A self-introduction Mark Wyatt

3 things about myself 1. I live in Abu Dhabi but am currently on holiday in the UK. To the right is a selfie taken with my wife and son at West Lulworth Cove on the south coast yesterday. Between 2009 and 2015, I taught at the University of Portsmouth, supporting Malaysian B.Ed TESL students with pedagogy and research-related courses, and teaching stuff like the history of English to British and Erasmus students, and communication theory mostly to students from Hong Kong. Walks along the coast were more regular then.

3 things about myself 2. My favourite football team is Arsenal (and I’m watching them on New Year’s Day against Crystal Palace at the Emirates Stadium in North London). Arsenal have won the league six times in my lifetime but on every one of these occasions I was overseas. In 1971, I was in Australia with my parents. In 1989 and 1991, I was in Thailand early in my teaching career. In 1998, I was in Nepal, working for the British Council (where I met my wife). In 2002 and 2004, I was in Oman, working on an in-service University of Leeds BA TESOL project and studying part-time for a PhD. By the way, my first supervisor was Simon Borg, who supports Tottenham Hotspur; we never talked about football.

3 things about myself 3. Before I got into teaching, I was a poet, but until recently (see a forthcoming issue of ELTED devoted to innovative writing about research) hadn’t written any poetry for a very long time, in fact since 2003. Below is a poem from that year. It’s entitled: ‘Dreaming of America’.

2 things I like doing when I am not teaching 1. Researching, writing, collaborating in research activities, helping other people do research. Research can be incredibly liberating and fulfilling. I write almost every day, usually producing several articles each year. A link to a list of my publications is here: https://scholar.google.ae/citations?user=qq6WYKQAAAAJ&hl=en 2. Playing tennis. In Abu Dhabi, there is a tennis court just across the street from my house and I usually play doubles with friends 7-9 each weekend morning during the winter. When the weather gets hotter, we play a bit earlier. At the moment, the weather is beautiful and there’s a lot of greenery around the court to enjoy between points.

1 thing I am curious about and might like to research I work in a really interesting environment, supporting the development of research skills in undergraduate engineers through a project-based learning approach; this is at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi. It is a great deal of fun and is very rewarding, facilitating growth; the students really seem to appreciate it. I’m interested in exploring how a community of practice centred on supporting project-based learning has developed at this university, so a kind of teacher cognition study is in order, including an examination of the social and historical elements of this (over the last decade or so). Writing about the approach they follow, my colleagues have variously described it in print as holistic project-based learning, problem-based learning, context-based learning, enquiry-based learning and inquiry-guided learning, and I find this interesting too.