Michelle Bedeker, PhD

Michelle Bedeker is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at Nazarbayev University with teaching and research experience across primary, secondary, adult, and higher education contexts. She holds a Ph.D. in Language and Literacy Studies, a Master's Degree in Education (Applied Linguistics/Language Education), Bachelor of Education (Postgraduate) in Curriculum, Pedagogy and School Leadership, and a Bachelor in Education (undergraduate) degree from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Her research agenda intersects Bourdieu's Sociology of Education, Systemic Functional Linguistics genre-based approaches, applied/educational linguistics, and ethnography to make visible how the entanglement of context, time, and history impact teachers' agency, professional identities, and sense of self. Therefore, three overlapping areas: systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and SFL-informed genre pedagogy and a Bourdieusian lens to explain multilingual/cultural teacher education, are utilized as tools to research and challenge social inequity in education. Her approved research grant titled "A Transformative Approach to CLIL pedagogy in Kazakhstan: Investigating SFL theory and STEM teachers' metalinguistic knowledge" deals with the sense-making of STEM teachers contextual realities and then developing an SFL Genre-based Pedagogies Professional Development Course with two leading professors, one from the United States of America and the other from Stockholm University in Sweden. Therefore, she adds to the project her research interest in teachers' conceptualizations of the support they need in English literacy and language pedagogy in contexts where it is an additional or foreign language for both teachers and learners.