Lehr- und Lernmaterial
Hier gelangen Sie zu der gesamten öffentlichen Materialsammlung des Projektes. Die OER werden auf der öffentlichen OER Plattform „FOERDE“ der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel bereitgestellt.
OER Material
Life Writing in TEFL – Teaching Material on Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy
We are very excited to announce that our first package of OER teaching material has been launched: As part the TEFL seminar “Teaching life writing the EFL Classroom” taught by Prof. Dr. Susanne Heinz, M.Ed. students of English have designed teaching material for bringing the work of acclaimed US-lawyer and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), to the TEFL classroom.
The teaching unit focuses on Stevenson’s multiple award-winning life writing text Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption which was first published in 2014 and has also been adapted to a film in 2019. In his memoir Stevenson talks about his career as a defense attorney fighting for legal representation of his disadvantaged clients. The memoir thereby gives first-hand insights into the injustices of the US judicial system (with a particular focus on the issues of mass incarceration and death penalty), systemic racism, and other forms of discrimination. The chapters of the book document Stevenson’s work on cases with clients who were convicted either wrongfully or in an unjust manner: Most of them people of color, some of them still children when they committed the crime for which they received a life sentence, others coming from unstable homes, or being mentally impaired and thus should not have been held accountable for their crime in the same manner as non-disabled people. Stevenson tries to give an encompassing and detailed description of his clients‘ lives of whom quite a few were victims of domestic violence, rape or social / racial violence and discrimination.
As the book deals with sensitive issues such as racism, discrimination, and abuse, teachers might consider giving a trigger warning about certain passages before reading a chapter or chapters from the book in class.
The material designed by the students illustrates how the genre of life writing can be integrated into today’s EFL classroom as an important example for non-fiction texts (see “Info Sheet: Overview of 9 Lessons”). The material features tasks for intensive and extensive reading, includes graphic organizers structuring the reading processes, and makes use of digital tools such as Conceptboard. In addition to the book, several teaching examples include selected scenes from the film Just Mercy (2019) directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and the HBO-documentary True Justice (2019) by Peter Kunhardt. The material can be found here.
Teacher Guide – NASA’s „First Woman“ (2021)
As part of the „Mobile Enhanced Language Learning goes Open Educational Practice“ project, the TEFL department of CAU Kiel is developing new language teaching and learning scenarios for English. In this blog post, we report on an ongoing project in which Sean Holt, M.Ed. and his students from the „Teaching multiliteracies with digital literature“ course are creating a guide for teachers on how to use NASA’s graphic novel First Woman (2021). In this post, we discuss the concept behind the project and briefly introduce the content of the graphic novel as well as our goals for the teacher guide.
The graphic novel
The graphic novel First Woman by NASA, which was released in 2021, tells the story of Callie Rodriguez and her robot sidekick RT. In the story, readers follow Callie’s journey from a young girl full of potential to an astronaut candidate and finally the first woman to land on the moon. The graphic novel colourful style and upbeat tone clearly aims to inspire and educate young readers about the exciting field of space exploration but also about the important contributions of women in STEM fields. You can read the entire graphic novel here.
The teacher guide
We believe that First Woman is full of potential as a teaching resource for English language learners. Not only is the graphic novel engaging, easy to follow and accessible, but it also features a strong female character that students can relate to. Moreover, the inspiring optimistic nature of the text promises a fun reading experience. Additionally, there is an audiobook version of the novel available on SoundCloud for those that prefer the audio experience.
For these and other reasons, we decided to create a teacher guide that will provide teachers with guidance and resources on how to integrate First Woman effectively in their foreign language teaching and learning. The guide, which will be published under a CC-BY NC license to ensure educational freedom and open accessibility, will offer practical materials that encourages and enables teachers to incorporate digital literature into their TEFL classrooms while also highlighting the potential for teaching English language and literacy skills. The teacher guide consequently focuses on combining language education with the development of digital and media literacy through a multimodal approach to digital literature.
Stay tuned for more!
Exploring wiki-writing in the TEFL classroom (Summer term 2022)
Collaborative writing as a relevant skill for the digital workplace – and in the English classroom of the future?
The „Mobile Enhanced Language Learning goes OEP“ project recently collaborated with the FutureSkills initiative at CAU Kiel to create a freely available Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The course was offered during the summer term of 2022 and was developed in the seminar „Exploring wiki writing practices for TEFL,“ led by Sean Holt, M.Ed. In this seminar, the students explored online wikis, including Wikipedia, to investigate their potential for promoting writing skills and media literacy for the modern English classroom.
The use of digital technologies has changed the way writing takes place, and collaboration and cooperation with colleagues or classmates have become commonplace. This has led to the development of new competencies and skills for internet-based writing formats, such as GoogleDocs and Etherpads. Wikis provide an excellent platform for creating and experiencing such writing scenarios in a school context. They are based on shared authorship, product goals, and can be hosted easily on most Learning Management Systems (LMS). Therefore, wikis allow but also require multiple authors to work together, making it a natural tool for building competencies in collaborative writing formats in TEFL.
During the seminar „Exploring wiki writing practices for TEFL,“ the Master of Education students engaged in the process of knowledge negotiation and meaning-making through hands-on group work. They created their texts in a course-internal wiki on the university learning platform OpenOlat. This experience allowed them to reflect on the nature of digital writing processes in the digital space of shared authorship. In a final block seminar, the participants applied all their gained knowledge in groups by creating their own learning modules for the „Future Skills“ website, a joint open educational platform of the universities in Schleswig-Holstein that provides digital learning opportunities for students and teachers and focuses on future-relevant skills.
The MOOC „Wikis and Wiki Writing“ is a digital introduction to the practice of wiki writing. It is designed as a self-study course that invites exploration and critical reflection. Engaging in the MOOC enables participants to better understand how cooperative writing processes take place in wikis and helps learners conceptualize the varied competencies that are involved in collaborative writing. Furthermore, the course takes a closer look at fan wikis as pop cultural spaces and investigates the reliability and validity of the information the open encyclopedia Wikipedia offers to users. Through this project, students were able to explore the potential of wikis as a useful tool for building and promoting relevant writing skills for the English classroom of tomorrow while also becoming more media literate.
Overall, this cooperation between the TEFL department and the FutureSkills initiative highlights the importance of building relevant skills for the future through digital teaching and learning-focused activities. As our world becomes more connected, the ability to collaborate and work with others in online writing formats will become increasingly important. The MOOC creation project is an excellent example of how universities can equip students with opportunities to build these digital competencies with meaningful products.