Hello SRIS Colleagues!

It was exciting to see many of you at our open meeting at the 2018 convention in Chicago, and likewise to be communicating with you online. As cochairs of the SRIS for 2018-2019, Carter Winkle and I are really excited to share some updates and opportunities with all of you.

Open Educational Resources

It’s been an exciting year for me personally, having had the opportunity to collaboratively develop an open education resource (OER) online course that has a creative commons license (CC BY 4.0), meaning that the materials can be retained, reused, remixed, and redistributed freely for other educators to use and build upon. I’ve come to learn about how these OER materials can become a way of creating more equitable learning opportunities for colleagues and learners in the field, especially those in low-resource environments, which connects well to our work in social responsibility. I’d encourage all of you to explore using and creating these resources as contributions to the field. You can find more information here and here. Some OER resource sites that are especially useful for English language teaching include LINCs for Adult English Instruction, Excelsior Online Writing Lab, EFL OER Resources, as well as these sites for OER images that you can use freely: pixabay and unsplash. Consider uploading your own local images to help build a culturally and contextually relevant repository of images that we TESOLers can utilize. Here is a video and article by of one of our TESOL colleagues who licensed his teaching tip on using fidget spinners as CC BY 4.0 so that other teachers can use it freely. The Morningside Center has some U.S.-based teaching resources for Social Responsibility that are not OER, but free for teachers to use in their classrooms related to social and emotional learning and restorative practices.

SRIS Activities

This past year was busy and exciting. We collaborated on two webinars this spring. The March webinar was a collaboration with the TESOL Diversity Collaborative (TDC), and featured EdChange founder Paul Gorski: “Why Educators Need Equity Literacy More than We Need Cultural Competence.” The second webinar, extended from the convention intersection with the Teacher Education Interest Section (TEIS) and the TDC: “Integrating Social Justice into Teacher Education and Classroom Practice” on April 18th. We hope to have a few more webinars this year. Please let us know what topics and speakers you are interested in bringing to our interest section this year.

Get involved

We are excited that through the feedback from our members, we have identified four “Areas of Advocacy” within the SRIS to empower members to lead initiatives in the areas listed below. The leaders for each area have volunteered to head up focused initiatives and we hope you will engage in networking and collaborating on projects with them. Please reach out directly to the leaders below to share your ideas and availability.

They are these:

1. ELL Advocacy, including political concerns and immigrant rights (led by Georgios-Vlasios Kormpas, Babak Khoshnevisan & Christine E. Poteau)

2. Intersections of Identity in Language Teaching, including--but not limited to--non-native speakerism, race, gender, and sexuality (led by Hemamalini Ramachandran)

3. Professional Learning, including teacher education, materials/curriculum development, and social justice resources development (led by Chris Leider)

4. Global Education, including peace and environmental education (led by Yecid Ortega)

Also in aligning with TESOL International Association’s new strategic plan, we are hoping to extend our SRIS interactions more equitably to our global network and identify and build upon our expertise in SRIS. We’d like to collaborate with affiliates and would like to hear what matters most to you in your context!

Looking forward to the great work we will do together this year!

Warm Regards,

Heidi Faust,

SRIS Cochair

Heidi Faust is currently the Director of TESOL Professional Training Programs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture.