[00:00:55] Laura Richards (she/her): Welcome back to another episode of All Things EAP. I'm Laura Richards from the University of Leeds in the UK.

[00:01:01] Xiaoqing Bi (she/her): And I'm Xiaoqing Bi from Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University in China. So Laura, it's the end of the term, are you starting to feel Christmassy?

[00:01:10] Laura Richards (she/her): I definitely am. And we hope all of you listening are too. To get you in the festive spirit, we have a great episode taking you into the new year.

[00:01:19] Xiaoqing Bi (she/her): That's right, Laura. In this episode, you met with two very special guests to discuss EAP leadership in the UK.

[00:01:26] Laura Richards (she/her): I spoke to Rachel Heasley from the University of Manchester and Hannah Jones from the University of Edinburgh, who is also the incoming BALEAP chair. We chatted about the issues and challenges around leading EAP in UK contexts. Xiaoqing, I'm interested to hear what stood out for you in this discussion.

[00:01:43] Xiaoqing Bi (she/her): Well, Hannah mentioned that breaking into these leadership communities is often done informally. The casual chats with the right manager over coffee, rather than in formal meetings. And this made me think about some cultural barriers to leadership. I mean, those kind of coffee chats with managers wouldn't be a thing here in China. So I think this episode is really a discussion about EAP leadership in the UK, but entering into EAP leadership in different contexts and cultures could definitely be a topic for another day. 

[00:02:18] Laura Richards (she/her): Exactly. And this is something we'd like to explore more in a future episode. So if you have an experienced of leadership outside the UK, please do get in touch. Now onto today's topic. It was a pleasure talking to Rachel and Hannah about the challenges for EAP leadership. And we really hope you enjoy the discussion.

[00:02:39] Xiaoqing Bi (she/her): Merry Christmas and enjoy this episode. 
[00:02:42] Laura Richards (she/her): Welcome to today's discussion. I'd like to thank Rachel Heasley from the University of Manchester. And Hannah Jones, who is the incoming BALEAP Chair from the University of Edinburgh to the podcast today. Hi Hannah, hi Rachel.

[00:02:56] Hannah Jones (she/her): Hi..

[00:02:56] Rachel Heasley (she/her): Hello.

[00:02:57] Laura Richards (she/her): So before we get started on our discussion about leadership, could you take a moment to introduce yourself and a little bit about your background to our listeners?

[00:03:05] Hannah Jones (she/her): Thanks, Laura. So, hi everyone and welcome. I'm Hannah Jones and I'm Director of English Language Education at the University of Edinburgh and also, as you said, incoming Chair of BALEAP. I've been involved in leadership roles in EAP for probably about 15 years across different institutions, different roles, including several years in roles in China before. I returned to the UK and I guess in the past five years, or so in my current role, I've become more and more interested in leadership and I've been reflecting a lot on leadership practice, for the work that I'm doing towards Advanced HE Principal Fellowship, thinking about what makes, good leadership of teaching and learning, and also how to create space and support for others to flourish in the different communities where I have influence. And what I'm particularly interested in is how to practice leadership in a way that's authentic and ethical and in the challenges of doing so in the ways in which we sometimes might find ourselves feeling sort of conflicted or compromised. And also how to reconcile in my leadership practice the tensions or possible tensions between leadership as a sort of service to a community where you're consulting and representing and maybe protecting and a more directive leadership where you need to take a position and drive that forward.

[00:04:39] Laura Richards (she/her): Thank you so much, Hannah. Rachel, could you take a moment to introduce yourself?

[00:04:44] Rachel Heasley (she/her): Yeah, thanks. I work at the University of Manchester, and I'm in a slightly different position, compared to Hannah in terms of my thinking about leadership is relatively recent. Um, so I recently changed roles from an academic English tutor and my current role title interestingly contains the word leader, so my current job title is senior language tutor and academic leader. And so I think particularly since transitioning into that role, leadership is something that is perhaps more on my mind, partly in terms of my own approach to how I intend to or aim to lead others and to lead projects and things. But also I guess my perspective for this conversation is going to be partly someone who is being led within the context of EAP and higher education and what does that look like or what could that look like or what should that look like? And kind of my perspective and questions and comments from that angle as well.

[00:05:33] Laura Richards (she/her): Thank you so much, Rachel. I think it's really useful to have perspectives from different sides in this discussion and just a little bit about where I currently am on leadership. I've had a variety of different leadership roles across the course of my EAP career over the last 10 years from presessional module leadership, in-sessional module leadership, foundation year leadership. But now I'm moving more into leadership in scholarship, specifically around use of artificial intelligence. And so this is a relatively new field for me, and it's a completely different way of leading. It's much less, admin focused and functional, and it's much more about inspiring other people to become interested in this area and think through, how we address the issues that come up. So on to our first question. How do we define leadership in EAP? We've already identified that we have quite differing experiences of leadership. What does it mean to be a leader in EAP and how does this differ from some of the ideas of management that we might also have encountered?

[00:06:36] Hannah Jones (she/her): I'm happy to go first because I really wanted to actually reflect on, on something that you had said, Rachel, which was this idea of like the academic leader. And I think for me quite often. You hear this sort of distinction between leadership and management that management is sort of operational. It's about monitoring things, it's about kind of processes. Whereas leadership is more fluid and isn't necessarily attached to a title. And I came across a distinction once a leader is somebody who brings together a group of people, a community, in moving towards a common goal. And I think in -that sense, anyone can be a leader, so at any level in an organization, somebody can bring leadership to a particular context or situation. I think in EAP, those elements around community are actually really relevant in the sense of how we are often peripheral or seen as peripheral. So as a leader, there is that sort of role of being as, as I said, maybe even a protector of a community. So that's quite interesting. In Breiman, who did their literature review on leadership in HE and talk about the idea that actually good leaders might not really make very much difference. What they actually do is just create space for others to flourish and perhaps create space for leadership to flourish in others. Whereas a bad leader can have a really obvious negative effect. Like, you know, when there's a bad leader, right? I don't know if I completely agree. But to the extent that I do recognize it, I don't think the same is true of managers. I think When we think of the sort of operational management that happens in, in the EAP sector, things like timetabling and work allocations, I think that that, when that's done well, that does have a really kind of obvious and tangible positive effect, but I think these definitions are quite sort of contested.

[00:08:37] Rachel Heasley (she/her): I was just going to agree. I think I found it hard to divide because I think to be a good leader, often good management skills are also required and vice versa. And so I think there is a massive overlap and perhaps within job roles we sometimes divide the duties of a manager and the duties of a leader, but I think the qualities overlap substantially in terms of what makes a good manager and a good leader.

[00:09:00] Laura Richards (she/her): That's a really good point and I was looking back at some of the recordings from the PIM on leadership that took place in Durham back in 2021. Now obviously this was still during the pandemic in the UK and and so this is all online but that's great because it means that we can go back and kind of see what people's thinking was at this time when I was watching Melinda Whong's talk and she was referring to some trainings that she runs with academic leaders both in a current institution and previous institutions that she's worked in. And what she was really highlighting was that the qualities that we think of as being necessary traits or characteristics of good leaders are in fact the same things we think of as being necessary for good teachers. And so there's so much that we can kind of bring from our own experience as teachers, and as teaching and learning practitioners into leadership. I'm not sure the same is necessarily true for some of the kind of operational management that we've been talking about, although the sense of kind of project management that sometimes is required in order to be an effective leader on things like redesigning curricula, redesigning programs, or as I'm learning now, trying to lead in areas of scholarship definitely those kind of project management and managerial skills are really useful. But I like to think of the difference between, at least in my experience, between leadership and management as being between people and processes. And when you're a leader, you think of how you can encourage, and I like the fact that you use the word flourish there, Hannah, and that you were talking about kind of being protector of a community. I very much see that being people orientated, but management to me is much more process orientated. And we have to do a combination of the two, I think, at different stages and in different roles, but I like to kind of think of, of that, at least in my own, um, practice is kind of that being a distinction.

[00:10:56] Hannah Jones (she/her): I don't know if I completely agree with that though because we do talk about line management, which is absolutely about looking after people and supporting people. I would go back to this idea of the, of the terms just being really contested in the sort of, in the kind of wider field of management and leadership.
But I think particularly in EAP, It's, it's not surprising that it's even more contested and blurry because as a field it's an area that we shy away from which is something that Melinda Wong also talks about in the same talk. where she talks about getting a call in the middle of the night to be appointed as a director because they couldn't recruit anyone. She talks about the kind of hesitation that classroom teachers have towards stepping into a management or leadership role, and some of the reasons for that hesitation, even when the classroom is such a fertile ground. I think we have a bit of a sort of deficit in thinking about leadership in EAP. I don't quite know why it is. I, I speculate that it's something to do with the language school backgrounds that many of us have and the association of leadership with timetabling and allocation of work, unpopularity associated with that, but it does you know, it's something that I think affects us quite negatively. I don't think it's, it's something that's entirely unique to EAP. I think it reflect, it affects other areas of higher education as well, where leadership is seen as a, a kind of temporary service that you do in order to then get the reward of more research time, for example. So it's not only us, but I think it is particularly.
us, because we have very little scholarship on it. We don't have a fourth level in TEAP accreditation, for example, as we have in Advanced HE. And so, yeah, I think it's not, it's not surprising that we don't really know what it is.

[00:12:51] Laura Richards (she/her): I think that's a, yeah, a really interesting observation. So you mentioned that kind of some of the background that we bring to our leadership in EAP coming from the fact that quite a lot of us do come from language teaching backgrounds, language schools, either in the UK or outside the UK. So what, what do you think in terms of leadership we can bring from our quite diverse backgrounds, but predominantly language teaching centers to draw on in terms of our own leadership as a discipline.

[00:13:19] Rachel Heasley (she/her): I'm not sure this is directly answering your question, but I when I was thinking about this and the idea of Melissa Wong was pointing out as well in her talk about how people don't really sign up for leadership. I was thinking about the way that we talk about leadership or we kind of see leadership in terms of day to day teaching roles. And I think we often talk about, you know, you lead a meeting or you lead a team or you lead a project, but it's quite rare, perhaps for us to label people as a leader, even though they're taking part in those duties and I think from my perspective, I think I've seen lots of elements of leadership within colleagues of all sorts of varieties where it's perhaps kind of gone unnoticed or unlabeled or unvalued. And I think a lot of that maybe we're missing opportunities to kind of point that out and label that a bit more clearly. So yeah, I was kind of thinking, I guess, of my own experience and in this, I think when Whong was talking about at the beginning of her talk where she says, you know, "I've had no formal training", and I think for a lot of us, we enter roles that have got this duties of leadership, but we're not necessarily trained or prepared for them in a formal way. For me personally, like since I've swapped roles, I've kind of been encouraged and myself have been like looking at what kind of courses could I do and what training and support could I get? And I wonder actually, would that have been more helpful before I entered this role? 

[00:14:33] Laura Richards (she/her): So I wonder in thinking about that, if it's the responsibility either of the individual to recognize the areas in which they are leading or the ways in which they're leading, or perhaps it's a collective responsibility to point this out to them because I imagine that people coming from, from a range of different backgrounds may not necessarily, consciously think about, "Oh, I'm leading on this", or "I need to lead on this". It may just be something that's part of their practice and they do it instinctively, but should we perhaps be surfacing this more? And what would the benefit of that be? 

[00:15:06] Hannah Jones (she/her): From my perspective, this is about professional development and, and professional development goals are something that should be ultimately the responsibility of the EAP practitioner in terms of their autonomy and they know where they want to go. But I mentioned line management before and I actually, to digress very, very slightly, when we talk about leadership and management, something I really don't like is this sort of positioning of management as somehow lesser because good line management is super, super important. And one of the ways in which good line management is effective is through that kind of negotiation and navigation and kind of Careful co construction of people's professional development trajectories so that if somebody does have an interest in leadership, then identifying that at an earlier stage, because as you said, Rachel, once you're in it, you know, even if those courses are really useful, which I'm not sure if they always are. Ideally you would have done those beforehand, but I do think it's interesting that the idea of, of teaching as a kind of preparation for leadership and or management, and to answer your question, Laura, again, maybe in a slightly different and indirect way, one of the things that I have talked about before, but it's something that I just find quite interesting was that for me in my leadership practice, one of the most important things for me to be able to do is influence the governance structures of my institution and find champions there and actually sort of drive forward a change agenda, which is in, in service of the student and staff communities that I'm responsible for. And that's a really difficult thing to do. It's really difficult to get listened to. One of the things that I found unlocked that for me was the knowledge base that I have as an EAP teacher. I struggled for years to influence those committees and structures and decision making processes, and then I almost had an epiphany where I realized that I could use the same tools that I teach students, because as EAP teachers, we are teaching students, among other things, how to kind of decode the rules of entry to a discourse community. And once I kind of had that moment where I was like, "oh wait a minute. This is the same thing. This is a discourse community that's got gates around it". That's got kind of hidden rules for claiming membership and being able to participate. And I then started analyzing those committee meetings, how their papers are written, how they communicate with each other, as well as the kind of more informal conversations that happen, those one to one and two to one meetings, where somebody senior says, can we grab a coffee? It's not just a coffee, it's probably the most important meeting of, like, your year. And of unpicking this network and webs of influence that happen behind the formal structures. And all of that is very closely related to language and EAP and discourse. I did find that once I made that connection, not that I have got everything that I want, by no means, but I started to have a lot more success in terms of persuasion and influence. So, My answer to that question is for me personally, my background as an EAP practitioner has been incredibly helpful to me as a leader, if not transformative in some ways. I think we're uniquely positioned to make that connection in, in our sector.
[00:18:56] Laura Richards (she/her): I think that's a really powerful point that we take our experience and our disciplinary knowledge in order to leverage that in leadership positions. Obviously it's frustrating to hear that you found it so difficult to gain traction on policy or, or high level governance issues, but I think that's probably something

[00:19:17] Hannah Jones (she/her): It's normal. 

[00:19:18] Laura Richards (she/her): That's very normal Yeah, exactly. 
So Rachel, I'm interested in hearing, from your perspective, cause you've recently transitioned to a more significant leadership role. Um, what do you kind of see the differences being and, and prior to taking on this role that you currently have? Can you just remind me what you're doing?

[00:19:38] Rachel Heasley (she/her): So until recently, I was an academic English tutor. Most of my role was teaching and kind of developing materials in the summer, I was involved in leading teams and our pre sessional, but now my role is to help. um, coordinate part of our in sessional support. Um, and so my, a lot of my role is focused on one of the university's three faculties, um, and I'm responsible for kind of trying to embed us a little bit more there and build up relationships, um, kind of find out a bit more about their needs, their students, and. Um, yeah, kind of sell our courses and boost our student numbers and all those sorts of ongoing issues. Um, so there's a bit of that going on. And then there's also the day to day kind of logistics of running the course and like problem solving as and when. Um, so I guess for me, um, it was interesting actually hearing Hannah talk about how you found ways to sort of get into that discourse community. And I think that's something that I'm currently learning is how people communicate. And particularly in such a big university, how many. Different groups of people communicate, but also don't necessarily communicate with each other then working out kind of who to, who to talk to and how to approach them and all those sorts of things. I guess that's the learning curve that I'm currently on.

[00:20:51] Hannah Jones (she/her): I think that's another sort of experience of leadership as well that perhaps puts people off is that it's not always satisfying, I don't think we'd do it if it wasn't enjoyable, but, but it can be, it can be really frustrating because the sort of the kind of scope and scale of your influence is much wider, but the gains are much slower, um, it takes much longer to see impact because, I guess, because the impact you're looking for is far reaching and don't know, this is very much a personal observation, I'm sure it could easily be challenged, but I feel like when you're in your classroom with your group of students, particularly if you're teaching on something like an International Foundation programme, where you're working with the same students for a semester or for a year, it can be really, really challenging, deeply rewarding to sort of see the progress of those individual students. And you can really feel your impact in this really satisfying and rewarding and tangible way. You can see that, you know, maybe not every day, but it can become quite a regular part of your sort of professional experience. And I don't, you know, don't want to put people off, but I'm not sure that is the case as a leader. I think the gains are. Maybe they are slower and so you need a lot of patience and a lot of resilience. It tends to be associated with change and achieving goals, but I try to sometimes sort of detach myself from that a bit and try and see it more about just active engagement in a process and sometimes accidental gains come out of that process as well.

[00:22:29] Laura Richards (she/her): I like the concept of accidental gains. But I think it's interesting at this point to bring in Andy Curtis's book from 2022 on leadership in language education and focusing more on kind of reflective practice. And in a chapter on challenges, he summarizes the key themes that his interviewees have talked about in terms of challenges in their own leadership in, and it is predominantly TESOL, context that, that they're drawing from. But some of the things that kind of stood out for me relate back to the idea of resilience and perseverance and recognizing that I think both of you have alluded to that quite often working within these university structures is a lot slower than the immediacy of working with students in the classroom. He identifies one of these themes as as being an outsider and trying to affect change, but this kind of being a strength in a way because it gives us a better ability to relate to both our students and to relate to staff because they can often feel like outsiders too. Something else that he pulls out of those interviews is becoming thick skinned and I think we definitely have to do this. 

[00:23:40] Hannah Jones (she/her): You definitely need resilience and patience and you know, and you might also sometimes have to be the face of an unpopular decision as well. Something that I'm thinking about is, should we be thick skinned? Should we have to be thick skinned? I mean certainly in some of the positions that I hold, would it be helpful for someone like me to actually be saying, no we don't all have to be thick, thick skinned, we can be human, we can be vulnerable, we can be authentic, we can say, that upset me, or I don't agree with that, that's the way it is, and it's some, it's really, really hard, but it's something that, because I have the privilege of being, being able to do so, I am kind of trying in my leadership practice to be as open and transparent as I, as I can and be as human as I can and be okay with saying, I've made a mistake or I don't know, or that's really upset me and I need a minute to think about why before I respond. That connects to Authentic leadership as well, which again is a contested term, but I do think there's This idea that to be the boss you just have to be really tough. I think it does create a barrier. It creates a barrier to anyone who might not think of themselves as tough.

[00:25:00] Laura Richards (she/her): I want to move on to a slightly different question now. How do we bring our positionality into our leadership, and how can we bring that individuality into our leadership? 
[00:25:12] Hannah Jones (she/her): I'm very aware that I'm I'm female and I'm white and in the UK, I represent the majority that I, what I would say is that wasn't the case in my leadership roles in China. But the female dominance of EAP is very UK. It's not the case in other parts of the world. So I'm aware of the privileges that I have but I'm also aware that I think as a woman at my kind of level of leadership, I see a lot of other women, but when I go into those committees, those senior committees that I'm trying to influence, particularly at the top. I've certainly had a situation where I was in a, the most senior committee in my university where there were two other women in the room apart from me, and one of them was the secretary.
And that's not, and it's not unusual. But how I reflect on that and what I do about that, I'm not entirely sure.

[00:26:16] Laura Richards (she/her): It is a really difficult topic to approach and I think it's really interesting that you pick up on the fact that it, it is a survival mechanism that you kind of, you're just so used to it. 

[00:26:25] Rachel Heasley (she/her): Yeah, it's interesting because I, I think I've experienced more comments about age than my gender, really. So for me, I think my experience has been as a relatively young person and who looks young as well. And I guess similarly to what Hannah was saying, I think you just develop a sort of mechanism of brushing it off and just, OK, carry on. 

[00:26:47] Laura Richards (she/her): But it's interesting that you also mention age as well, Rachel. It's something that comes into leadership. And I think going back to those disparities in the higher power structures in universities, where it does tend to be older men compared to at the center level contexts. We were discussing just before we started recording about the kind of gender splits among EAP practitioners, saying that it kind of looks like the list of center directors across the UK shows that two thirds of them are female, and maybe that has an impact on the way in which we lead. So it's interesting that you're talking about the vulnerabilities, and not developing a thick skin.
Perhaps this is something that women have developed for the reasons that you've already outlined. You know, we kind of brush off casual sexism and microaggressions because we're so used to it. I don't want to turn this into a discussion about feminism or the female perspective, but I think it's something that is relevant when you talk about leadership in EAP, particularly when more grassroots level leadership is taking place amongst women, but then, when you look at professors of EAP, very difficult to get read on how many professors of EAP there actually are, but I'd hazard a guess that it's not representative of the gender splits elsewhere in EAP centers and institutions more generally.

[00:28:00] Hannah Jones (she/her): I do have a one more reflection on that feminist perspective, it's not a particularly positive one, and again, it's more of a provocation to think about, I'm not saying I entirely agree with what I'm about to say, but there is a sense of leadership as service in HE. There is a sense of leadership as a citizenship or service or something that you do for your community that is essentially administrative and not your real job.
And so is it therefore in a certain sense aligned with things like being the person who says, I'll take minutes for this meeting or, you know, and is that why there are more female directors? I don't think it applies entirely. Being a leader or a manager in EAP is quite often a permanent role, not always, whereas in mainstream HE, it tends to be a temporary or rotating position. I just think there might be, there might be something in that leadership of service and the dominance of, or predominance of women in, in those positions.

[00:29:08] Rachel Heasley (she/her): I was just kind of racking my brain to think of the different people that I've managed to talk to, and I think the majority have been women which is perhaps not necessarily reflective, because I think the majority I've spoken to have been course directors but I think it's kind of a stereotype, isn't it? That you get the female academic who really cares about the students and really wants to reach out and really wants to provide the wraparound support that they all need and has time to make it somehow in their busy schedule to talk about it. So my gut instinct is that it probably does. run across the board, but I don't have statistics or formal evidence to back that up.
[00:29:40] Hannah Jones (she/her): Just really quickly to reference, Jackie Tuck, "I'm nobody's mum in this university". So relevant to what we were just saying.

[00:29:48] Laura Richards (she/her): Oh yes. Fantastic. Thank you. And all of the articles and texts that we've referred to today will be in the show notes for this episode. Okay, so I'd like to move on to a final question, which is, as leaders in EAP at different levels, how can we tackle the big challenges that are coming down the line? Now, as we record this today, there's been an article recently from the BBC, an investigation into language levels, English proficiency levels of international students at UK institutions, and it is not particularly favourable. Obviously some of the data in this article, I'm sure will be contested, but at a time when UK institutions are struggling financially with international student numbers dropping, the elephant in the room being that international student numbers are propping up home students. What can we do as EAP practitioners in leadership roles to address this? How do we manage this.

[00:30:53] Rachel Heasley (she/her): From a personal perspective, to me, it seems the obvious thing is that we need to not be a silo separate to the rest of the university. And it's a case of finding the right places to make our voice heard, but make our voice also valued, and so I think my approach at the moment is very localized within this one faculty. But a lot of the conversations I'm having are kind of, here's what we're good at. Here's what our expertise is, but also here's the evidence to show. And then also, "so here's what we can do for you, and here's how we can support you". And I think there's a lot of dialogue, isn't there, of the international student problem. I think even that article, it uses the word scandal or, you know, there's a lot of very emotive language around it. And I think part of our job is to change that dialogue and to find the right places to do that. I imagine that Hannah has a lot, perhaps a lot more input on how and where to do that. But at the moment, I feel like that's something that I'm learning to do on a localised level. 

[00:31:48] Hannah Jones (she/her): I mean, I would say that it's about reimagining EAP. This article is not new. For as long as I've been in EAP, there's been these sort of regular moral panics over the English language level of international students and both from the media, as we've seen today, but you do also see it from academics. And I don't want to you know, invalidate their concerns either, because I do think that institutions will put their recruitment targets above student experience and there will be students in classrooms that can't operate and it does have impacts on, on quality and the experience of others. But ultimately, I think it's our role to respond to those sectoral challenges. And I think that it's more concerning in the context of these other sectoral challenges that we're facing with falling international student numbers. and kind of increasing threats to language teaching and language centers. But I think the big thing, thinking about my context, is that we can't just rely on a big presessional anymore to fund the rest of our activities. We need to really think beyond that. We need to think about what internationalization really is, and think about that in terms of intercultural skills for all students, rather than just education for international students who challenge the deficit model and really kind of reimagine what EAP is. On a more positive note there's also things like to widen access and participation. As you said, Rachel, it's about not being in a silo anymore, and I've always advocated for insessional to be embedded within the degree curriculum. I don't think we should abandon pre sessional. Personally, when I teach more, it's my favorite thing to teach. And I think there will always be a place for sort of transitions and pathways more but pre sessionals are getting smaller in general across the sector, so we can't rely on them in quite the same way and they do also build in precarity. they build in precarity for practitioners because of the way that they create fluctuations in demand for staff across the year, but they also build in precarity because they sit out with the degree curriculum. So I think at least the argument that EAP is successful communication is at the heart of the academic for every student. and therefore should sit embedded within the learning journey of every student. 

[00:34:19] Laura Richards (she/her): It's really helpful to get your perspective on this. I wonder if, our listeners from outside the UK are kind of interested. Obviously it's a big issue for us at the moment, but we know that we do have many listeners outside the UK who are part of the, the BALEAP network and, some of them may be thinking, well, perhaps some of the models that we have might also come under threat. So some of the challenges that we face in the UK and the learning that we have and the adaptability that we're having to engage in, will also start to apply to contexts outside of the UK as well. There are several transnational educational partnerships between the UK and China and a couple in other countries as well, so these concerns don't just stop up our doorstep they do apply elsewhere . Before we finish up, do either of you have any final positive thoughts on, what we can do as, as EAP practitioners , both at local levels and at more institutional levels to ensure that EAP remains the positive force for good.

[00:35:17] Rachel Heasley (she/her): A few weeks ago I had a conversation with an academic within the public health department and he was very positive in terms of thinking about our perspective. I remember him saying to us, well, you know, you've, you've got freedom. You've got the strong advantage that you're not constrained by a specific curriculum, you're not constrained within one department. And I think sometimes that feels like an overwhelming sort of view of it all and that how do we please everybody and how do we fit in with everybody's sort of agendas and I think yeah for me I've been challenged recently to think about but what are the freedoms and I think like Hannah said the opportunities perhaps that are that are present currently.

[00:35:53] Hannah Jones (she/her): We are in this really challenging sectoral environment at the moment. It is difficult, as in potentially even hostile in the UK, and that will have its ramifications globally as well. But I think alongside those threats, there are also opportunities. You've said Laura, that we can be very adaptable, and that the flip side of being able to compromise is being able to adapt, right? And we are good at that, and there are opportunities for us to reimagine EAP and who it's for. In a way that is quite positive and perhaps disrupts a sort of more marketized model of higher education that we're sometimes associated with that sort of sees EAP as basically about fixing international students or getting them ready to study I think there's an opportunity for us to sort of maybe not leave that behind.

[00:36:42] Laura Richards (she/her): So more than ever strong principled leadership, inclusive leadership is what we need to ensure that that that can take place and that we we use that freedom wisely. Thank you so much for talking to me. There've been some, some brilliant insights from both of you and we hope that if any of you listening have any comments or observations, then please get in touch with us and let us know what you think. So thank you very much, Hannah. Thank you very much, Rachel. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
[00:37:09] Rachel Heasley (she/her): Thank you both.

[00:37:10] Hannah Jones (she/her): Thank you for having us. 

[00:37:14] Laura Richards (she/her): Thank you so much for listening to All Things EAP. We really hope you've enjoyed it and that you've found something interesting or useful in it. We really want to hear from you as well. So if you'd like to share a comment, suggestion or an insight into something that we've talked about on one of the episodes, please send us an email or voice note at podcast@baleap.org, but you can also get in touch through X, formerly known as Twitter and our YouTube channel, which are both @AllThingsEAP. Thank you again for listening, and we hope that you can join us for the next episode. 
Take care. Bye-bye.