Editorial
GISIG published the eLesson on 'Growing Up in Gaza' on the eLesson site. For more click here
Introducing a New Online Tool: eLesson Inspirations on Global Issues
Bill Templer, Bulgaria
Bill Templer is a Chicago-born educator with research interests in English as a lingua franca, critical pedagogy, minority studies and social justice issues in the EFL classroom. He has taught at universities in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, Iran, Israel, Bulgaria, Nepal, Thailand, Laos and Malaysia. Bill is active on the IATEFL Global Issues SIG Committee, the Editorial Board of the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, and within BETA in Bulgaria. He is assistant editor at clelejournal.org and is also a widely published translator from German, particularly in the field of Jewish history and culture. Bill is based as an independent researcher in eastern Bulgaria. E-mail: templerbill@gmail.com
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eLesson inspirations
GI: English …. For a change
A child growing up in Palestine
eLesson Inspiration: Sarah, A Young Girl in Gaza
References
The Global Issues SIG of IATEFL seeks to encourage educators to get students to think about real issues both in the world and locally, as part of their learning of the language, ‘English … for a change.’ The GISIG motto in IATEFL is: “CARE GLOBAL, TEACH LOCAL!” One feature of this approach is a new idea launched in 2014, “eLesson Inspirations,” the brainchild of the now former GISIG coordinator, Margit Szesztay. Watch this brief 2-minute “video introduction by Margit to the idea. These are short videos to encourage students to think about some interesting topic, supplemented by a pdf worksheet for teachers to develop pre-viewing and post-viewing activities (with a strong emphasis on lexical development):
Basically it’s for teachers who believe that teaching English is not just about teaching the language, but that there is scope for more. That teachers are also educators, and they can also become agents for change. The videoclips have been selected for their potential for generating thing, for getting students to think critically about the world around them. Critically, but also compassionately, and responsibly (Szesztay, video introduction, 0:25-0:52 min.).
There are numerous practical ideas suggested for using the eLessons in the classroom, various activities, although these are not fixed and set lesson plans in a traditional sense: “You are the expert when it comes to your own classroom. So it’s up to you look at these activities, look at the building blocks of a possible lesson, and choose the ones that you feel would go down well with your students, and the ones that you feel comfortable with” (ibid., min. 1:30-1:45).
Such an eLesson could normally take 45 minutes, or even less, or it could be expanded into something more, as you and your students decide. Topics range from bullying to Benjamin Zephaniah’s engaged poetry (Templer, 2014a), the power of meditation to ‘How I could change the world …,’ a rich and expanding spectrum to choose from. The materials are suitable for B1 level and some are geared even for a more elementary A-2 level. Szesztay (2014a) describes the worksheets:
you can pick and mix activities depending on your specific teaching situation and your lesson aims. The activities are built around a video clip and they all focus on global issues. Decide if your students should watch out of class or in class, and if you want them to watch the whole video, or just a section. You can of course listen/watch first and be inspired to come up with your own ideas!
With lessons built around these clips, your students can learn English while exploring real-world issues, relevant to their own life worlds. There is an archive of eLesson Inspirations, open-access. Students can be encouraged to browse on their own.
Xiaobing Wang (2014) notes: “they are inspiring E resources, half ready-made, but there is still space for teachers to tailor to fit their own students and classrooms!” Chaz Pugliese (2014) is enthusiastic:
A very useful resource and once more, proof that there’s life beyond grammar. I’ve long been convinced that if I want my students to pay attention and react to the lesson/activity I must challenge them beyond the language. Which is why I like these clips. They provide teachers w/ plenty [of] opportunities to tap into the cognitive and affective domains
Margit Szesztay (2014b) stresses: “These short clips and the accompanying classroom activities stand as another example of combining language teaching with teaching for change. Watching the clips offers a fresh look at global issues drawing on creativity, poetry, imagery, and giving voice to alternative viewpoints.”
Many of us inside the IATEFL Global Issues SIG and across our profession can agree with Margit (ibid.) when she says:
I now see the students in my classrooms as world citizens, in addition to being Hungarian or Turkish, teenagers or young adults, visual or kinesthetic learners, etc. With no exception, all my students are inhabitants of a planet with diminishing resources, facing crises of an unprecedented scale. Albert Einstein said, ‘We can’t solve today’s problems with the same mindset that created them.’ We need a change in attitude, a change in mindset. To me, being an educator means planting the seeds for such change. My main challenge is to be an agent for change, while bearing in mind that my main responsibility is to teach language; to challenge my students to think creatively and compassionately, and remember that most of them come expecting to prepare for exams and have fun.
She goes on to underscore: “There are so many ingredients out there but these inspirations put them into wholesome snacks,” embodying “the invitation for multiple perspectives.”
In commenting on a stimulating article by Alan Maley (2005), the founder of GISIG as a special group—Alan’s piece is a kind of introduction to the broader focus on Global Issues in English language teaching—Margit Szesztay (2014c) has stressed:
It reminds me that my main aim as an educator is to encourage a critical, non-conformist stance in my students. Encourage them to shake off social conditioning, see the world around them with fresh eyes, question taken-for-granted assumptions, and find personal meaning in the Aristotle quotation: “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.”
Templer (2014b) provides a fuller introduction to eLesson Inspirations and is accessible online. Tim Grose (2013) also has practical ideas for utilizing videos in teaching Global Issues. Such clip-inspired lessons are great material for in-class action research—explore and publish your findings. In the broader context of Film English, watch Kieran Donaghy’s ELT lesson on the video The DNA Journey, dealing critically with the theme of nationalities, ethnic groups, racism and DNA in a remarkable way. Donaghy (2015) has many great ideas on using short video clips in class; see also the detailed interview (Donaghy, 2016). GISIG welcomes your own contributions to eLesson Inspirations. Spotlight an issue.
The present article links to an eLesson Inspiration published in December 2015 at the GISIG site, based on a brief interview with a young 11-year old pupil, Sarah Al-Jamal, growing up in Gaza, talking about her life (in Arabic with English subtitles) shortly after the 51-day Israeli assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014. How children and teens suffer under violence, upheaval and war, how their education suffers, is a highly relevant topic for the world of multiple disorders we live in today. This is the voice of one such ordinary girl, who dreams of becoming a doctor. It is directly entwined with the GISIG War & Peace Issues Month 2015.
To some in our profession (not only in Israel), the topic of Gaza is controversial. Yet as Margit has stressed, such clips and related activities are catalytic digital springboards for getting students (and teachers) everywhere to think critically, “but also compassionately, and responsibly,” about our world. The activities suggested are all my own, from what I think is an ethically Jewish and universal viewpoint—and of course there are other viewpoints to build on in listening to Sarah, “multiple perspectives” for exploring the endless vertigo of oppression in Gaza for many children and adults. The video encourages attentiveness to a particular form of subjectivity and self-worth in Sarah’s daily struggle to survive. Namey (2016) describes the dire situation in most Gazan schools June 2016. A recent interview explores the broader context in Gaza summer 2016, from three interrelated perspectives, Palestinian and Israeli (Aljazeera, 2016). A bright initiative in ELT, experimenting with drama creativity, is Nick Bilbrough’s digital Hands Up Project with Gazan school kids.
A number of the activities I sketch try to hone the social imagination through ‘interior monologuing’ (Templer & Tonawanik, 2011). As Linda Christensen (2000, p. 131) notes: “Students need opportunities to think deeply about other people—why they do what they do, why they think what they think. They also need chances to care about each other and the world. Interior monologues are a good place to start.” Often, the focus is just on an ordinary person. Interior monologuing asks: “How would you feel in that person’s place?’ This exercise in ‘imaginative stepping into the heart and mind of Others’—and moving beyond empathy to “compassionate thinking,” recognizing the “interconnected nature of our lives” (Pohl & Szesztay, 2015)—is a part of a pedagogy of TESOL for social empathy, solidarity, and social justice. It is highly attuned to the complexities of meaning-making in riven life worlds under extreme social duress, thinking about crisis perceived through the sensibilities of others ‘from the bottom up.’ Such a pedagogy knits a collage of perspectives for firing the social imagination, better understanding ourselves within a powerful dialectic of “what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise” (Giroux, 2014, p. 21).
Sarah Al-Jamal talks about her daily life, fears, family, her problems and perplexities, a mini-narrative of survival living in one of the world’s iconic ‘hot spots.’ The eLesson Inspiration can be accessed here.
Aljazeera. 2016. Who is stopping the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip? Inside Story, 7 July. http://goo.gl/hNIJxI
Christensen, Linda. 2000. Reading, writing and rising up. Teaching about social justice and the power of the written word. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools.
Donaghy, Kieran. 2015. Film in action: Teaching language using moving images. Peaslake, Surrey: Delta Publishing.
Donaghy, Kieran. 2016. Interview with Kieran Donaghy. By Vicky Papageorgiou. ELTA Newsletter (Serbia), 10(4), July-August, pp. 17-22. http://goo.gl/j5khO8
Giroux, Henry A. 2014. The violence of organized forgetting. Thinking beyond America’s disimagination machine. San Francisco: City Lights. http://goo.gl/zbt2IO
Grose, Tim. 2013. On-line videos for teaching global issues. Global Issues in Language Education Newsletter, 88, August, p. 19. http://goo.gl/PJpR8L
Maley, Alan. 2005. MacDonald Duck re-visited: Implications for culture, society and education. GISIG IATEFL Newsletter, 17. http://goo.gl/rZ8tqZ
Namey, Isra. 2016. Gaza’s schools remain in ruins two years after war. Aljazeera, 6 July.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/gaza-schools-remain-ruins-years-war-160614065635894.html
Pohl, Uwe, & Szesztay, Margit. 2015. Bringing creative, critical and compassionate thinking into ELT. Humanising Language Teaching 17(2), April. http://goo.gl/0v9hM5
Pugliese, Chaz. 2014. eLesson Inspirations. gisig.iatefl.org. Response, 2 February. http://goo.gl/FX6eI8
Szesztay, Margit. 2014a. The Lost Generation, eLesson Inspiration. eLesson Inspirations, 23 January.
Szesztay, Margit. 2014b. Spotlight on the Global Issues SIG. IATEFL Voices, May-June, p. 21. Reprinted in mELTing Pot, May-June 2014, pp. 3-4. http://goo.gl/XhW9KY
Szesztay, Margit. 2014c. Introduction to Maley (2005). gisig.iatefl.org. Newsletter Highlights. http://goo.gl/rZ8tqZ
Templer, Bill. 2014a. ‘Football Mad’, eLesson Inspirations. gisig.iatefl.org. Comment, 17 February. http://goo.gl/cnAmuR
Templer, Bill. 2014b. Using ‘eLesson Inspirations’: A bank of intriguing building blocks for teachers. BETA E-Newsletter (Bulgaria), #9, Jan-Feb., pp. 11-19. http://goo.gl/WBTLyJ
Templer, Bill, & Tonawanik, Phuangphet. 2011. Honing critical social imagination through a curriculum of social empathy. Humanising Language Teaching 13(4), August. http://goo.gl/hBpg5n
Wang, Xiaobing. 2014. eLesson Inspirations. gisig.iatefl.org. Response, 28 January. http://goo.gl/FX6eI8
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