“This was a blast – great people and meaningful work”. Ruslana Westerlund, Westerlund Consulting and Bethel University.
June 17th and 18th saw the return of our annual Disciplinary Literacy Symposium to the University of Bath, and this year proved to be the biggest event so far, with 31 speakers giving talks and workshops on a range of topics related to writing at school and university level. The line-up was exciting and diverse, with a mix of teachers, researchers, consultants and other educational professionals from as far afield as Hong Kong and Australia to local Bath-based professionals coming together to share their expertise.
Highlights from Wednesday included Evelyn Hargett (University of Bath) and Verity Neeves (Royal Wootton Bassett Academy) presenting on The Professional Learning Cycle: an adaptive tool to guide responsive co-planning for positive impacts on student learning, which was praised as bringing to life “how two professionals working together, a researcher and a teacher, can use linguistic tools in the classroom.”
On Thursday, local teachers from Royal High School Bath shared their experiences of the power of combining pedagogical research with classroom practice. Craig Devlin discussed Reengineering the Physics curriculum through language, explanation and meaning, detailing how teachers can improve their classroom performance and outcomes through using the Teaching and Learning Cycle. This was particularly well received, with one delegate remarking how this “was really inspiring and supportive for me in my role.”
A full list of the presentations and their abstracts can be found here:
As with the previous year, the event allowed for plenty of opportunities for networking, discussion and the free exchange of ideas. For the first time, the symposium was preceded by a ‘Research Party’: a fantastic week-long series of meetings, workshops and presentations in which many of our guest academics met with the BAWESS team to discuss disciplinary literacy issues and plan future collaboration. As a result, exciting new research outputs are planned next year, in the form of a special issue of Linguistics and Education Journal and presentations at the AILA and ISFLA conferences in Vancouver, Canada and Puebla, Mexico. Watch this space for future updates!
***** Don’t forget, your school can sign up to participate in the BAWESS project and contribute to this landmark research. Full details can be found at the website information page here. You can register via the online form here, or email the team at bawess@bath.ac.uk for more details.*****
