The March issue of the Social Responsibility Interest Section Newsletter is now online. The theme, Social Justice in the Current Political Climate, was chosen to extend the conversation from SRIS’s academic session at the 2018 TESOL Convention that just wrapped up in Chicago, beyond the convention by soliciting articles on the same theme.
At the convention, Anne Marie Foerster Luu, Lelja Bilal-Maley, Maitham Al Lami and Mark Algren presented about DACA, Social Justice Education, the travel ban and the impact of the American political climate on IEP enrollment. Carter Winkle and Anastasia Khawaja facilitated the session. While the presentations at the convention all focused on the US context, the newsletter contributors provided a more international perspective on the impact of the current political climate on English educators around the world.
This issue includes a guide to starting a reading group to explore racial issues with your colleagues, even if no one is an expert on the topic, a study of the identity and language benefits of MMORPGs for “los otros dreamers,” students who have been deported back to Mexico from the United States, two different articles about the challenges of collaborating with teachers in Cuba and learning from Cuban teachers, a look at the challenges of ELT in Turkey, a description of The Hands Up Project, which teaches English through drama and storytelling to Palestinian and Syrian refugee kids over video, and a book review of Out of My Great Sorrows, a biography of an artist and her family’s legacy of trauma following the Armenian genocide.
As usual, I was incredibly proud to work with so many great authors and share their writing with SRIS and the larger TESOL community. Our next issue will be “Continuing the Conversation, Building Solidarity,” which is designed to extend the conversations that happen at TESOL each year and include the rest of the SRIS community, including those who cannot make it to the convention, in the dialogue that takes place. If you’d like to share your ideas in the next issue, please check out the call for submissions and send me your work by May 1, 2018!
Riah Werner 