Tesol Italy Convention 2022

About Tesol Italy Convention 2022

How can the ELT community face the new educational challenges of an increasingly complex international scenario? How can global issues and core values be addressed in ELT? What should be the role of teachers and educators in promoting human rights and democratic citizenship education and contributing to effective learning and communication?

TESOL Italy’s 47th Annual Convention, entitled “Promoting HOPE in ELT”, will seek to offer answers to these critical questions, focusing on the thematic areas explained by the acronym HOPE:

• Human Rights
• Oracy Skills
• Professional Development
• Educational Values

This year’s Convention program wishes to provide a space for reflection and discussion on the importance of fostering human rights and democratic values in the classroom and developing learners’ critical thinking, social and oracy skills. ELT teachers and educators need to play a crucial role in raising students’ awareness of human rights issues and shared educational values such as diversity, equity, inclusion, women’s empowerment, and gender equality, accepting and valuing differences across race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and education, developing social and civic competences, and strengthening understanding and protection of human rights and citizenship.

Furthermore, in the light of positive psychology, promoting HOPE in ELT means to encourage learners’ positive feelings – such as optimism, self-efficacy, self-esteem and hope for the future – and create an emotionally supportive environment in which learners feel safe and motivated to engage and achieve educational success.

Promoting respect for human rights and democratic values, fostering positive emotions and empathy, improving oracy skills, collaboration, and interaction with different people, working in multilingual, plurilingual and translanguaging contexts, can be the key factors for effective and successful learning.

Dealing with the themes of the HOPE acronym will also have a positive impact on ELT teachers’ professional development and growth giving participants opportunities to enhance their knowledge and expertise on current cultural and social issues, get informed and learn about the latest ELT trends and recent best practices as well as share ideas and resources on the Convention topics.

The four key areas: Human Rights – Oracy Skills – Professional Development – Educational Values allow potential speakers to explore, investigate, rethink, and reflect on important aspects related to the Convention themes.

TESOL Italy welcomes relevant proposals referring to teaching and learning experiences, projects, research studies, use of innovative approaches, strategies, methodologies, and techniques aiming to collaboratively promote HOPE in ELT.

The 2021 Convention Themes are:

Challenges and Opportunities within and beyond the Classroom

The need to transform the education sector is overdue. The closure of schools around the world triggered by the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the challenges faced by schools, teachers and students to secure education continuity away from classrooms. How has the pandemic changed education and opened an opportunity to rethink schooling? In addition, the recognition of non-formal and informal learning is an important means for making the ‘lifelong learning for all’ agenda a reality for all and, subsequently, for reshaping learning to better match the needs of the 21st century. It is very likely that learning taking place at home or elsewhere, is a lot more important, relevant and significant than the kind of learning that occurs in formal settings. How can we recognize, appreciate and value this?

Foregrounding Global Citizenship Education in ELT

Global Citizenship Education is a strategic area of UNESCO’s Education Sector programme, and builds on the work of Peace and Human Rights Education. It aims to instil in learners the values, attitudes and behaviours that support responsible global citizenship: creativity, innovation, and commitment to peace, human rights and sustainable development. Global citizenship has become one of the most important issues for English language teachers around the world, as we are witnessing its growing importance in the international scenario and its incorporation as part of a process of inclusion/e-inclusion. How can inspiring input, suggestions, and ideas related to the issue of global citizenship be addresses in ELT?

Investigating Teachers' Professional Profiles and Beliefs

It is widely recognised that at the outset of the pandemic, many teachers felt they lacked appropriate training and were unprepared for the remote and hybrid teaching scenarios they had to face. Teachers found their beliefs challenged as they had to adapt to new modes of teaching, collaborate with colleagues, and work in unpredictable, challenging situations. To what extent are these new scenarios having an impact on teachers’ beliefs? Research shows that faced with a plethora of online CPD opportunities based on new pedagogical approaches for the new normal, teachers have constantly risen to the challenge and demonstrated their commitment to professional learning and development and that their paramount values and beliefs have continued to help teachers forge their didactic action. But just how are new forms of CPD currently influencing teachers’ practices, and what CPD can we offer to support evolving post-pandemic teacher profiles?

Translanguagism in ELT: a pedagogical approach

During the last decade more people than ever in the history of mankind have been on the move all over the world, because of unsustainable social conditions. Forced to abandon their homeland, they brought with them their own identities and their language. This disruptive condition has modified the language and cultural landscapes of many countries and of their school population. It is within this reconfiguration of peoples and cultures that the notions of ‘translanguaging’ and of ‘translanguaging spaces’ have emerged. Translanguaging has been defined as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah, 2011). The pedagogical implications of translanguagism are multiple, and translingual practices have proved as particularly effective when used by multilingual learners to communicate and to learn in the language classrooms. Welcome to this conference are all those teaching and learning experiences and projects that use translanguagism as an approach engaging multilingual learners to communicate and to integrate their language repertoires.

Stories of Hope

Manuela Kelly Calzini

Manuela is an experienced teacher and teacher trainer working mainly in EFL Education and Continuing Professional Development Programmes. She is an International Storyteller and has been an active member of the Society for Storytelling since 1998. Manuela is Senior Academic at Trinity College London Italy. Her main research interests are young learners, communicative skills and performance-based assessment.

Songs of Hope

Fergal Kavanagh

Fergal Kavanagh created Tune Into English in 2004 and has since presented his Roadshow to many thousands of students in ten countries. His website www.tuneintoenglish.com was nominated for a prestigious British Council ELTons Teachers Innovation Award in 2011. A one-time radio DJ, he has taught at most levels and written a successful course book for the Italian Scuola Media. He continues to tour and write pop culture biographies.

Sirio Di Giuliomaria Award 2022

How can ELT teachers encourage learners’ hope for the future promoting respect for human rights and democratic values, fostering positive emotions and empathy, improving oracy skills, and developing social and civic competences?

This year’s edition of the Sirio Di Giuliomaria Award is aimed at empathetic and proactive teachers, who have been able to create in the ELT classroom an emotionally supportive environment in which learners feel safe and motivated to engage and achieve educational success.