Through my positions at AIHE and the University of Adelaide, I am developing teaching methods that are centred on social learning (in-person and online) through the development of communities of practice. My areas of interest include the digital transformation of education, engaging curriculum design, cross-cultural communication, and international student learning experiences.
My varying positions within universities have allowed me to provide support to linguistically, culturally, and cognitively diverse student cohorts from across the universities’ disciplines. Recently, I completed a Graduate Certificate in Education, in order to critique and evaluate existing pedagogies and look for ways to improve these in the context of the evolving education situation of the past two years. My student-centred approach has allowed me to develop the ability to identify the individual needs of students and approaches to teaching that are specific to individuals’ ways of learning. My research in linguistics has provided me with the skills to analyse the language and structure of academic texts and break them down into manageable formulae that can be scaffolded to students, so they can easily replicate these in their own assignments. My recent publications on critical review texts and reflective writing texts make recommendations for educators to scaffold these assessment types in their own curriculum.
With a focus on memory studies, narratology and the influence and exposure of traumas in literature, my PhD research uses cultural trauma theory to examine the narratives that have emerged through survivor memoirs and how these may have contributed to shaping public memory of the Holodomor, a genocide that took the lives of approximately one third of the rural population of Ukraine in 1932-33.
My publications include: papers on academic discourses; a number of articles for a multilingual magazine, for which I wrote in English, French and Russian; an academic book chapter on phraseology, published at the University of Białystok; creative non-fiction pieces about my grandmother’s experiences during the Holodomor and WWII; and a collection of studies entitled ‘Text-Based Research and Teaching: A Social Semiotic Perspective on Language in Use’, co-edited with Dr Peter Mickan. For a full list of my publications, please see my portfolio here.
Elise Westin 