ESL etc.

Catharine Hannay and William Little wrote this post about their TESOL presentation. Thank you both very much for sharing this! And for anyone else who has materials they’d like to share, let me know. It was lovely meeting David at the TESOL convention, as well as several other teachers who are interested in social justice [...]

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For those who both were and were not able to attend my TESOL 2012 presentation, here are the materials I referred to. The overall focus of my presentation was using local environmental resources as a way to both raise student awareness of environmental issues and to offer them opportunities for positive action. One emphasis I [...]

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At the TESOL 2012 Convention, I’ll be presenting some ideas for ESL/EFL activities based on local environmental resources. Let me know if you’re interested and I can fill you in on the details. It’ll be my first TESOL, and I’m looking forward to putting faces to some names. I’ll post my materials after the talk.

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Here’s a neat poem from 1933. It would be great to use as part of a discussion about how the world has / has not changed over the last 75 years. It also reminds us that environmental concerns and dissatisfaction with modern industrial life are not new ideas. Plus, it kind of foreshadows climate change. [...]

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Letters of Note recently posted a letter from a freed slave to his former master. The former slave was living and working on Ohio, when his former master wrote to him asking him to return to work on his farm. His response is a spectacular blend of sincerity and sarcasm. In my experience, students are [...]

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It’s not ESL specific, but I found a lot of relevant ideas in McKay Jenkins’ recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, he argues against focusing on preparing students for competition in the global marketplace. Instead, he suggests helping students understand and explore the problems of the marketplace, problems that are becoming [...]

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My wife and I just watched a great documentary on PBS called My Life as a Turkey. It tells the story of naturalist and wildlife illustrator Joe Hutto and his experience as “mother” to a brood of wild turkeys. The video powerfully reveals the complex and sophisticated lives of wild turkeys. I think this should [...]

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Slavery Footprint is a visually engaging survey that roughly determines how many slaves were involved in producing the goods we consume. It’s similar to carbon footprint calculators in terms of the questions it asks, asking about your home, electronics, diet, clothing and so on. On several of the questions, it allows you to really delve [...]

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NPR has a neat short video on how the world population has grown to reach 7 billion. It would be pretty understandable, even at lower levels, and it would work with a range of topics: population, poverty and wealth, food, consumption, etc. Thanks Krista

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Business Insider has a page that features a ton of different charts and graphs on wealth inequality. It would work great in conjunction with an activity on Occupy Wall Street. The graphs start off showing how unemployment is at an all-time high (since 1940), then they look at CEO pay and corporate profits. The graph [...]

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