By Beatriz Sedano, PhD Student, Open University of Spain
My first contact with NOBLE was less than one year ago in CIEFE, International Congress of Spanish for Specific Purposes. Since I connected with the NOBLE team, other graduates and phd students like Carolina, I have found so many benefits of connecting.
DISCUSSING AND LEARNING
First of all, NOBLE is a professional learning community. Therefore, as students and teachers of LSP, the most important thing is to learn and discuss specialized language education. In our virtual meetings, personal meetings in conferences, webinars and continuous contact through NOBLE social networks and personal email, we have been discussing a lot of issues related to my research field such as: LSP Teaching, Teacher Training, Language and Globalisation, IT Language Teaching and E-Learning, last Tendencies like Language MOOCs, etc.
In NOBLE you can find an amazing amount of resources to learn about and then discuss with the group: info about Language and different Careers; info about Starting a Program; info about Global Opportunities and Intercultural Resources; or practical resources like the K-12 Handbook with full lesson plans.
SHARING AND DISCOVERING
Secondly, the benefit of being a professional learning community is to share in order to discover.
Through NOBLE, we share knowledge but also resources: our research bibliographies, and information about conferences and events, resources such as journals and articles collaboration work, job opportunities, etc. We have been organizing webinars where experienced teachers and graduates can share their knowledge and graduate students can disseminate their research s in order to gain experience and obtain feedback and some ideas to create LSP courses for the future.
WORKING AND COLLABORATING
Another crucial thing if we want to understand the LSP field and prepare our students for the global workplace, is to learn to work in collaboration with other teachers and professionals of the field we want to teach.
Through NOBLE, we have been working together on presentations for conferences like GERES or AATSP, and different projects for the future.
To learn more about the professional perspective, we are organizing a new series of webinars for this year dedicated to the professional world, because it is not always about the teachers!
BROADENING YOUR HORIZONS AND BORDERS
Current and future LSP teachers need a wide education and training. They have to find a speciality but also be versatile and learn and know about diverse fields. Communities like NOBLE are the perfect chance to explore different paths in your education.
One of the best things for me about NOBLE is the ability to connect students and teachers from the US and Europe. So we can learn from different universities, backgrounds, teaching trends, open our fields of research and action and spread the LSP teaching of the different languages we teach around the world.
In short, I strongly believe that BEING CONNECTED with NOBLE has been crucial during this year to learn about my investigation, to find new paths and ideas and find opportunities for career development. It is a great opportunity for those who are starting a graduate or postgraduate career to make professional connections and feel you are not alone…
You can find all the info in NOBLE website and in Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin.