ESL etc.

I recently attended a webinar by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The webinar introduced some new teaching materials aimed at helping students understand how they could take productive actions related to climate change. I like this approach, as I’ve found in my own teaching that simply teaching about problems can […]

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I first posted about the New Internationalist Easier English Wiki about a year and a half ago. Since then, they’ve added a lot of great materials to their site. The New Internationalist is a magazine focused on promoting global justice and, through their easier English wiki, they make articles more accessible to English language learners […]

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This transcript of a speech given by journalist Chris Hedges offers a very powerful look at our current state of affairs. The introduction of the article draws parallels between our self-destructive path and the novel Moby Dick, which opens the door to using this article as part of a unit on literature, as well as […]

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100 Views of Climate Change is a website from Colorado State University that offers short and long videos on climate change, along with notes on books and articles and links to other resources. Finding specific resources is very easy. The site is broken into five sections: climate, nature, humans, action, and the big picture. Each […]

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The True Cost of Food is a 15-minute video about the hidden costs of factory farming, industrial agriculture and fast food. It comes with a discussion guide and an excellent Take Action handout. I really like how the Take Action handout is framed — recommending actions based on the issues students care about. The video […]

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Greening the L2 Classroom is a great article in the July 2012 edition of TESOL Connections by Wendy Coyle and Amy Delis. I met Wendy and Amy at TESOL 2012 when I attended their presentation on having students create environmental PSAs. This article describes much of the process they used in structuring this activity, and […]

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We The Trees is a new crowd funding website focusing on permaculture projects. There aren’t very many projects posted on it yet, but it could make a nice addition to a unit on permaculture or on the environment in general. The projects are set in many different of countries, which might help them resonate with […]

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Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers and engineers that has put together the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that enables DIY fabrication of 50 different industrial machines that they believe are required to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. I like the principles behind the […]

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The Dark Mountain Project is a group of environmentally minded writers and artists who are challenging the stories we tell ourselves. The stories which any culture tells itself about its origins and values determine its direction and destination. The dominant stories of our culture tell us that humanity is separate from all other life and […]

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Here is the slideshow I just gave at the third annual BART symposium. It’s a modified version of the presentation I gave a couple of months ago at TESOL. Within the slideshow, there are links to PDF versions of some of the handouts. If you’d like DOC versions to adapt for your own use, you […]

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