CRECEA End of Year Report
Although we got off to a slow start, the Centre for Research in Education in China and East Asia (CRECEA) is now gaining momentum and is looking forward to a busy 2020! Here is what we got up to this year, 2019.
Meet CRECEA’s new administrators
CRECEA has employed two part-time administrators to help run the centre. They will be monitoring our emails, maintaining the website (and this blog!), and helping to organise events.
 |
Shirui Chai is a 3rd year PhD candidate studying the academic experiences of Chinese overseas students at a British university, with specific reference to their intra-classroom dialogic participation. Shirui is Chinese but has been living in the UK since she was 18 and is now married with a bouncing baby boy. | |
| Tom Avery is a 1st year PhD candidate studying how refugee-background children in the UK experience language education in schools. He is British, but taught English in South Korea for eight years. There he met his wife and had two beautiful children who live with him in rural Wiltshire. |  |
|
Our main job at the moment is setting up the CRECEA web page and getting the centre organised ready to hold lots of events and to host visiting scholars arriving next year.
First CRECEA Postgraduate Research Symposium
In June this year, Bath hosted a first symposium where we welcomed students from Tongji University, Shanghai. 13 students from Tongji and 5 from Bath presented on a range of topics related to language and education, language and literature, political sciences and education. We were also lucky to have two great keynote speakers, Dr Daniel Candel Bormann from La Universidad de Alcala and our very own Dr Samantha Curle, who joined our department this year.
It was an intense weekend, but there was lots of interesting discussion and exchange between the two groups. We look forward to organising another Symposium next year.
Visiting Scholars
We were pleased to host Dr Weihong Wong as a visiting scholar this year. Weihong completed a research project on children’s language development in Chinese families under the supervision of Xiao Lan. She’ll be publishing reports of the project in the Chinese Journal of Language Policy and Planning and Current Issues of Language Planning. She also managed to co-author a paper in the International Journal of Bilingual Educaation and Bilingualism with Xiao Lan and English today. She’s had a really busy and successful year, and left us to return to China in October. We wish her all the best!
As Weihong left, we were also proud to welcome two new visiting scholars to the department: Yang Xigang and Ho Jie.
Xigang is an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Languages school at Nanjing Forestry university and the director of the Department of Applied Linguistics in NFU. His research interests include applied linguistics, translation and teaching methodology, and he will be with our department of education at Bath until March 2020.
Jie’s research interest include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and identity. Her current work draws on sociocultural theory and teacher cognition to interpret how teachers exercise agency, make choices between teaching and research, and adopt appropriate actions in response to educational reforms to construct professional development paths that suit their own needs and characteristics. She will be with us until October 2020.
We’re really excited to get off to a strong start in 2020; we have lots planned, so watch this space!
Tom and Shirui, Centre Admin