This pitch presents the highlights of the empirical interdisciplinary course which was built on the principles of the fully inclusice Exploratory Practice (Hanks 2017, 2019). The course Suomet vieraina suussa (Tasting the forms of Finnish) was carried out at the Tampere University (Finland) with an aim to engage MA students of Finnish language to work together with non-linguists, a group of students of Theatre Arts. The aim of this collaboration was to empower the participants' professional identities through co-investigating language awareness and ideologies (or 'language regard', Preston 2011) as shaped and co-created in the interdisciplinary learning environment. Among the participants were us two instrcutors who represented the both of the fields involved, and who now worked together for the first time. The very starting point of the course was the well-known fact that linguistic forms, their social use as well as human reflections of the forms in use, all mutually shape and inform each other (Woolard 2008). Stemming from this fact, among the aims (or rather, the instructor's puzzles) was to conduct research concerning the potential of an interdisciplinary learning environment to function as a context for exploring and developing language awareness and ideology in terms of professional growth. The learning environment was used as a means for exploring bottom-up sociolinguistic norms and sense-making as emerging and relevant for the participants. Among the inclusive research methods was autoethnographic, reflective diary keeping (Ellis & Bochner 2000), applied together with project based collaborative activities. In the short pitch, the talk will address the methodological design of the course pointing out the fruitful balance of the intensive collaborative work and the individuals' self-reflection.
Ellis, C. & Bochner, A. P. 2000. Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In Denzin, K.N. & Lincoln, Y. (eds.) The handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks: Sage publications s. 733–768
Hanks, J. 2017. Exploratory Practice in Language Teaching. Puzzling about principles and practices. Research and Practice in Applied Linguistics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hanks, J. 2019. From research-as-practice to exploratory practice-as-research in language teaching and beyond. Language Teaching 52, 143-187.
Preston, D. R. 2011. The power of language regard: Discrimination, classification, comprehension, and production. (Special issue II, 2011) Dialectologia s. 9-33.
Woolard, K. 2008. Why dat now? Linguistic-anthropological contributions to the explanation of sociolinguistic icons and change. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (4), 432-452.
