Presented By Claudia Ferradas

Session Details

In a famous tango composed by Enrique Santos Discépolo in 1948, “Cafetín de Buenos Aires”, a young boy finds himself outside a café, looking in and wishing he could enter that forbidden world, that longed-for space he craves to belong to.

Similarly, our learners often find themselves outside looking in, wishing they could belong to the world they learn about in their textbooks. Standing on the periphery, as if looking through a glass pane, they learn about and long for the centre, a “first world” that is often out of reach and expresses itself in English.

Can our choice of materials and approaches allow our students to come into contact with the world on the other side of the glass with an attitude of interest and openness - but without an underlying feeling of inferiority? Can English language learning empower learners to look at themselves and their own culture from the outside as well, taking a critical stance and developing ways of expressing their own identities in the target language? In short, how can learners profit from the enriching experience of coming into contact with otherness by reflecting on their own values and identity and on the construction of their self-image?

This presentation will explore some answers to these questions derived from putting into contact materials from diverse cultures and media, from comics to literary classics, from folk tales to V-logs, from rap to tango –an encounter which challenges presuppositions on what materials and contents to use in ELT classes.

About Claudia Ferradas

Claudia Ferradas travels the world as a teacher educator. She has run training sessions and participated in conferences in South America, the Caribbean, the USA, Europe and South East Asia.

In the UK, Claudia is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Languages, Leeds Metropolitan University, and an Associate Trainer with NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education). In Argentina, her native country, she is a lecturer at the Instituto de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas, Buenos Aires and at the MA programme in Literatures in English at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza. She also teaches an MA seminar at the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain.

Claudia often works as a consultant, materials designer and facilitator for the British Council and has co-chaired the Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature on five occasions. At present, she is co-ordinating the publication of intercultural teaching materials in four languages for the Ministry of Education of the city of Buenos Aires.

Among other publications, Claudia is the author of Working with Values (Pearson/Longman, 2006) and The Value of Caring (Pearson/Longman, 2008), and is one of the contributors to Developing Materials for Language Teaching (Continuum, 2003).

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