reflect the journal’s aims. That’s why I am actually quite satisfied that we’ve been able to complete the second issue of Volume 2 well ahead of schedule. This will have seven articles rather than my preferred six, on account of a production hiccup that delayed the publication of one article earmarked for Issue 1, and they will start appearing in the coming weeks as our production team makes its way through them.

At first glance, this is a somewhat broad collection of themes, which moves from intercultural solidarity with Gaza to neurodiversity and AI. There is, however, an underlying thread connecting them: Each examines, in a different setting, how people are positioned by the discourses, technologies, and institutional arrangements through which they must act. What gives the issue its coherence, then, is a broadly critical concern with participation: who is able to speak, learn, belong, or progress; under what conditions; and with what consequences.

An open call for papers

By the way, if you are working on research that unsettles assumptions about how languages are taught, valued, and used as instruments of power, you may want to consider publishing with us. The EJELR is a diamond open-access journal, which welcomes work at the intersection of language, ideology, and social structure. We give particular priority to theoretical and methodological innovation, research on languages whose speakers and scholars are underrepresented in mainstream scholarship and critical perspectives that illuminate the political and ideological dimensions of language education. If you’d like to find out more, feel free to reach out to me for an informal inquiry.

Other things that have been happening

So there you have it: papers and books published, projects managed, meetings planned, presentations in the pipeline, and that doesn’t even include exam papers graded, students counselled, funding bids prepared, and putting out fires that administrative mishaps regularly create. If it sounds overwhelming, that’s because it often is.

And that’s when the people around you make a difference. When you’ve spent all night fighting a deadline, a colleague coming in to help, two hours before they are due, with coffee and Zimtschnecken (“my mother baked them, professor; you should eat them while they are still warm“) make a difference. A friend offering to drive you home, even though it is out of their way, makes a difference. Colleagues calling before they travel to Volos to ask if there’s something you’d like them to bring from their country, and colleagues bringing premium coffee from Cameroon (“we did our research on you!“) make a difference. Leaving little tokens on one’s desk, sending a message at just the right moment, or taking small tasks off one’s hands (“Hey, who washed my coffee mugs?“) can make a difference too.⁵ Care comes in many forms.

Heidegger⁶ distinguished between two: Concern in our dealings with things and tasks (Besorgen), and care for other people (Fürsorge) — ‘solicitude’ seems like a good enough translation. Academia can make you focus so intensely on the former that the latter and more important aspect gets forgotten. It happens to me, but somehow, it doesn’t happen around me as much.

Things that will happen next

I’m supposed to be on sabbatical this semester, which should mean that I will have more uninterrupted work time. Or so I thought. Actually, what seems to have happened is that I must have made too many promises to too many people, and now is the time they are due. Which is ok, because I enjoy the social aspects of academia. So if you are in any of the events below, I’d be delighted to meet you there too – just walk over and say hi:

• On 21–25 October I will be teaching a course on AI and critical literacy at the Heidelberg University of Education.
• On 30 October I will be holding a training event on research engagement for teachers at the Piraeus Directorate of Education.
• On 17–21 November I will be in Poitiers, France doing ReaLiTea dissemination work, and also exploring how our resources can support the teaching of less-widely taught languages.
• In December, I will be in Bucharest as part of our LocalLing programme, and probably involved in a large online ReaLiTea dissemination event (details TBC).
• On 28 January 2027 we will be organising our AI Lang webinar with the ECML.

So, as sabbaticals go, this one is perhaps not turning out to involve quite as much sitting quietly and thinking as I had imagined. But there are worse ways to spend one than travelling, talking to interesting people, and working on things that I care about. And, somewhere between Heidelberg, Piraeus, Poitiers, Bucharest and the various airports in between, I may even manage to get some writing done.

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Notes

1. And rigtheous fury. That’s the only appropriate response to chapters that don’t follow formatting instructions. ↩︎
2. The other is the puns across the paper. They are so horrible that you cannot help loving it. ↩︎
3. It’s funny that, while I am actually quite bad at editing anything I have written myself, I am actually a very sharp editor for anything others have written. And I was even better before astigmatism began to take its toll… ↩︎
4. If you noticed some irony in how I found this so absorbing in a month when I was noticing, somewhat belatedly, that I have become a different kind of academic from the one I set out to be, you are not alone in having noticed. ↩︎
5. Claude flagged this paragraph as something I should reconsider: apparently, readers will infer that I have a young infatuated female student doing my work for me. Except of course there’s nothing in the paragraph suggesting ‘young’, ‘female’ or even one person. Not the first time I’ve had the chance to talk about AI bias… ↩︎
6. I hate quoting Heidegger, for reasons his biography should make obvious, but he is often annoyingly insightful. ↩︎

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