By Anne McConnell, EFA Teacher-Organiser + Lambeth hub lead “A Strike Day to Beat All Strike Days” – This little article appeared in the free London METRO newspaper on Monday, 30 January. The closer look at the current strike action that we took during a recent ESOL class was sparked by one student asking, “Why […]
Category: Teachers
Shared by EFA teacher-organiser Dermot Bryers, Pedagogy Lead In class, we’ve been looking at EFA, Citizens UK, and the Living Wage campaign in recent weeks. Students compared the two organisations using their knowledge from previous lessons and the projects’ respective websites in terms of: It produced lots of interesting discussion and emerging language. The emerging […]
In one of our classes recently several students spoke about health problems in the check in at the beginning of our class, so health as a topic seemed a good one to discuss. We talked about how our health is, what we do to look after our health and also about the NHS. Talking about […]
Shared by EFA teacher-organiser Anne, who leads our Hackney & Tower Hamlets hubs: “What’s in the news?” This is not an uncommon question in my classes, to check in with each other at the beginning of a session. It also quickly becomes apparent who are the news listeners and who are not. I don’t allow […]
Shared by EFA teacher-organiser Robin, who leads our Brent hub: In our Brent hub, we’ve been sifting through the various issues our students face in education and employment. Quite often the issues are individual and we try and support each other to make headway. An issue like “I’m unconfident in English” can be subjective; it […]
Prepared ahead of English for Action’s 2021 Participatory ESOL conference, this working paper on theory and best practices for encouraging strong learning communities was put together by EFA teacher Robin Sivapalan. Key themes include: A brief review of Paolo Freire’s education philosophy and the origins of Participatory ESOL Group Analysis The psychology behind group support […]
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 […]
In early March 2020 we advertised our annual EFA conference and set the date for April 25th. This year’s theme was going to be ESOL and community organising. We aimed to explore ideas and approaches and we wanted to make a case for including community organising as an intrinsic part of participatory ESOL. But we […]
On Saturday we delivered a training session for the Iranian Youth Development Association (IYDA). The session focused on using participatory tools to differentiate language learning for students of different levels. The Iranian Youth Development Association is a wonderful charity, set up in 1989, that provides Farsi language lessons and Iranian and Afghan cultural education for […]
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Student retention
So colleagues, what are your secrets for retaining students and encouraging regular attendance? With informal, community ESOL it can be tricky to keep students attending. For a variety of reasons – classes are open and free, there is continuous enrolment, lack of end of course exams (in some cases), students find work during our courses […]
English for Action 