Creating and sustaining a platform for researchers and teachers to communicate: an example of TESOLgraphics

Abstract

The never-ending gap between research and practice may be explained by two main reasons. First, both researchers and practitioners have limited time and space where they can engage with each other in their busy professional lives. Second, researchers and practitioners sometimes hold negative beliefs of each other's professions, potentially due to the inherent yet unnecessary social status differences. As an online collaborative platform, TESOLgraphics (tesolgraphics.com) aims to break through these obstacles and create an equitable research–practice relationship in which everyone's professional knowledge and experience are equally valued. In the hope of inviting more researchers and practitioners to TESOLgraphics as well as to any other initiatives with similar agenda, we report our experiences in the form of collaborative autoethnography. In this article, we discuss three aspects: (a) motivation for and contribution to TESOLgraphics; (b) the impact of TESOLgraphics on promoting a research-practice dialogue; and (c) hopes for a future research–practice relationship.