MaWSIG meets GI SIG, 25 January 2020, 1.30 pm UTC
Making good materials for everyone, everywhere, no matter how much money they have
Linda Ruas and Margarita Kosior
Both Linda and Margarita have been involved in projects teaching English learners and training teachers or making materials for use in areas with limited resources, be it financial or technological, and will share with us in this webinar ideas for creating learning materials under these constraints. Linda has led Global Issues SIG projects working with untrained volunteer teachers in refugee camps, and is now working with secondary English teachers in Guinea Bissau. She will present some of the simple lesson sequences and materials she has helped teachers create, as well as other ideas for teaching English such as WhatsApp groups and CoPs (Communities of Practice) for teachers to write short texts and lesson plans together about various local and global issues in West Africa eg. FGM, teen pregnancy, the cashew nut harvest and gender equality. Margarita is the author of a recent IATEFL GISIG publication 12 Months of Social Issues: ELT Calendar of Special Days. It is a compilation of lessons, one per month, focusing on a different special day (mostly UN and UNESCO) each time. In this way, this volume consists of twelve complete sessions, many which can be used in limited-resource classrooms. The publication aims not only to develop learners’ linguistic competence, but also to raise their awareness of important issues and encourage them to take action, reach out to the wider community, and make a difference. During her session, Margarita will not only talk about the rationale behind the creation of these materials but will also present specific examples of activities and tasks, explain how they can be used in the English language classroom and give tips on how we can create similar materials.
Linda Ruas, MA, is an ESOL teacher and CELTA trainer at LSEC in London. She has trained teachers for many years in various contexts: Brazil, Japan, UK CELTA and DELTA courses, and refugee camps and is now working, mostly remotely, with teachers across Africa, mainly in Guinea Bissau. Linda has written some materials and regularly creates more lessons about social justice issues on the Easier English New Internationalist wiki.
As an advocate for social justice, Margarita Kosior believes in spreading awareness of global issues through ELT. Margarita has incorporated social issues into her teaching since the beginning of her career when, as a novice teacher, she still didn’t know much about Global Education. She simply believed that what she was doing was the right thing to do. Since then, she has participated in relevant projects, presented at international conferences and written ELT materials based on social issues ranging from modern day slavery, disabilities, the Holocaust, to kindness, as an underlying value necessary to make a big change in the world. Margarita shares her insights and teaching tips on her blog: ELT for a Better World and she is the author of a series of children’s stories, Tales of strays.
[…] Sadly, this year’s IATEFL conference was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But in its place, IATEFL held a fabulous two-day online ‘get together’ – attended by thousands of teachers all around the world and featuring plenaries by a number of IATEFL past presidents as well as a number of panel events. Linda Ruas stepped in to represent GISIG for a discussion of inclusivity in ELT materials, alongside representatives from MaWSIG, IPSENSIG, YLTSIG and LITSIG. Find a recording of Linda and Margarita Kosior’s previous webinar on this issue here. […]