Dr Marina Orsini-Jones

National Teaching Fellow 2013 Marina lived through a very traditional higher education learning experience at the University of Bologna and was mesmerised by the teaching and learning practices she encountered at the then Coventry Polytechnic when appointed as British Council Language Assistant in 1984. She thus began her transformational journey as reflective practitioner. In the 1990s constructivism, hypermedia and the birth of the Internet offered her a new landscape of student-centred curricular creation. Marina became part of the cross-disciplinary and cross-university task force for assessment, learning and teaching. Working with her colleagues, international partners and with her students, many of whom also became her research assistants, Marina started to design courseware to teach Italian language and society. She published work on e-learning innovation and change management. The constructivist e-learning model underpinning the courseware she designed has since known many new 'incarnations' and has been disseminated to other subjects, but its principles remain the same: it is supported by metareflection; it assumes a willingness on the part of both lecturers and students to swap roles (and learn from each other); it presupposes an effective use of the affordances of the technology available at the time of the implementation of the curricular actions to maximise social-collaboration and knowledge-transfer. Marina currently leads the Applied Research Group in Pedagogical Innovation in Languages and Literature. Many of her students have become her partners in an educational journey that has produced student-informed and student-driven curricular innovation in the area of threshold concepts. Marina's doctoral dissertation discussed how she reflects on her practice 'through the looking glass' of her students' perspectives. Marina has published joint scholarly work with students on Computer Assisted Language Learning, digital literacies, personal development planning, intercultural communicative competence and threshold concepts. An example of a recent publication written with her students is Practising Language Interaction via Social Networking Sites: the expert students' perspective on personalised language learning (Orsini-Jones,Pibworth and Brick 2013). In 2012 Marina was awarded an HEA £60,000 Teaching Development Grant to explore intercultural Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and metacognitive thresholds in international language exchanges with partners in the UK (Warwick) and Mexico (UNAM, Mexico City).