Talking Intuition Into Consciousness: A Discursive Approach to Evolving an Understanding

Abstract

This paper utilises discursive puzzling to examine the interplay of intuition, student-teacher interactions and feedback for practitioner research in language teaching. The authors, both educators and researchers, utilise dialogue to unravel the subtleties of these components in the teaching-learning dynamic, which we discuss as a process of co-creation. We initially scrutinize the role of intuition, revealing its significance in quick decision-making and its alignment with expert thinking. Through the discussion, we came to recognise the crucial dimension of feedback, which we recognise comes from a variety of sources, and we discuss how it shapes educators' intuitive processes. We also discuss the convergence of teaching and research, examining the blurred boundaries between them, which we found to be especially true for exploratory practice. Through this discursive analysis, we found that practitioner research enriches teaching by fostering continuous learning, transforming it into a sustainable form of professional development, where educators and learners mutually contribute. In this way, teaching and researching also lead to learning and development, thus becoming its own reward. This analysis underscores the multifaceted nature of intuition in language teaching and research.