Maria Grazia Maglione, President of TESOL Italy, Rome, Italy

Crisis creates opportunities

Over the last two years, our association, like other professional development organizations, has experienced a challenging time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To support ELT teachers and educators in such a hard situation, we tried to organize some free initiatives to meet our members’ needs and give more visibility to TESOL Italy. We would like to share with the other affiliates a training experience that provided quality professional opportunities and received positive feedback in terms of attendees and participants.

Language Improvement Courses (LICs) with an Insight into American Culture and Society

Thanks to the financial support of the American Embassy in Italy, we were able to organize, with the precious collaboration of TESOL Italy Local Groups coordinators, nine free Language Improvement Courses (LICS) - of different CEFR levels, from B1 to C2 - attended by about 200 hundred teachers coming from different Italian regions (see https://tesolitaly.org/lics-with-an-insight-into-american-culture-and-society/).

The program had the dual aim of improving their language and communication skills and fostering a deeper understanding of American culture and society in the Italian school curriculum. It had also a positive multiplier effect as teachers participating in the course could include what they learned in their syllabus and spread it to their students, encouraging their self-reflection and cultural awareness.

The LICs top-priority educational objectives were:

• Fostering opportunities for ELT and CLIL teachers to learn more about US culture and society.
• Making participants aware of applying creative methods and innovative solutions into their classroom.
• Using media technologies effectively and creatively in the classroom to develop students’ media literacy.
• Promoting and embedding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) issues into teaching practice.
• Integrating American mass media and social media resources (TV news programs, talk shows, movies, songs, etc.) and cultural topics (street art & social movements, teaching Black Lives Matter & promoting anti-racism, fostering women’s empowerment and gender equality) into the classroom.

The training courses included 30 hours of online lessons plus 10 hours of online self-study with cultural materials and activities created by qualified expert trainers and uploaded on TESOL Italy’s e-learning platform. This allowed the creation of a repository of useful online materials and resources.

Moreover, three amazing webinars dedicated to the legends of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and the hip hop culture were held in April giving further insight into American culture and society:

“The Dream and the Curse: Bruce Springsteen’s The River” by Professor Alessandro Portelli 

“Translanguaging & Hip Hop: a view from the US” by Professor Lucilla Lopriore 

“Bob Dylan: In and Out of Time” by professor Marina Morbiducci 

The three webinars were appreciated by LICs participants: some were even engaged in creative writing tasks and wrote interesting pieces such as a diary page and some articles. You can read three examples in TESOL Italy Newsletter Mar-Apr 2021 (LICs Special edition).

LICs offered a valuable opportunity for professional growth in a time of crisis due to the pandemic as well as a space to meet, learn and share teaching experiences, good practices, and useful resources. The online format allowed us to train a high number of teachers (about 200), achieve the planned learning objectives, and enrich the digital platform with educational content.

Thanks to these training courses, we were also able to increase our membership and strengthen our sense of community. On the one hand, designing, organizing, and managing the LICs required a big effort and commitment from both the Project Committee and Local Groups Coordinators, while on the other hand, the successful result was a boost for the association’s activity and growth and helped the association cope with the crisis and develop resilience.

Building on the success of the 2020-2021 LIC project, TESOL Italy has designed a new training project with Language Improvement Follow-up Courses (LIFCs) to enhance teachers’ language and communication skills and deepen their awareness of American cultural issues.

The strategic priority of the new training program is to promote American culture through creative methods and innovative solutions, developing and implementing media literacy, and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In TESOL spirit

Bio

Maria Grazia Maglione became President of TESOL Italy on November 14, 2020. She is an upper secondary school English teacher, a teacher trainer for English and CLIL courses, and several educational projects. She also worked as a training supervisor at SSIS Lazio and Tor Vergata University, Rome. Her main areas of interest are creative writing, extensive reading, motivation, innovative didactics, and soft skills.