Ahead of my debut talk at the IATEFL conference on 10 April, I took part in a ‘warm up’ for International House World on 7 March. This webinar, organised by Shaun Wilden, was almost a year in the planning. Shaun first spoke to me about this one evening during the IATEFL conference in Glasgow, April 2017.  He proposed a number of webinars based around the topic of wellbeing. A series of four webinars from three presenters was confirmed a couple of months ago and information circulated about it more recently.   Next week it is the turn of Professor Sarah Mercer, who gave me advice on my research, more specifically the wording of the questions, followed later by two sessions with Ushapa Fortescue, which will be on mindfulness and meditation.

The recording is available* by clicking on this link (Adobe Connect) or you can watch it on YouTube.

Around 20 participants actually joined the webinar, which in hindsight was a manageable number.  Quality rather than quantity. This is because it was designed to be interactive and I asked many questions to the attendees.  If there had been 40 or more it would have been difficult keeping track of all the comments and respond individually. The questions I asked were some of those posed in my survey last December. I mostly focused on questions related to:

• diagnosed / undiagnosed mental health conditions
• whether it is ever a good idea to disclose a condition upfront
• causes of stress for language teachers
• what coping mechanisms people employ.

At first, I was reluctant to share the recording widely as some of the research presented will feature in my talk at IATEFL.  However, many people who missed it have already asked me about being able to watch the recording.  In addition, I will be radically re-presenting my research and giving a fuller summary at 3.55pm in room 9, Brighton Centre, on 10 April.  To coincide with this, I will publish an extensive blog post which deals with the findings, including the responses to the questions that there was not time to deal with in the webinar.

Looking back on it, I feel that my introduction was overlong – this will be drastically cut down in Brighton as there will not be time in a 30 minute talk. I wanted, however, to personalise the issue and why I carried out the research in the first place.

The recording is available* by clicking on this link (Adobe Connect) or you can watch it on YouTube.

*note: you may need to download the Adobe Connect desktop app first or watch it in a suitable browser.  In the rendering of the recording, the audio, slides and webcam video appear not to be in sync.