PLENARY SPEAKERS. Mary Scholl. Cultivating curiosity, creativity and joy in the language classroom.

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1 Mary Scholl Cultivating curiosity, creativity and joy in the language classroom. Mary Scholl lives in rural Costa Rica and is the founder of Centro Espiral Mana, a teacher-training center, a community English and volunteer program. She has a Masters Degree from the School for International Training and over 20 years of language teaching experience and more than 15 years of experience with developing teachers. She has taught in public and private settings on three continents and worked with teachers in the U.S., Japan, Libya and most countries in Latin America. Mary strives to create joyful, compassionate, engaged and empowering learning opportunities and is a frequent presenter at conferences in Latin America What is it about those special moments when learning that really make us feel alive, engaged and successful? How would you define what makes them so wonderful? The presenter has been studying, experimenting with and engaging genuine curiosity, creativity and joy in herself and in her classrooms for over 20 years and is eager to share her stories and experiences about how we as teachers can create and cultivate these opportunities for our learners to do the same. She envisions a world in which learners are engaged, creative, compassionate, curious, creative and joyful

2 Carol Lethaby Is the messenger delivering the message? Carol Lethaby (MA TESOL, with distinction, University of London Institute of Education) has been involved in distance teacher education since 1998, having developed materials and tutored on several distance-learning courses for the British Council and various universities in Mexico. She has also designed and run numerous on-site teacher training and education courses in California, Mexico and the UK, including internationally recognized teaching certificates and diplomas. Carol now lives in San Francisco, California, writing materials and consulting, as well as being a part-time lecturer on the New School New York online MA in TESOL and an instructor at UC Berkeley Extension and City College of San Francisco. She is co-author with Jeremy Harmer, Ana Acevedo and Ken Wilson of the Just Right series published by National Geographic Learning - Cengage Learning. The potential for the use of technology for language learning is seemingly endless, but are we losing sight of teaching and learning in this rush to use the latest devices and software? In this session, the presenter will ask participants to consider the e-centric teacher and the t-centric teacher. The e-centric teacher puts everything electronic first and the t-centric teacher puts teaching and learning ahead of technology. We ll be questioning how well we are using technology to really help learners and how far we might be, in fact, creating a distraction to learning. How we do things and where we get information may be different in the digital age, but it s time to put the spotlight back onto learning and teaching. Let s make sure that the messenger really is delivering the message!

3 Lindsay Clandfield Content and Culture in an Era of Global English. Lindsay Clandfield (B.A, Lic. Diploma TESOL) is a teacher, trainer and international award-winning author of books for teachers and learners of English. Lindsay is the lead author of Global, the new critically acclaimed course for adults from Macmillan, and Dealing with Difficulties (with Luke Prodromou) and Teaching Online (with Nicky Hockly), both published by Delta Publishing. Lindsay's work has appeared in major ELT magazines. He had a regular column in the Guardian Weekly. His awards include the Ben Warren International House Award and two Duke of Edinburgh Awards from the ESU. Lindsay has addressed teachers in more than 30 countries. He is currently working on a new book of English for academic skills. Given English s status as an international language, what does this mean for the topics and texts we use with students? Published material has been criticised for being Anglo centric, cosmopolitan, bland, celebrity-driven or a combination of all these. I believe that students of today and the future need texts and topics that are international and culturally sensitive but engaging on an intellectual and affective level as well. This talk looks at examples of such texts and topics and ideas of how they can be exploited in class. I will be drawing on examples from the awardwinning course Global.

4 Living in a Switched-on World: Teaching and Learning in Hyper-connected Times Nick Perkins has worked for 16 years as a teacher, teacher trainer and manager in the field of EFL. Based in Bogota, Colombia since 1999, he managed the ELT Department at the Universidad Externado de Colombia for four years before taking the post of Teacher Development Unit Coordinator at Pearson Colombia. He then worked as Academic Development Manager for Latin America at Pearson International for three years and was responsible for Pearson s teacher development initiatives across the region. Since the start of 2012 Nick has been working as an editor for Pearson ELT, a role that allows him to contribute his knowledge of the challenges facing English teachers and learners across Latin America to the design of textbooks for the region. Nick has spoken on ELT related topics at major conferences and in private and public schools, universities and other institutions all over Latin America, in Asia and the UK. His principal areas of investigation are student motivation and incorporating technology into ELT. In his free time Nick hosts a popular weekly radio show in Bogota called Onda Cuántica.. In 1998, Clark and Chalmers published a paper entitled The Extended Mind that proposed the concept of active externalism (AKA extended cognition).

5 Since then researchers have been studying this phenomenon as related to the devices we use and their effect on our brains. This is especially relevant in education today as the more information a person has access to, the harder they are to teach (in a traditional teacher-centered sense of the word), and the more tools a person has at their disposal, the harder they are to educate (if they are expected to participate in a traditionally structured classroom). Over the past few years increasing numbers of students have been appearing in the classroom with smart phones and other Internet-connected devices in their pockets and this has generated series of challenges teachers. However, asking students to turn off their cell phones at the start of class may well, nowadays, be the equivalent of asking them to turn of half their brains! During this talk we will explore the challenge of teaching hyper-connected students (and some of the ways we can resolve the perceived problems this implies), as well as looking at the way in which extended cognition requires us to re-think our attitudes towards classroom education.