Ross Thorburn
Is TEFL Recruitment Racist?

Sixty years since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Fifty-five years since Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”.  And, four decades after George Wallace said “I was wrong.” You might think, by now, we’d have racism under control. We don’t. In fact, the prevalence of racism in recruitment has not improved in the US since 1989 (Quilliana, Pagerc, Hexela & Midtbøenf, 2017).  Is TEFL recruitment racist? We know that our industry discriminates against “non-native English teachers”, but what about good old, garden-variety racism? 

Is TEFL Recruitment Racist?

young learners

Opportunities in online teaching with young learners

Opportunities in online teaching with young learners

As teachers around the world get used to teaching online, it’s easy to focus on the drawbacks; the things that we used to be able to do offline but can no longer do online. Far less attention gets paid to what we can do online that was never previously possible offline. In my experience as a trainer in an online language school, this context holds just as many opportunities as it does limitations. In this short article, I will discuss six opportunities inherent in online young learner classes that were never previously possible in face-to-face lessons and how to take advantage of these.