October 2026: Notes on Ends and Unexpected Angles

I am writing this post from Heidelberg, Germany, where I spent the last week teaching a course on the uses of Artificial Intelligence in language education. Heidelberg, it is said, is one of the most picturesque cities in Germany, with the castle and student jail among the most prominent attractions. The truth is, I did not get to see any of that because the course has kept me busy and the weather has kept me indoors.

My visit is now near the end, and I find that my experience of Heidelberg has come through angles I had not expected: the castle, as seen from the windows of a university building, between meetings and classes; the Neckar River, glimpsed through the rain from a bus that might, or might not, get me to my appointment on time; and the city itself, experienced mostly through conversations with colleagues and students rather than through the usual tourist itinerary.

Unfamiliar angles are not quite disappointing, but they are damper. They can show things that the familiar perspective leaves out, and sometimes they unsettle you enough to change what you thought you already knew. This is growth. But it is growth tinged with a sense of loss, as possibilities that seemed promising fade out. This post is, then, a reflection on unfamiliar angles, growth and unfulfilled potential in an October that is nearing its end.

Things I am publishing

Empowering Language Teachers through Research Literacy

There are two moments in the process of editing a book that I find particularly satisfying. One is, obviously, when you hold the published book in your hands. But the feeling of accomplishment is even stronger in the less visible moment when you submit the manuscript to the publishers, and a book that existed for a long time mostly as potential finally becomes something tangible. Such moments are even better when shared with friends, which is why I felt especially happy when Kenan Dikilitaş and I sent Routledge the manuscript for our upcoming book, Empowering Language Teachers through Research Literacy.¹

Those who have been following the progress of this volume in previous posts already know that the book grew out of the ReaLiTea project. Across four parts and eighteen chapters, colleagues from Australia, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka to Norway and the UK look at research literacy from different perspectives: how teachers read and evaluate research, how teacher education can support that, and what changes when teachers start to see themselves as part of the research conversation. As editors, Kenan and I are very grateful to the contributors for the care they put into their chapters. It has been a real privilege to work with such a thoughtful group of people.

Perhaps this is another reason why submitting a manuscript feels so satisfying. There is still a long way to go before the book reaches its readers, and no guarantee that it will make the difference we hope it will. But it is good to know that, at least in this case, something that might have remained merely a possibility has been given a chance to become real.

Other upcoming publications

At about the same time, draft chapters began to arrive for another book I am working on, this time with Richard Fay, entitled Being and Becoming a Plurilingual Academic in an English-dominated World.² This is one of the most important stages in a series that will also include reviewing, revising and copyediting the submissions. Balancing the individual voices and perspectives that each chapter encodes, while maintaining cohesion in the volume, is not always an easy task, but engaging with the drafts and seeing them develop is definitely one of the most rewarding aspects of academic work.

Further down the pipeline, a few days ago I also submitted a proposal to the University of Thessaly Press for another edited collection, in Greek, which will focus on research literacy in the Greek school system. My motivation for this project comes partly from my caution about importing concepts from the international literature into local practice, and I would like to provide space for the articulation of local understandings of what research literacy and research engagement mean in the context of Greek education. Also, I am conscious that our work on ReaLiTea has focused somewhat narrowly on language teachers, and I think there is value in exploring the relevance of research literacy to teaching-adjacent activity, such as the work of school advisors, administrators and school counsellors. More on this as it develops.

Things I am co-ordinating

ReaLiTea

As December 2026 draws closer, I find myself increasingly sad that the Research Literacy of Teachers project is ending. Over the past few years, it has become much more than a collection of deliverables and deadlines. It has been a space for conversations, friendships and ideas that I would have liked to see continue for much longer. This, however, did not prevent me from enjoying the activities that the team and I have been undertaking on the road to the project conclusion.

The Volos transnational meeting

The highlight of the last few weeks was the transnational meeting, which took place in Volos on the 28th and 29th September. I will admit that, when we started the project, I found the prospect of this particular meeting more intimidating than almost everything else in the timeline. At the time, I was afraid that we would have fallen behind schedule on all fronts, and this would involve difficult decisions. I also doubted that my university could support even a modest event, and the VIP treatment we received at meetings elsewhere had set the bar uncomfortably high.

As it turned out, everything went much better than I had feared. This is perhaps another reminder that the things we anticipate with the greatest apprehension are not necessarily the ones that turn out badly. Sometimes, looking back at what worried us can be a useful way of recognising how far we have come.

Wrapping up the ReaLiTea project

In addition to planning the finishing touches for the project outputs, in the meeting we also decided to hold a virtual event where we will present our work. This event, led by our partners at the University of Vienna, will take place on 11th December 2026 (14:00–16:00 CET). We all hope to see many of you there if you can make it!

The Heidelberg interview

Another thing I do not often do, but did for ReaLiTea, was a short video interview about the ReaLiTea framework for teacher research literacy. I generally tend to avoid these, because I find them stressful: in addition to sounding at least semi-coherent, you need to remember to look at the camera, move your hands naturally, and make sure your microphone does not rasp at your beard. At an age when one’s cognitive faculties are beginning to feel noticeably weaker, this is just too much to keep track of.

Even so, it proved an enjoyable experience. During the interview, Caro Blume and I discussed how the framework came into existence, and talked about its content and intended uses. I am actually quite happy about it, and I hope to share it as soon as we have finished with post-production.

LocalLing

While ReaLiTea is moving to its conclusion, the collaborations that were seeded in the March 2026 meeting of the Revitalisation of Linguistic Diversity and Cultural Heritage project are now taking on lives of their own. The past month included the visit by Bénédicte Pivot from the Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry to Colombia, where she joined Germana Carolina Soler Millán and Guillaume Bruno Roux for training in qualitative fieldwork methods, delivered a keynote at the 6th International Conference on Sociolinguistics and Interculturality, and made field visits to indigenous communities. I am planning to visit the University of Caldas in Colombia myself in 2029, and I am already feeling quite impatient about it.

On this side of the Atlantic, Katerina Maadla from Tallinn University visited the Université de La Manouba in Tunisia, as a guest of our LocalLing partners, Fethi Helal, Nadia Bouchhioua and Adel Sliti. While in Tunisia, Katerina delivered a series of lectures exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming translation and interpreting practices in minoritised languages. My own visit to Tunisia will take place next summer, and I am very much looking forward to it.

AI Lang

I have found the Artificial Intelligence for Language Education project to be, in some respects at least, one of the most challenging projects I coordinate. Which is, I suppose, why I took particular pride in submitting a near-final version of the Guidelines for the Ethical Use of AI in Language Education, one of our two main deliverables, to the ECML in mid-October. These have been in development for some time, and the latest (hopefully final?) version now contains several use cases that showcase how the guidelines can help language teachers reflect on the integration of artificial intelligence in their practice.

I also enjoyed using our other main deliverable, our Moodle-based professional development course, in a class that I taught at the Heidelberg University of Education between 20 and 25 October. Seen from that perspective, I found that its modular structure was quite helpful, as it allowed participants to select the resources that seemed most relevant to their interests and professional needs. I also came away with the impression that they appreciated the pedagogically grounded, down-to-earth guidance offered by the course. Of course, seeing something you have helped create being used in practice can be a slightly unsettling experience. Things that seemed perfectly obvious during development sometimes look rather different when you have to explain them to someone else. In this case, however, I found the experience largely reassuring, and it has given me some useful ideas about how the course might be used in other teacher education contexts.

We are now developing the final webpage through which teachers will access all the resources we have created. Among other things, this involves creating a short video (another one!) where I introduce the project and show our guidelines and Moodle course.

Things I have been reading

One of the books I enjoyed reading this month was Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome, which I picked up at the airport on the way to Heidelberg. What I found especially interesting was that Beard’s account is not sequenced as a succession of biographies from Octavian Augustus to Romulus Augustulus. Rather, it is a thematically organised discussion of what it actually meant to be an emperor, with chapters focusing on the succession, the imperial entourage, the emperor’s time off and more.

This has actually made for unexpectedly appropriate reading in these Trumpian times. Despite being concerned with the rulers of the ancient Roman world, the book invites reflection on the personalisation of political power, the normalisation of extraordinary behaviour, and the extraordinary lengths to which people will go to flatter those in authority. What I found even more insightful, however, was how the book invites us to look beyond colourful personalities and outrageous anecdotes, and focus on the political structures that made such behaviour possible, and eventually even normal.

Things I would like to share

Over the last month, I came across a couple of calls for contributions that I would like to share, in case these may be of interest.

• Amazigh and Occitan, side by side (Montpellier, 18–19 November 2027). This is a colloquium that is growing out of the LocalLing project, and it looks at how two minoritised languages keep creating, circulating and being taught. Proposals in French, Occitan, Amazigh or English are due by 20 December 2026. (more here)
• CCERBAL 2027: Bilingualism and Multilingualism at the Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (University of Ottawa, 6–8 May 2027). This conference (where I will appear as a keynote speaker) asks what happens to bi- and multilingualism as AI becomes part of everyday language use and teaching. It also explores whether artificial intelligence will entrench English or contribute towards linguistic diversity. Proposals are due by 30 November 2026 (more in my earlier post).

As always, if you have work that explores the intersections of language, identity, education and power, the European Journal of Education and Language Review, which I edit, might be a suitable home for it. If you would like to find out more, feel free to reach out for an informal chat.

Things I have written on the blog

Over the past month, I have mostly focused on research literacy in this blog. These included a post about our Volos transnational meeting (mentioned earlier), and a post about a special issue focusing on teacher research literacy. I also made a short post about the CCERBAL conference in Ottawa, where I will speak in May 2027. If you have missed them, the posts are below.

Things that will happen next

The next event in my calendar would have been a workshop for teachers in Piraeus, where I was looking forward to sharing some of the resources we have developed in the ReaLiTea project. This event will not happen as planned. Collaborations of this kind rest on a sense of mutual respect for each other’s roles, and when that is missing, even a modest event becomes difficult to sustain.³ Rather than let the workshop fade into another unfulfilled possibility, we will hold it online, under the auspices of the University of Thessaly, and teachers from the Piraeus area will be very welcome to join. More details will follow as they become available.

Upcoming events

Other future events, planned for the next few weeks, include:

• A dissemination event for ReaLiTea resources at the University of Poitiers, France, from 17th to 21st November 2026, which will also explore how our resources might be useful for teachers of less-widely taught languages.
• A series of lectures and collaborations in Romania, where I have been invited by the University of Bucharest.
• An online appearance at the EVÕLxTI häkaton meeting in Estonia, on 27th November 2026.
• The online ReaLiTea dissemination event, on 11th December 2026.
• A webinar on using Artificial Intelligence for Language Education, hosted by the ECML, on 28th January 2027.

If you happen to be at any of these events, do come and say hello! And if you are organising something yourself, whether a seminar, a workshop for teachers or a conference, and you think I might be able to contribute, please feel free to get in touch. I am always keen to hear about new contexts where the work my colleagues and I have been doing might be relevant, and some of the most rewarding collaborations I have had started with exactly that kind of message.

A conclusion, of sorts

There is a temptation, especially in academic life, to describe endings as new beginnings, and try to rhetorically reframe disappointment as opportunity for growth. I do not know how convincing I find this. Some things simply end, and some possibilities are lost along the way. But there are occasions, every now and then, when an unfamiliar angle lets us see something that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Heidelberg has offered me a few such moments this month, even if they mostly came through rain-streaked windows rather than from places I had hoped to visit.

Footnotes

1. The editorial team also includes Christina Rignel, who participated in the project by contributing to editorial processes during its first weeks. ↩︎
2. Under contract with Multilingual Matters. We expect this to appear in late 2027 or early 2028. ↩︎
3. A lot of public academic work is unrewarded, and rightly so. However, I strongly believe that when material resources are scarce, the role of relational resources like respect, transparency, and consultation becomes even more important. A professional event that relies on teachers donating their evenings and speakers donating expertise and reputation is already a problematic setup, made intolerable when both groups of people have to comply with a never-ending stream of changing instructions. ↩︎

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