Past Events

"Voices of Resilience: Empowering Learners Through Remote Theatre and Poetry"

In this engaging session, Haneen and Siddhu will explore innovative approaches to integrating remote theater and poetry into educational settings, particularly for learners from refugee or underserved communities.
Haneen will introduce the concept of remote/online theater, highlighting its potential to empower students to become authors of their own narratives.Participants will learn a structured framework for guiding students through the processes of writing, rehearsing, and performing their stories collaboratively, ultimately sharing their creations with peers around the globe. Case studies will illustrate successful implementations of online theater in challenging contexts, providing educators with practical strategies for integration.

Siddhu will complement this with a live recital of ‘The Mower’ and other poignant poems reflecting on Palestine, analyzing their emotional depth and poetic features. He will present a lesson plan designed for English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals, focusing on themes of colonization, displacement, and identity, while engaging participants in reflective discussions using the "Circle of Viewpoints" strategy.

Utilizing Project Zero’s Visual Thinking Routines, Siddhu will enhance the interactive experience with visual aids, demonstrating their effectiveness in classroom settings. The session will conclude with exit tickets encouraging self-reflection, allowing participants to distill their key takeaways. This collaborative workshop aims to inspire educators to harness the transformative power of art and storytelling to foster resilience and identity among their students.

Event details

📖 Event type: SIG Webinar Literature

🗓️ Date: 04/10/2024 - 16:00 UK time What time is this in my location?

🏫Venue: Online event

💲Fees: Free for IATEFL members
Please note that certificate will be sent to members of Iatefl only

LITSIG: Intersectionality in children's picture books: The road to diversity

The relevance of literature as a means of providing children with opportunities to reflect their own experiences and to see into the experiences of others prompts the inquiry: why choose children's picturebooks as vehicles to explore diversity? Diversity, as portrayed in picturebooks through (dis)abilities, cultural, racial, and linguistic, can be explored in English language teaching (ELT)
creating opportunities for more inclusive spaces.

In ELT, picturebooks are widely recognised as a valuable scaffolding tool for literacy support, aiding in language comprehension. Visual images aid children’s language learning: from arousing interest, to facilitating comprehension, to engaging with the story, to making vocabulary memorable, to an important support in re-telling or acting out the story (Read 2008: 7).

Within this framework, this webinar will revolve around two picturebooks: Elena’s Serenade and Marcos an Aquanaut. In them, we will draw on linguistic and racial diversity, as well as (dis)abilities. We will examine the “word” in its aporia of signifiers along with the intersections presented in the images and the text. At this point, Iet us pause for a moment to explore the two stories further. Elena’s Serenade, written in English but interspersed with Spanish, anchors the narrative within the Mexican community in the US. Ibrahim emphasizes that such stories highlight the multilingual nature of the world, challenging the one- language-one-culture bias. The use of brown kraft paper in the picturebook enhances ethnicity, as the soft brown background complements the characters' brown skins, spreading their cultural world across the pages.

Marcos an Aquanaut features Marcos, a protagonist in a wheelchair, in a children's story that avoids forced messages about (dis)ability. The narrative presents Marcos as a typical, energetic boy who enjoys swimming with a team of aquanauts. The story is bilingual, in English and Spanish, highlighting the potential of dual language picturebooks to enrich English classrooms by embracing linguistic diversity.

These picturebooks serve as bridges to connect the multiple intersections where languages, ethnicities, and (dis)abilities converge. Mixed-race charactersin children's books contribute to diversity by disrupting the focus on monoracial identity. Characters that break free from the typical perspective that (dis)abilities limit them offer a more nuanced and empowering representation. This webinar journeyed into what ELT educators can do before, during, and after reading Elena’s Serenade and Marcos an Aquanaut, which can be extended and adapted to other titles.

Event details

📖Event type: SIG Event Literature

🗓️Date: 31/08/2024 - 15:00 UK time

🏫Venue: Online event (United Kingdom)

💲Fees:

• £5 - Non Members

• £3- IATEFL members

• Free for LITSIG members using discount code- Please email sig@iatefl.org if you need the code

Bringing Diverse Representation in Literature in ELT through Creative Reading Responses

This webinar invited teachers to explore a selection of contemporary children’s picturebooks, young adult and adult literature and key concepts related to Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) through creative teaching ideas and a variety of reading response activities. The aim of this exploration was to introduce teachers to material they can use in their lessons to incorporate contents of CSE and that will serve as a springboard for a series of activities. This webinar focused on the incorporation of tasks that foster reflection, self-expression, creativity and critical thinking while dealing with topics of diversity, identity, social justice, gender stereotypes and roles.

If you are a member, you can access the recorded webinar!