It was a fabulous couple of hours, “proper” coffee breaks where things got kind of philosophical!
How are we all doing?
Lots of busy-ness and bits of beachiness for some!
How’s COVID doing where you are?
- Argentina – things are tough, low vaccine rest and much uncertainty
- Switzerland – vaccines moving quickly
- France – getting there
- Spain – heading towards the 50 year olds for the vaccine
What are you up to?
- Updating CVs, thinking about making “my own website” and awareness of the freelancer’s insecurity but then “things just happen”. And then of course there’s the difficulties of keeping track of invoices and the “Declarado” app was recommended.
- Writing SDGs (the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals) for Japan, there’s lots of work to do there.
- Giving presentations at international conferences.
- Wasting time on silly, but addictive, games on the phone…
And what about our relationship with tech?
We’re all dying a slow death of a thousand cuts with all the subscriptions. It feels like the companies own us. We all know that Google isn’t really “free”, we and our data are the product. How then do we feel about using Google Classroom? It seems to be the favourite for teachers.
There is a search engine “Gener8” which pays you for the ads you see; you get vouchers and can also donate to charity.
And what is the end game for online businesses? It’s either to make money or to collect data. Is there an ethical question around data collection or does it only depend then what we do with it? Businesses need to build their databases to let their potential customers know what’s going on and to sell our products. An alternative approach could be to do lots of free stuff and then sell special events.
Who taught us the most during lockdown?
Greta and family taught us about activism, privilege and LGBTQIA+. We learnt so much through listening to those less listened to. We were inspired by others and learnt to be quiet and listen. We learnt that litter-picking is a gateway drug into activism, we learnt that we can all make a difference. We learnt that teens listen to teens
Talking of inclusivity…
We went on to talk about the flexibility and potential inclusivity of pronouns in English and that Portuguese is adding a new neutral suffix “e” to add to the traditional “o” and “a”. We agreed that it can be hard to make the shift and challenged ourselves to use neutral pronouns more.
Do we live in an age of contradictions? We’re increasingly moving away from the binary towards more nuance and complexity while at the same time being dumbed down by simplicity and polarisation.
We reported that we’re pushing the publishers, on some occasions more successfully than others; in one book we managed to get an info box of the use of “they” as a preferred pronoun and the accepted “they” if gender is unknown, wouldn’t it be good if we could add to “unknown or unimportant”?
Learning to listen?
Also on the theme of listening we wondered how often we just listen without visual prompts and therefore questioning the authenticity in books and exams. We commented that even phone calls are less used now in the age of the video call.
Exam listening tasks are so often torturous! Who writes this stuff? Not millennials, we guess. We commented on how contrived much of the exam language is, can it be any other way?
We got righteously angry about the claim that exams don’t need prep and the idea that if you’ve got the level, you can take the exam. Nonsense, we agreed.
We were similarly aggrieved by the expression “21st Century Skills”; it’s 2021! Would “soft skills” be better or is that a bit bland? What about “life skills”; communication, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking? We don’t like a page on these things bolted on to the end of a unit, these skills should be embedded throughout.
What is “transformative pedagogy”? And how does academia interact with practical teaching?
Apparently a theory focussing on “adjusting thinking based on information”. All learning is transforming, isn’t it? This left us with more questions than answers and led us to talking about the difficulty in accessing academic writing. We agreed that if you can’t explain something using simple words, it means you can’t explain it. But then, is the academic side of things necessary to elevate the profession? And action research is great but not much use if it just ends up gathering dust, there needs to be a combination of the theoretical and the practical. Perhaps there will always be a gap between academics and teachers.
Do academics care about the practical application of their work or is it just a theoretical exercise? Also, it appears that some academics want to protect, rather than share, their research in the competition to get published (or tenure) and then to secure a research position. We also heard about how theory and practice are combining, in TESOL Argentina there is a talk about story-telling connecting stories, feelings and emotions.
“The lumpy jumper” scene from “The devil wears Prada” was mentioned as recommended viewing!
We were introduced to Google scholar (Google again, have we come full circle?); scholar.google.com. Some papers there are downloadable and there are often several versions. The number of citations shows if something is well-read. Use the abstract to see if it’s what you’re after and the bibliography to follow up and deepen. There’s also academic.edu where people share their research, subscription is free and they send interesting emails.
“Schools kill creativity” (TED talk – Ken Robinson) was recommended, especially the conference disco section to illustrate one of the problems with academia.
What do you do with webinars and conference sessions?
How important is it to take notes? How often do we just leave them afterwards? We’re keen CPD-ers and what do we do? What about our younger colleagues? They seem to make no notes. Is it a generational shift? Some record it to watch later, will they ever? Is there something about active listening as we make notes deciding what to include and how to represent it? Is it the same on a keyboard as making a mark on a paper? Perhaps if we take good notes we don’t need to look at them again? The debate goes on…