Volunteer team
At the end of the CATAPULT project, a sustainability plan was drawn up for the CATAPULT platforms: the Community of Practice LinguaCoP and its matching tool Linguaclick. In this plan we unfold two phases for the further development of our platforms. The first phase (2021-2022) focuses on consolidation and expansion and on fundraising to meet all our ambitions. In the second phase (from 2022-2023), we will maximize the potential of LinguaCoP with the help of new investments. In the first phase we will put together a team of volunteers to develop into a professional team in the second phase to support the exploitation of LinguaCoP and Linguaclick.
For which activities are we looking for volunteers?
1 content curation
2 events development
3 publicity
Content curation
In order to remain attractive to the community, it is vital to regularly offer new content related to language training in general and our events in particular: notifications, news in blog posts, topics in our forums, resources… The content volunteers team will strive to identify and share as much content as possible relevant for freelance language and LSP professionals.
Events development
LinguaCoP will organize events around themes related to language training and LSP in particular. The volunteers of the events team help in selecting themes, finding, contacting and guiding suitable speakers for webinars.
Publicity
The volunteers of the publicity team ensure that everyone involved in language training, inside and outside the CoP, is informed as much as possible about the activities of the CATAPULT platforms: the Community of Practice LinguaCoP and its matching tool Linguaclick.
Volunteers can sign up for one or more volunteer teams. The selected volunteers will, if they wish, be presented as official collaborators of the CATAPULT platforms on a special Meet the Team page.
You can leave any questions or comments in a comment on this post, or in this Forum: https://linguacop.eu/forums/forum/volunteers/
Please note, to comment on this post or in our Forums, you must register: https://linguacop.eu/register/
If you prefer, you can also send a message to this email address: volunteers[at]linguacop.eu
I have a question about the target audience of this website and the community it seeks to create…. how important is the status of “freelance” in your description of readers?
I suppose that most language teachers, especially if they are teaching LSP, are employed in colleges and universities etc… rather than freelancers. (Although there may a high proportion of people with rather “precarious” employment conditions).
Focus on freelancing suggests to me that a lot of the discussion should be about strategies for running this sort of micro-business: eg. how to advertise, trends in the market for teachers, how to create individual study plans. My feeling is that a site for EMPLOYEE LSP- teachers would be more about organising a real community of practice with sharing of materials for specialised areas…but this means it would need to attract a very large public of teachers in different fields to create useful synergies. For example, I once taught a course of “English for Lighting Designers”, but I’ve never found a single colleague in this LSP field.
There should also be some generalised attempt to improve the position of LSP teachers within academic institutions. This could be analogous to the Teachers of English for Academic Purposes of BALEAP see https://www.baleap.org/ with definition of professional competencies and certification of teachers who can demonstrate their expertise.
Very interesting thoughts, John. I agree that LinguaCoP should serve freelance (LSP) language teachers and should promote LSP among freelancers. Furthermore, the matching tool Linguaclick is meant first and foremost for the promotion of freelance (LSP) language teachers.