I Sold My Toyota to Talk About Teaching: A Pilgrimage to ISSOTL25

By Mian Salahuddin

Attending ISSOTL25 in Christchurch was not a routine professional trip; it was a pilgrimage financed by sacrifice. To get there, I sold my Toyota Aqua. That car carried years of commuting, school runs, and village roads in Swat. Selling it felt like amputating a limb. But the sale became an act of faith: that teaching, learning, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) were worth more than four wheels and a registration book.  

What followed was a journey that braided borders, loss, humour, and hope—and convinced me that SoTL is not a purely intellectual project. It is a profoundly human one.  

Border Work and the Pedagogy of Welcome

The trip began with a 14‑hour layover in Doha and the long haul to Auckland. As a Pakistani passport holder, I prepared for the familiar choreography of suspicion: extra questions, side rooms, and the quiet humiliation of being treated as a risk rather than a guest. With only a small handbag, I felt like a walking red flag.  

Instead, I met a smile.  

“Are you here for the conference?” the officer asked, glancing at my letter. She stamped my passport and said, “Welcome to New Zealand. Enjoy your stay.”  

That brief interaction did more than move me across a border. It modelled a pedagogy of welcome—one that many of us aspire to in our classrooms.  

The Silent Room: When SoTL Meets Grief

Christchurch greeted me with clean air, southern stars, and—temporarily—no hotel room. Budget constraints meant that, for a night, a park bench stood in for a bed.

The next day, amid conference name tags and session schedules, my phone rang.  

My cousin had been shot dead by militants back home.  

In that moment, I was no longer a presenter preparing to talk about “linguistic resilience.” I was a grieving relative standing on the other side of the world. When the conference chair, Misty, gently guided me to a designated Silent Room, the conference shifted from being an academic event to a lifeline.  

The Silent Room became an unscripted SoTL intervention: a physical acknowledgement that scholars arrive as whole people—with families, politics, and grief that do not pause for our conference programs.  

Bluff, the Edge of the Map, and an Unplanned Ritual

After ISSOTL25, I traveled south to Bluff—the “end of the road” in the South Island. Standing at that literal edge of the map, I shouted my cousin’s name into the wind. No memorial, no microphone—just one small voice against the Southern Ocean.  

It was not “data collection,” but it was meaning‑making. In retrospect, that moment has become part of my scholarly personal narrative—a reminder that our research questions often emerge from sites of rupture, not comfort.  

The Other Interrogation Room

If Auckland airport enacted a pedagogy of welcome, my return to Islamabad offered its opposite.  

At the Anti‑Narcotics Force checkpoint, I was asked three times why I had gone to New Zealand. Twice, I answered faithfully: “Conference.” On the third round—jet‑lagged, grief‑stricken, and slightly defiant—I replied, “Dance competition. Second place.” The officer stared, decided this was above his pay grade to decode, and waved me through.  

Humour, in that moment, became an act of survival. It also exposed how differently states interpret the movement of bodies and ideas.  

Back home, my principal marked me absent despite approving my leave. “I was sponsored by my Toyota,” I explained. The car was gone; the sacrifice was invisible in the ledger.  

What This Journey Taught Me About SoTL

ISSOTL25 was, for me, an academic Pompeii—sudden, devastating in parts, yet preserving something precious beneath the ash. Selling my car, sleeping in a park, grieving a cousin, navigating borders, and then presenting on teaching and learning forced one central realization:  SoTL is not just about improving methods; it is about honoring the conditions under which learning and teaching are lived.  

This journey sharpened three convictions:  

• Care is a scholarly practice: Silent Rooms, kind emails, flexible chairs, and compassionate organizers are integral to serious SoTL.  
• Borders are pedagogical sites: Every checkpoint, visa form, and welcome (or lack thereof) teaches something about whose knowledge travels easily—and whose requires selling a Toyota.  
• Narrative is data: My story is not an aside to my SoTL work; it is one of its primary texts.  

I returned to Pakistan car‑less, tired, and marked “absent” on an institutional register. But I also returned with a renewed commitment: to use SoTL to bear witness to the human condition—to grief, borders, humour, resilience, and the quiet power of a stranger’s smile.  

I arrived in Christchurch hoping to raise the voice of the oppressed. I left carrying one beloved voice in my heart and the memory of a border that did not feel like a wall, but a welcome.  

That, for me, is the scholarship that matters.