By Robin Sivapalan, teacher-organiser and former EFA Brent hub lead
At English for Action London’s May 2023 conference on trauma-informed ESOL, we began the day with an exercise aimed at exploring the theme of ‘connection’ and how we seek to build connection through our work as participatory ESOL teachers.
Following the conference, Laura Wiggin, department head at Rochdale College and member of our Community of Practice for ESOL practitioners across the UK, shares with us a full-day training she ran with for her colleagues around this theme of ‘connection.’
Laura recounts:
“In the starter activity, the staff had to create a structure (out of small building blocks) that summed up the 2022/23 academic year.
The structures were great; participants described the challenges that they faced in the academic year, such as OFSTED and Further Education institutions’ expectations, but also said how they had overcome them to reach their goals of earning an ‘Outstanding’ rating as a department and achieving a positive experience for our learners.
Included in the structures they built were trap doors to signify challenges, bridges to describe how they overcome challenges, and wheels to describe how they close the loop. They were all fab! A few photos of the structures are here:
Next, I picked bits out from EFA’s May conference and an IATEFL conference which linked to connection, in particular trauma and our asylum seekers and refugees.
Then, I showed them BBC reports of the Rochdale boy who died from poor housing, including examples of EFA resources on the topic of housing, and posed these questions:
- How can we make connections with our learners lives to empower them?
- What topics could we explore?
- How could we do this?
- What could be the impact of this?
Everyone agreed how important it was to make a difference to our learners’ lives by empowering them with language. They loved the way that language was pulled out of the resources by Adela, a teacher-organiser from EFA.
Below is an example of the groups’ ideas around the 2 themes we explored, ‘shopping’ and ‘money’:
Lastly, we talked about our curriculum and enrichment opportunities and how the ideas and themes we discussed could be implemented into our planning.
We also planned when we would carry out enrichment activities throughout the year and how it would link into the scheme of learning.”
English for Action 