Love to @TDSIG
Six years ago, I wrote a love letter to teaching associations as my time on our local TESL Toronto Committee was coming to an end.… Read More »Love to @TDSIG
commentary
These posts contain links to and commentary about aspects of the language teaching industry.
Disruption complements usualisation
Watch recordings of my #iatefl2021 talk, which is basically part 2 from my #iatefl2019 talk on LGBTQ+.
Mental health is health.
Mental health is as important as physical health. In fact, are they really different things? They are our health.
200th post – A decade comparative narrative
I’ve also been sitting on what my 200th post would be about for many months and which would be meaningful in some sense.
One talk progresses to the next
I’m very excited to have been asked to give a plenary talk at the upcoming World Teachers’ Day Web Conference on Saturday, October 5, hosted by IATEFL and British Council!
This post will make you gay (or your mats anyway)
Well, it will. Or maybe not. In this post, I talk introduce a Usualisation approach to inclusive materials design.
A QSIG?
Not only since I’ve been doing talks about LGBTQIA2S community within ELT, but a lot since then, I’ve been asked about the possibility of there being a related teacher association endorsed/organised Special Interest Group (SIG), specifically in IATEFL. For simplicity sake (at least for this post, though there is an argument to be made for or against), I’ll refer to this as Queer SIG (QSIG).
The SIG purpose–not unlike all other SIGs in terms of the special interest itself–would be to have a self-selected grouping together of members interested in and practising queer pedagogies as well as providing a forum, collection of talks, etc., to discuss queer issues within the ELT environment, for example, the practical classroom space, institutional support, teacher training and ongoing development, and policy. As an endorsed official SIG from a teaching association, this usually involves membership money, volunteer hours towards organisation/protocol, and a variety of expectations on providing the above more concretely than say, an informal Facebook group would.
I’ll address a few considerations that come to mind for me here before drawing any conclusions and largely relate this to the IATEFL context as it is the teaching association I belong to.
Somewhere in the middle [cross-post]
Hi. Over the last few years, a certain change has been occurring in my belief system, not so much a complete overhaul, but more of an awakening of my ownership of attitudes and actions regarding social issues, and resulting urge to further explore how they impact my pedagogical choices.
As an ELTer, I’ve never subscribed to the idea that the ELT classroom should be devoid of engagement in social issues nor that we as teachers are meant to act solely as language-checking gurus following a sanitised beige syllabus.Read More »Somewhere in the middle [cross-post]