Welcome to Absolutely Intercultural, show 306. My name’s Anne Fox and this show is coming to you from Denmark. Today’s show may make you look back at conversations that you’ve had, interactions that you’ve witnessed and materials you may have used in the classroom. I’ll be talking to Rose Aylett who supports teachers all over the world both face to face and online, to help them help their students to become global citizens.
Rose Aylett is a teacher trainer who works internationally and recently she developed a new course for the Norwich Institute of Language Education on helping teachers support their students to become global citizens.
We’ll be talking about how you can use language to project (or not) power:
We’ll also hear about how art forms, such as theatre, can be used to help people recognise the many ways that a conversation could go. Rose talks about Augusto Boal and his “theatre of the oppressed”
And then we’ll ask the question about whether there are any topics that we should not discuss in the classroom.
absolutely powerful
We’ll start by asking why we might want to learn how to become global citizens in our English classes by going absolutely powerful.
Are you re-running some previous conversations in your head and seeing how different people were exercising power? This doesn’t have to be only in English by the way.
absolutely just
Rose’s course is very much about promoting social justice and for this it turns out that using the arts can be very helpful here. Rose talks about one specific example as we go absolutely just.
absolutely taboo
Another important part of Rose’s course is about controversial topics. Are any topics really off-limits? What happens if something goes wrong?
So if you have an English course book, I hope that this show has made you take another look at it to see if it tackles any PARSNIP topics. Maybe you can think of a situation that it would be useful to practice using the theatre of the oppressed approach. Or you may be remembering a conversation where you can now see that power was being exercised and how.
Thanks to Rose for sharing some of her strategies and thanks to you for listening. If you have a story to tell on this or any related topic then don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment on our website where you can also listen to all our previous shows. We are also on Apple podcasts and Spotify where you can give us a rating.
Our next show will be coming to you from Laurent Borgmann in Germany on 6th June.
Until then, stay tuned!
