This paper is a qualitative exploratory classroom research study through which I have developed my understanding of professionalism and knowledge of theories about learning, change, reflection, the artificial dichotomy of theory and practice and academic culture and knowledge. After presenting a literature review of these concepts as a background of my actual teaching, I go on with my experience of teaching and supporting students’ learning by selecting and using appropriate methods and designing, planning, analysing and evaluating class sessions. In order to display how these were put into action, I have depicted a typical class and my teaching practices in a Turkish as a foreign language class as a guest lecturer owing to my participation in the “Learning and Teaching in Higher Education” (LTHE) Programme at an international UK university. To serve this aim, I have added two lesson plans that I designed (including the details about one of my lessons and examples from games, dialogues, role cards and culture parts), my teaching record log, the teaching observation record of my class by a teaching fellow and my observation record of the class teacher, alongside the feedbacks of mine and my colleagues on each, and the teacher evaluation form for the students. All in all, I have gone through a reciprocal process of change, by which I know myself and my boundaries while getting others to stretch theirs through this programme; therefore, it has been an intellectually challenging, energising and emancipating phenomenon both for my own self and for others around meGaining insights into learning, teaching, teacher training, theories on educational philosophies, methodologies and research design, I feel my sense of self that shifts like the buttons of an accordion according to my different roles has included that of a researcher-teacher, teacher educator and teacher of Turkish as a foreign language at university. Being a researcher is always there as a part of me. During my Ed.D (Doctorate of Education) studies in TESOL at the University of Exeter, I have continued to look for ways to hone my skills in my profession, and activated my knowledge of and experience in teaching for interactive learning, teaching methods, using technology, planning, assessment, marking, feedback and evaluation in higher education by completing the Stage 1 and the Stage 2 of the tripartite LTHE Programme. Completing the Stage 3 after submitting a report with a teaching portfolio and making an oral presentation followed by an interview with the programme director and staff, I have been awarded the status of Associate Fellow of the HEA (the Higher Education Academy) recognised in the UK and the British Commonwealth. As I aspire to keep on being active in my professional life while growing intellectually on one side through my Ed.D, I have also wanted to continue pursuing my interest in teaching Turkish to foreigners on the other through this programme, and that is how I collaborated with the Turkish language teacher in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at Exeter and started teaching there as it has always been a calling for me. Subsequent to my short autobiographical account of my professional life, I will draw upon the literature on the nature of professionalism, which is promoted at the heart of the programme. While regarding teaching as a profession according to the normative definitions, I prefer to think of professionalism as a changing concept in response to the social transformations including both global and local influences (Breen, 2006). This results from the fact that the degree of the professional autonomy and control stated in definitions may be argued from the lenses of teaching practitioners who work with different challenges or opportunities to take initiatives in various educational contexts. Referring to being professional or professionalism, teachers generally talk about the quality of what they do and of the conduct, demeanour and standards which guide it (Helsby, 1995), while professionalization is attributed to improving teachers’ status and levels of professional reward through the eyes of other people. These two concepts are seen complementary to each other in that by improving standards, one will improve status. However, sometimes this may not be the case. For example, modernistic models of professionalization including training, accreditation and academic knowledge base may have helped improve the status of teachers in community and of teacher educators in the university (Labaree, 1992); however, such a ‘licensed autonomy’ did little to enhance the professionalism of teaching regarding the quality of the work (Labaree, ibid.); likewise, defining scientific and technical standards of knowledge in high-status may cause the equally important emotional dimensions of teachers’ work to be overlooked, which again displays that stronger professionalization does not always indicate greater professionalism (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996 cited in Hargreaves, 2000). Having explored the main points of professionalism which is the essence of the programme I participated in, I turn to my professional journey in depth, starting with my understanding of theories about learning, change, reflection, theory and practice dichotomy and academic culture in my field and a comparison of my discipline with others. Then I go on with my experience of teaching and supporting students’ learning by selecting and using appropriate methods and designing, planning, analysing and evaluating class sessions. In order to display how these were put into action, I have depicted a typical class and my teaching practices in a Turkish as a foreign language class as a guest lecturer and lastly critically reflected on my professional practice and engaged with the ways of feedback from students, peers and senior colleagues, presenting my lesson plans that I designed (including the details about one of my lessons and examples from games, dialogues, role cards and culture parts from different lessons), my teaching record log, the teaching observation record of my class by a teaching fellow and my observation record of the class teacher, alongside the feedbacks of mine and my colleagues on each, the teacher evaluation form for the students (see Appendices). In the section regarding my teaching practice, I consider the needs and expectations of my student group in Turkish language learning class and the rationale for my choice of teaching methods and my session plans with specific reference to different sessions in which I have taught as can be seen in my Teaching Record Log (Appendix 1). First of all, exploring each language classroom, a language teacher should be aware of the fact that students are complex human beings who bring with them to the classroom their own individual personality, aptitude, motivation, beliefs, learning styles, strategies and autonomy (Tudor, 2001; Hall, 2011). Another reason for exploring individual characteristics of language learners is that it is learners that may (not) effectively complement the efforts of teachers, textbook writers or curriculum developers. This view that “learners are interesting to learn from” contributes to the teacher’s actions and classroom practices. Moreover, there is also a shift from individual to social and from universal to specific images of learners, which takes diverse social and cultural contexts beyond the classroom into account. Therefore, while tailoring my session plans, I was mindful of the ‘internal syllabus’ (Hall, 2011: 162) that my learners may naturally have. My starting point was their needs and expectations from and beyond the language classroom. That is why I started with meeting them and their present teacher to learn about their purpose of learning Turkish as a foreign language, the syllabus that they would like to follow, their educational, social and cultural background through our informal conversations. The students were from different countries ranging from China, Czech Republic, France, Syria, Tataristan and the UK. I had two groups of different language learning levels, Elementary and Intermediate Turkish groups. As their present teacher had already established a syllabus according to their aims of learning General Turkish in order to communicate in various situations in daily life, I firstly examined their route for learning and with my own experience in language teaching I aspired to blend different methods of learning according to their levels with the existing book syllabus that had already been followed. In so doing, according to the feedback after the classes and my colleague’s observations, the class became more interactive and contextually relevant with the engagement of the learners in communicative taskbased meaningful activities, problem-solving and real-life games adapted to their themes. In addition to my teaching hours, I did team planning and team teaching (Richards and Farrell, 2005: 159) with the Turkish language teacher in the other class hours to run the lessons smoothly in my lessons too. This also helped him gain insights into different teaching methods to make his class more communicative and authentic, as he explained in his reflection on his teaching in my observation record of his class (Appendix 2). I also learned more about the inner dynamics of the classroom by asking students about their culture and their purpose of learning Turkish language and culture as a diverse group of people from different countries around the world. Seeing this diversity as an opportunity in the class, I and the teacher provided opportunities for intercultural learning through research-based themes about various aspects of society, culture and lifestyles in Turkey and in their countries, which led them to learn beyond the classroom after each lesson. To give examples from two teaching sessions, even if the levels of the classrooms were different, the main aim in both groups was to be able to have a good language proficiency in four skills, listening, reading, speaking and writing according to their levels. Therefore, I tried to change explicit grammar and deductive vocabulary teaching into a more contextual skills-based classroom with a focus on fluency, communication and inductive teaching. With these aims, I always started with an ice-breaker or a warm-up brainstorming activity that focuses on their experience and prior knowledge to orientate their attention to the topic of the day ranging from Greeting, Materials, Jobs and People, Countries, Nationalities, Languages, Food and Drink. These themes can be enriched with the additional themes such as “personal identification, house, home and environment, daily life, free time and environment” by the use of podcasts (Yılmaz and Babacan, 2015) and the integration of the cultural elements of different Turkic groups into the Turkish as a foreign language education (Şimşek and Dündar, 2015). The use of films and videos in Turkish teaching for foreigners is also a good way of improving not only listening and speaking but also reading and writing if supportive activities about the films are prepared (İşcan, 2016), and these would contribute to the introduction of the society’s way of thinking, their approach to the events, their ingenuity within the vocabulary concept. As suggested by Erdem et al. (2015), it is also important to rearrange the reading texts in line with such cultural elements as proverbs, aphorism etc. according to the levels of the students. In my teaching practice, I also paid attention to the activities in the book which always prioritised vocabulary, reading and grammar over communicative skills and reordered them. Hence,1 four skills were integrated with grammar and vocabulary components in a way to shift the order from receptive ways like getting input through listening and reading to productive skills like speaking and writing to facilitate their learning while they learn and practise the language components like grammar and vocabulary through games, pair and group work activities that include visual, auditory and kinaesthetic aspects within the context rather than discreet structures memorised through dull drills based on repetition and translation like in Grammar-translation or Audiolingualism methods. Based on their levels, I utilised various methods according to their levels. When the group started to be more autonomous in the intermediate level, I increased the use of target language in the classroom and supported their learning with camera recording and slide presentations with lots of visuals, stories, songs, biographies, newspapers, and real life articles about the topic of the week throughout the lessons and at the end of each unit, they had a choice of researching more about Turkish language and culture exemplified by different aspects of the society. In this way, there was always a smooth transition between the activities with the establishment of an aim for the learners to listen, read or make a dialogue or write a report as in the real life. Here I shared a record of one of my lessons I have designed, planned, analysed and evaluated by means of my colleague’s reflection in the end. It mirrors a three-stage process. First, as the person who would be observed, I explained to the observer my intentions for the class- how the students should have prepared for the class, what they should gain from the class, and how that will be checked or tested. Second, I have displayed the points my observer looked for during the class, in the context of the purpose of the class. Thirdly, I reflected upon my observer’s comments, and upon her own views of the class, in the context of the purpose as set out in the first section. Another sample lesson plan that I have prepared, some of the activities, role cards, slides and cultural texts for out-of-class learning can be found in Appendix 3. In my Turkish language teaching experience, I also collected feedback from my students by preparing a questionnaire with both open and closed-ended questions (Appendix 4) and talked about critical incidents they experienced during my lessons. The critical incidents that I asked them to share during our informal in-class conversations were about the most interesting part of the lesson or the part they had difficulty in or their favourite part of the lesson, which were also parallel to their answers to the questionnaire. In addition to students’ comments, I was also honoured to get positive feedback from my observer from the Modern Foreign Languages Department as can be seen in the details of the feedback and my reflection on them in section 3. I have also enjoyed observing the present teacher of the class (Appendix 2) and exchanged ideas with him about the methods I adopt from my teaching and learning background and his applications. While he provided me with the course book he followed, I extended, omitted or adapted some of the activities there by researching on the topic of the week from other books and the internet and brought examples from real life and different cultures while opening just a gate for the students to explore more. Then I explain my choice of methods and the points I adopted for my teaching and supporting students in more detail. In my practice in teaching Turkish as shown in section 3, I used communicative activities which appeal to different learning styles and multiple intelligences that go beyond verbal or logical intelligences and include musical and natural intelligences. In line with the tenets of Suggestopedia and NLP, I found songs, games, stories and materials from real life for students to internalise the language and warm-up activities to break their emotional barrier towards the new language down. The activities in culture parts were also based on the premises of task and problem-based learning as they required the students to go beyond the class and research on the topic of the week. In short, I benefited from various methods and approaches mentioned above in order to enable students to take charge of their own learning and provide them with as many opportunities as I could to make the context enjoyable and memorable for their learning. Among these methods and applications in second and foreign language teaching, project work under content-based learning is a means to promote meaningful student engagement with language and content learning. This approach which I adopt in my teaching in line with experiential foreign language education also proves effective in terms of providing a research-led environment for the students. Thus, such an approach enables students to learn culture and language together and gain awareness of diversity and intercultural communication. All in all, understanding post-method pedagogy (Kumaravadivelu, 2003), I try to maximise learning opportunities by facilitating negotiated interaction, promoting learner autonomy, fostering language and cultural awareness, integrating language skills and ensuring social relevance. Therefore, the choices of methods that I make during my courses are compatible with the theories of learning, the shifts of paradigms in education and the roles of teachers I discussed in previous sections. In this respect, I value the socially constructed nature of each learning context, reflecting on my role and considering my students as future social agents. Also, understanding my own identity and those of my students go hand in hand with being a teacher/scholar and being a student which are interrelated processes, and our learning gets ever deepening and broadening as we go on this journey as reflective teachers in higher education (Ashwin et al., 2015). Stepping back and looking into my experience of being a researcher doing a professional doctorate and teaching Turkish as a foreign language through the LTHE Programme at Exeter, I have realised that I have been in harmony with how I felt before coming there, adhering to my inner selfbelief that the more you learn the more you realise how little you know, as Socrates enlightened. This is what I can adopt in this ongoing journey full of renewing complex bodies, beings, ideas floating on the air all the time. I find teaching really rewarding for both the teacher and learners as a part of my journey. As such, throughout the sessions that I taught Turkish language, I could empathise with the learners as a learner of English language since my primary school years and later as a language teacher and educator who studied and researched on second language acquisition, applied linguistics and language teaching in academia. I can see different perspectives from both learners’ and teachers’ sides, which also reminds me of the fact that we are always on the way and what matters is to be on the way rather than arriving at the destination. Completing the LTHE Programme, as my review of theories and my actual teaching practice show in this paper, has provided me with new opportunities and experiences complementary to my approach to life and teaching process which echoes being open to change, development and learning.