A Communities of Practice approach to practitioner research: recognition and togetherness

The question of how to promote research activity among language professionals is challenging and complex. As well as effecting positive change in pedagogy and the classroom, teacher participation in research into teaching and learning contributes to identity and professional development. This paper records the experience over a two-year period of six language teachers at the Centre of Academic Language and Development (CALD), University of Bristol, who volunteered to participate in a small internally-funded research community. This Research & Publications project has provided a space through which these and other participants gained research experience while producing publishable output. In two stages of interviews in 2022 and 2024, we employed Lave and Wenger’s (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice (CoP) as our overarching conceptual framework, resulting in descriptions of the lived reality of becoming, being, and belonging to an EAP teacher-researcher community of practice. The interviews reveal themes of recognition and togetherness, confidence- and community-building, and mutual support, as well as responses to hierarchy, and feelings of isolation, vulnerability, and self-doubt. We conclude that such projects are potentially empowering and transformative of both identity and career trajectories, as has been the case for some of our participants. We also conclude that research and scholarship projects should be mindful of existing organisational dynamics, of additional, competing CPD demands, and of pre-project research experience. In particular, to ease the journey into research, consideration should be given to more explicit forms of researcher training, buddying or peer mentoring.