Celebrating 20 Years of the TESOL Programme at the School of Education
It’s our 20th Birthday!
This year marks 20 years of our masters in TESOL programmes at UofG. With over 1000 graduates from more than 30 countries, it seems a timely moment to reflect on our progress and achievements.
I can still remember when our first programme director, Dr Esther Daborn asked a small group of us if we would be interested in contributing to the MEd English Language Teaching. We said yes and quickly got to work! Since then while we have changed our name to TESOL our focus has always been on our learners and offering the best experience possible for them, informed by our own scholarship and research.
We have expanded and innovated from our initial small suite of courses. Subjects now range from assessment and linguistic varieties to teaching young multilingual learners and academic English, to incorporating strong social justice and AI strands into our work. We are very proud of our achievements in teaching and scholarship, recognised in the University Teaching Excellence Team Award 2019- 20.
Our team of lecturers has changed and grown, going from strength to strength, bringing in new specialisms in research and teaching. Innovative projects range from teaching English multilingually through art, and video coding for analysing interactional competence to exploring emotions in teacher identity. We have also been proud to guide many interesting projects by our PhD students graduate, quite a number from our own masters' alumni.
We have also developed a strong careers and employability strand with the TESOL Graduate Skills Award, our current ‘future skills’ project providing opportunities to engage with local ESOL students, student led language Clubs at a local primary school, and a Collaborative Online International Learning project with students in Spain. These are just a few of examples of our collective efforts. It’s been quite a productive 20 years!
Of course our biggest achievement is you, our alumni. We are always so pleased to hear from you with news of your careers, further study and achievements.
Please keep in touch, we’ve love you to let us know where you are now.
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