Internationalisation and TESOL academics professional development: Towards an intercultural model

Internationalisation and TESOL academics professional development: Towards an intercultural model

The study set out to investigate TESOL academics’ contemporary professional development (PD) landscape in Australia and Bangladesh. The overarching objective is to investigate TESOL academics’ intercultural paradigms and the contemporary PD provisions that enable them to engage in intercultural praxis. This study implemented a sequential multimodal paradigm in which an anonymous questionnaire was adapted from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS, 2018). This study's theoretical foundation consisted of three mutually compatible epistemological lenses: social constructivism, intercultural theory, and reflective practice. It also adapted the INSPIRE (in-practice, needs-based, sustained, peer-collaborative, impactful, reflective, evaluated) PD model to examine its efficacy as a PD model for the TESOL context and as an analytical framework. The raw data were managed using SPSS (v. 28) and NVivo (v. 16). The findings revealed that Australian universities offered abundant generic PD provisions, however, the academics desired to have discipline-specific PD provisions. Bangladeshi academics, on the other hand, expressed dissatisfaction about the dearth of both general and subject-specific PD. Nonetheless, in both countries’ settings, academics showed concerns over the lack of professional agency in weaving their own PD experiences. Concerning PD mechanisms contributing to the development of academic mindsets and intercultural skills, Australian and Bangladeshi academics appeared to select comparable universally popular activities: collegial interactions, collaboration, online resources, reading and research. Regarding intercultural paradigms, Australian academics appeared to integrate intercultural awareness into their instructions; however, their practice dimension seemed to be below par. On the contrary, Bangladeshi academics appeared to incorporate cultural awareness in their lessons instead of fostering intercultural competency among student populations. When it came to the critical appraisal of the existing PD conditions and subsequent improvements, Australian and Bangladeshi academics both emphasised: limited interculturality, self-initiated PD, and lack of discipline-specific PD and they proposed support towards intercultural praxis, joint responsibility, and discipline-specific PD. Contextual subtleties and nuances were perceived when Bangladeshi academics critiqued unstructured PD and lack of financial support and recommended for regular PD and increased incentives and research funds. The initial INSPIRE PD model is modified by integrating key findings of this study as intercultural, subject-specific, and institutional-personal for transnational applications, thereby making an original and crucial contribution to pertinent TESOL PD literature and Applied Linguistics discourse.

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