A participatory ESOL framework

Our ‘Henry Cavendish School’ class (online) have been looking at social media these past few lessons. Teachers often ask how participatory ESOL works in terms of a framework and planning. Often we take a ‘generative theme’ like Social Media in this case and explore it over a number of sessions (normally between 3 and 12 depending on how it takes off).

How do we choose the generative theme? Elsa Auerbach talks about ‘active listening’ here and it’s a useful concept. Often if there’s some loose chit-chat time at the beginning of a class, or you talk to people at break or after class, a theme emerges. It might also be that there is something in the news that lots of people are talking about (like gender equality or Black Lives Matter over the past year). Generative themes need to be meaty (people will hopefully have a lot to say), politically/socially charged (this covers most things to be honest) and relevant to the students/connected to their lives.

How to begin? The first session or two with a new generative theme is often exploratory, we call this the ‘making meaning’ phase (again borrowing from Elsa Auerbach). There are participatory tools, like the card cluster or picture pack, that help to collect people’s thoughts and feelings or bring up memories and stories. Often we make lists and do mind-maps or brainstorms. The language produced tends to be descriptive or narrative. There will certainly be a lot of new vocabulary produced and shared between the group. This phase favours speaking and listening and especially discussion skills. It can also be conducive to longer stretches of talk (telling stories or summarising) which we know are fantastic for language development. In our class, in Lesson 1 we shared our social media practices and preferences; we created a summary of the different social media we used in the group. In Lesson 2 (still ‘making meaning’) we looked at the pros and cons of different social media (see photo) and then of social media in general.

The next stage in this framework is ‘going deeper’. Here we turn to specific issues (often problems) that the group has unearthed in the making-meaning phase. In our case, there were two main sub-topics to explore 1 – social media can be intrusive (one of the words that emerged in Lesson 2) and bad for our mental health and 2 – social media can be especially difficult/bad for children. There are various tools and methods that can be used to explore these problems. A classic is the problem tree (see photo) where the roots are the causes of the problem, the branches are the consequences and the leaves or fruit are the actions/solutions. This also generates a load of language (perhaps more analytical language, expressing of opinions and argumentation) that can be picked up and developed. You can choose to focus on some grammar, vocabulary or phonology that will help the students to be more effective at this type of discussion. Or you could stick to the issues. As we know, learning a language is as much about how we feel, how much we belong, how the other people in our communication contexts behave and our material circumstances. It’s just as useful to discuss and compare strategies for what we do if someone is willfully not helping us to understand as it is to practise sentence stress and rising intonation for questions. We need to do both. To go back to our class, in this lesson, one thing that emerged and students seemed interested in was looking at intensifiers and adjectives. We found a good resource on the internet, discussed the rules, did some exercises. Just as valuable was when one student said “how do you know what a ‘strong adjective’ is?” and this sparked a discussion about the usefulness of rules compared to ‘what sounds right’. These kind of meta-discussion are another feature of participatory ESOL (of course, they are not unusual, but we recognise their importance).

This is where we have got to. The next and final stage of this block of learning is ‘broadening out’. We will bring in external texts (video, audio or articles) and evaluate them. We focus on reading or listening skills here, especially interpreting, evaluating and reading between the lines. We will turn our attention to the world outside the classroom/zoom and ask the question, ‘what can we do about all this?’ ‘How can I protect myself and others from the harmful effects of social media but access the benefits?’ We may find and share guidance for parents, or perhaps set up a workshop to help people understand how to manage social media and limit its problems. We are particularly interested in collective responses, in this action-orientated stage of the process, not just ‘what can I do as an individual?’, but ‘what can we do as a group or a community?’. We’ll keep you posted……