Natasha Kersh Editor

Valentina Kononova is an Associate Professor at Siberian Federal University, Russia. She heads the university UNICO langugae centre (UNIversity-Career-Opportunities) for personal and professional development which is rooted in TEMPUS project, EACEA. V. Kononova teaches language arts for university students as well as general population in the region, and nationally in online environments. She is an author of “Companion-dictionary for those who study Economics” and “Nobel Memorial Prize Laureates in Economics”, a textbook, Krasnoyarsk, co-authored with V. Razumovskaya. Her research lies mainly in three spheres – lifelong language learning, English language teaching, and corpus linguistics. She works internationally and does her research as an active participant of educational projects, conferences and other events, and a member of world associations, incl. EUCEN (Brussels).

Dr Natasha Kersh is a Lecturer in Education and a member of the Centre for Post-14 Education and Work at the UCL Institute of Education (UK). Her research interests and publications relate to the study of VET, school-to-work transitions and adult education in the UK and international contexts.  Natasha has extensive experience of working and directing national and international projects such as EU-funded projects and UK-based ESRC (Economic and Social Science Research Council) funded initiatives. Natasha has recently acted as a Local Coordinator on a Horizon 2020 project (European Commission) ‘Adult Education as a Means to Active Participatory Citizenship’ (EduMap).  She has authored/co-authored over 50 publications related to her field of study. Her recently co-edited book Young Adults and Active Citizenship: Towards Social Inclusion through Adult Education (Kersh et al. 2020, Springer) focused on the topic of social inclusion and experiences of vulnerable young adults.

Tatiana I. Dobrydina is an Associate Professor, Cand. Sc. Pedagogics, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages in Professional Communication of Kemerovo State University, Russia. Her PhD thesis and current research interests are devoted to the problems of developing students’ professional creative activity and implementing innovative teaching/learning methods in practice. She is a coauthor of the chapter “Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in VET in Russia: New Developments” in: McGrath S. et al (eds) 2019, Handbook of Vocational Education and Training: Developments in the Changing World of Work; Springer. Dr Dobrydina is Head of KemSU Programme of Professional Retraining “Translator in the Sphere of Professional Communication”, a lecturer and a designer of English courses for the Programme. She participated in implementation of two Tempus projects as a teacher in the TOULL project (530750-TEMPUS-1-2012-1-DK-TEMPUS-JPHES) and as KemSU coordinator and Director of UNICO Language Centre in the Tempus UNICO project (544283-TEMPUS-1-2013-1-ES-TEMPUS-JPHES). Dr Tatiana Dobrydina is responsible for coordinating the Third-age University movement in KemSU.