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I’m a professor of English as a second language
at Holyoke Community College.
I had a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant
at Irkutsk State Linguistic University
in Siberia, Russia.
While I was in Siberia,
I received an email
asking if I would be interested to work
with English Language Teachers in Central Asia.
So last year, in 2009,
I wound up going to
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia.
I gave workshops and presentations.
We focused a lot on materials development,
on the use of literature and primary sources
and developing learner-centered classrooms
instead of teacher-centered classrooms.
instead of teacher-centered classrooms.
When I presented
I used learner-centered classroom techniques.
The very first presentation that I gave
was what they called a chai chat.
But, it was about 150 people
from the city of Tashkent
who come on a weekly basis
to practice their English.
I had this enthusiastic crowd.
I had them singing songs and I had them jumping up and down with rhythm of English.
I had them singing songs and
I had them jumping up and down with rhythm of English.
But then there were also cultural enrichment aspects.
When I got to Tajikistan, almost immediately they flew me in a helicopter into the high Pamirs.
It was so powerful for me to go up into those mountains
and look across the Panj River at Afghanistan
and stand at the bridge when the Afghan merchants
came across on Saturday for the Afghan market.
Then, in Russia, the embassy sent me to an area of Russia that is very unusual, it’s called Kalmykia.
It’s in the southern part of Russia
the people there are Mongolian,
of Mongolian heritage and
they arrived there 400 years ago
and so it was like arriving in a Tibetan Buddhist place in European Russia.
It was a wonderful combination of cultural enrichment and professional networking
and I think that the more experience I have with different cultures
the more I understand the immigrant experience
that my students have.
And I love teaching
and I love the active classroom
and I love to engage.
I also feel that it’s an exchange.
The students are not just learning from me,
but I’m also learning from them.
And having different points of view is a wonderful thing in the classroom.
It creates enthusiasm
it creates deeper thinking.
Communicating this allows people to think
of diversity as a positive
and maybe in the long run,
that helps create a more peaceful world.