Kim Bower (2017) – bio

Professor Kim Bower holds a chair in Innovation in Languages Education at the Sheffield Institute of Education and is President of the Association for Language Learning. Kim is a teacher educator with a passion for languages, intercultural awareness and inclusivity. She inspires and empowers trainees and teachers to motivate learners to love languages and to develop a deep intercultural awareness.  She is currently part of the ADiBE research project, a 3-Year European CLIL project in multilingual classrooms.

In 2000, after teaching languages for 16 years, Kim moved to initial teacher education (ITE) within HEI and became recognised as a curriculum innovator in modern languages teacher education. She made national, substantive contributions in the leadership of two successful programmes for the government: the development of intensive modern language courses – subject knowledge enhancement (SKE) courses and the Anglo-French Bilateral Exchange Programme bi-national pilot with the IFUM Lorraine.

The SKE programme widened access to Initial Teacher Education (ITE) by enabling large numbers of graduates of German and Spanish and graduate linguist foreign nationals who were unfamiliar with the UK educational system to access ITE. In 2012 the SKE national evaluator estimated that 800 trainee teachers who would not have otherwise been able to access ITE had trained successfully. Many of these students were promoted quickly. Kim subsequently led the development of subject knowledge enhancement courses across the teacher education department at Sheffield Hallam University to further increase access to teacher training.

The Anglo-French bilateral project developed the secondary curriculum through Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pedagogy in teacher training via a 4-week exchange of trainees based at the Universities of Hull and Nancy. This CLIL pilot aimed to address the demotivation of secondary aged children to learn languages by enabling a more effective and engaging language learning experience through cross-curricular language learning. Kim developed this work further through a PHD in CLIL; she has contributed to the research base in this field and regularly speaks at conferences.

Kim’s research in learner motivation, teacher pedagogies and interdisciplinary language learning has led to the development of an international network in Anglophone countries, supervision on higher degree programmes, as well as numerous speaking and keynote engagements. Kim was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2017 and is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Email   k.bower@shu.ac.uk