ESL etc.

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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The #GlobalPOV Project is an initiative by the Blum Center at the University of California, Berkeley that addresses poverty and inequality through innovative digital media. Their videos are extremely visual, and are thus a good way to communicate complex ideas to English language learners. As an example, “Can Experts Solve Poverty?” would be a great […]

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With all the talk of Black Friday (here in the US), I always like to do a short lesson on Buy Nothing Day around this time of year. One place to get materials is the Adbusters’ campaign page, where there are a number of protest ideas and posters. Developing Teachers has a 90-minute lesson based […]

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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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This past summer, at the BART Summer Symposium, I went to a great presentation about a middle-school ESL unit on the treatment of migrant farmworkers. One of the presenters just published an article on this in the Fall 2012 issue of eJournal of Literacy and Social Responsibility. It starts on page 158. Students began by […]

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After Capitalism is a series of short animated videos available from The Guardian. Each video features a student animation of an impression of post-capitalist society. I was particularly struck by this one. The text of each animation comes from various authors and economists, including one of my favorite journalists, George Monbiot. The videos are short […]

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In preparation for an office move, I’ve been going through my files. I found a presentation I gave last summer that I wanted to share. It’s on a global issues themed poetry activity. I’ve done it with both intermediate and advanced students. The first iteration of this activity was done as one of the activities […]

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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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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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One of the fundamental problems with capitalism as it is currently practiced in many countries around the world is that it relies on continual growth. Obviously, this is not sustainable. The Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economy (CASSE) is an organization that seeks to explore the true costs of growth-based economics, as well […]

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