Heresy, Ethics and Scholarship

Chapter 5, Heresy, Ethics and Scholarship, focuses on ‘doing something’ within language education in universities. The chapter draws, specifically, on our own field English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and develops an ethics for language educators. Starting from the need to conduct socio-analyses as groundwork for change, the chapter details a socio-analysis of the field of EAP which illuminates forms of injustices and domination. It argues this can trigger an informed and collective response by revealing potential choices and possibilities for the future—a form of heresy. The chapter sees scholarship as central to this ethics and redefines it as broader than SoTL, and free from neoliberal imperatives that plague research. This ethics also requires engaging critically with agents in the field. Finally, this ethics argues for a developed knowledge base that allows practitioners a potent specialism and role within universities. In EAP, this means making visible the entanglements of academic communication within disciplinary epistemological and social forces to disciplinary colleagues and students, with potential (ethical) changes in disciplinary communication practices in teaching, research, and policies and practices.