ESL etc.

Facing the Future is offering Buy, Use, Toss, a 10 lesson unit on consumption, for free download. It looks very good, and features some old favorites like The Story of Stuff and Chris Jordan. It’s aimed at grades 9-12, and seems like it would be perfect for adult ESL learners. The lessons ask students to [...]

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Take Our Jobs is a project by the United Farm Workers offering harvesting jobs to unemployed Americans. The idea is to contend the allegation that illegal immigrants take “our” jobs, while also raising awareness about the food chain. Asking students to look at this initiative could be a great way to bring up issues of [...]

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Teach UNICEF is a new website that shares a bunch of UNICEF teaching materials by topic and grade level. Topics include child labor, armed conflict, poverty and sanitation, to name a few. Most topics offer materials for grades 6-8 and 9-12, and some include K-2 or 3-5. You can also browse by media type. I [...]

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Global Issues in the ELT Classroom, a new textbook by the Czech Republic’s Society for Fair Trade, won a 2010 ELTon from the British Council for innovation. This book uses the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals as a framework to address a wide range of global issues. The sample activities look promising, but they are [...]

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The Institute for Humane Education has a great collection of activities, many of which could be used with English language learners. Most of them are aimed at younger learners, but many could also be used effectively with adults. I haven’t yet had a chance to go through the whole site, but I took a look [...]

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I just became aware of A Young People’s History of the United States,a version of Howard Zinn’s classic targeted towards younger readers. I haven’t seen the book myself yet, but I suspect that it would work well with English learners, too.

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ACT Responsible is a Swiss non-profit that attempts to use the talents of advertisers to address environmental sustainability and social responsibility. Their gallery is full of images and short videos that could be great visual prompts for activities on a wide variety of issues. For starters, check out highlights in The Best Adverts to Save [...]

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I was recently asked for suggestions for materials that could be used with younger learners. Here are a few of my favorites. Facing the Future has a collection of activity-based, global issues lesson plans for students of all ages. In addition to the great stuff they offer for sale, they have a ton of materials [...]

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Worldmapper has a large collection of world maps that display various issues in a simple yet effective way. They expand each country to illustrate their share in a given issue. For example, the map below illustrates each country’s proportion of the world’s child labor. Worldmapper has maps on many, many topics, including poverty, gender empowerment, [...]

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The New Internationalist has a collection of global issues articles written specifically for learners of English. They have articles on globalization, the environment, human rights and war. They haven’t updated the articles for several years, but the topics are still very relevant. One example that I like is a series of 5 stories told by [...]

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