Dr Sue Garton

National Teaching Fellow 2015 Dr Sue Garton's approach to learning and teaching has developed as a result of more than 30 years experience as an English language teacher and teacher educator, working with learners and teachers from all over the world in a wide variety of contexts. Sue has been working at Aston University in the School of Languages and Social Sciences for 15 years and she is currently Director of Postgraduate Programmes with responsibility for both Masters and PhD programmes. During her time at Aston she has worked extensively on distance learning Masters programmes in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) as a result of which she has developed an approach to learning and teaching based the concept of 'situated learning', a philosophy she follows in all the modules she designs and delivers. Key to Sue's approach is the idea of praxis, an integration of theory and practice through the theorisation of practice. As a result of her distance learning experience, Sue has also been able to extend her approach to learning and teaching to her work on on-campus MA and BSc modules. Sue's own research interests are closely aligned with her work as a teacher educator, focusing on areas such as language in education policy and its implementation in the classroom, the role of materials in English language learning and classroom discourse. She has been involved in three British Council-funded research projects working with school teachers, the themes being: teaching English to young learners; the issues in the transition from primary to secondary school; and non-native teacher schemes. She is coordinator of a major EU Tempus project to develop blended-learning masters programmes for language teachers in Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Sue's main publications are also based on the idea of praxis, including From Experience to Knowledge in ELT, co-authored with Julian Edge and published in Oxford's Handbooks for Language Teachers series. She was recently appointed series editor, with Keith Richards, of a new series, published by Palgrave, called International Perspectives on ELT. The series aims to give accounts of local pedagogies with global resonance, taking a practical focus but linking with cutting-edge research.