Bill Templer

The BETA E-Newsletter, ezine of the Bulgarian English Teachers Association (BETA), Issue April-May 2023, #44 was initially mistakenly numbered Issue #43 and sent out to the BETA membership in late May 2023. It contained various errata. This CORRECTED VERSION should replace that version. You can share with colleagues and friends.
It has two articles co-authored by Bill and Silviya Templer, to which Silviya and I wish to call special attention: Reinventing BETA: A Hatful of Transformative Suggestions, Ново Начало (Bill Templer and Silviya Templer) … 7-31 and Moving toward self-determined, learner-controlled democratic alternative education in Bulgaria (Bill Templer and Silviya Templer) ...  32-47  ●●●●● There are also four other interesting articles and some news items, explore as you wish and share, by Tsvetelena Taralova  .. 48;  Reneta Stoimenova … 52;  Sonya Arnaudova … 57;  Silviya Apostolova.. 61.The new BETA President’s Address by Albena Stefanova (pp. 4-5) and a poem ‘In Pursuit of Excellence’ by E-Newsletter editor Georgi Dimitrov (p. 6) inroduce the issue.
Some hyperlinks in issue #44 may no longer function. Zlibrary is best accessed at https://zlibrary-asia.se/
●●●● The now projected Nov. 2023 issue should be #45. 
●●●● To supplement the paper by Bill & Sylvia on democratic student-centered, self-directed education, watch this new lecture: Peter Gray: 'The Education Revolution is Occurring Now and Here Are Ways to Speed It Up'  https://youtu.be/B7fATF0d85s  25 June 2023  AERO conference US, 104 min.  See Democratic Education in Nature https://youtu.be/k-LVQelZEdo [excellent!]  See also EUDEC in Sofia, 1-7 Aug. 2023: https://eudec2023.com/ 
See also THE TEACHER TRAINER (Summer 2023), excellent book reviews, some articles: https://tinyurl.com/5ymkc23h  NATECLA has launched a DISCUSSION BOARD: https://nateclascotland.proboards.com/  BETA needs one! Attend the BETA annual 'Jubilee' conference (also hybrid online) 9/10 Sept. 2023, see: https://elta.org.rs/2023/08/08/beta-2023/  See the program there, register.

One counter-vision for radical socioeconomic and existential change now gaining ground in discussion, debate and research on climate breakdown is degrowth. This brief essay offers ideas, resources for discussion, for what can be called a 'pedagogy of positive degrowth'. Its core educational hypothesis: Degrowth belongs as a component and urgent focus in EFL/ESOL, geography, biology, civics, history, the arts, and many other school subjects, in teacher trade unions, social jus ce NGOs and municipalities, social media, embedded in public discourse, public pedagogy and poli cal debate. And Read Caitlin Johnstone regularly!

I suggest here the need to foster Mindgrowth by engaging more hands-on inside our own teaching ecologies with experiments in democratic schooling, self-determined learning, important for changing schools into centers of student self-discovery, driven by student voice and student passions & interests. This needs to be foregrounded far more inside IATEFL. Sparking learning that is self-willed, "where the learner gets to decide what to learn, when, where, how, and why to learn" (Ricci & Riley 2023, 7). In the spirit and hands-on implementation of vistas of grassroots educational revolution sketched in Ken Robinson's Creative Schools (2016), see my article on Robinson in Futurity #2.

The paper sketches an approach that seeks to put students ‘inside’ the life worlds of others, exploring avenues to schooling ‘critical social imagination’ in the EFL classroom. Its core is writing or speaking what are called ‘interior monologues’. In such a monologue – structured as a poem, reflection, a letter, a journal or blog entry, a kind of autobiographical narrative or other form -- a student tries to imagine the thought of a character in literature, a movie, or a person in history or life at a specific point in time, assuming their persona. Often, the focus is just on an ordinary person. Interior monologuing asks the student: How would you feel in that person’s place? Try to visualize and articulate that. A detailed lesson plan on child workers in Thailand and Columbia is developed, and an Appendix with narratives from two child labourers is included.

The present article seeks to gather together a broad palette of links, suggestions, mental nudges, ideascape extracts, numerous video’d talks and interviews (a plethora of hyperlinks)n of the thinking and educator work of Ken Robinson and Dave Graeber, who both passed away in Sept. 2020. The article was written initially for social justice educators teaching English across the planet.  But these are resources for building your own pathways into greater familiarity with their thought and activism. And to be stimulated toward more Exploratory Action Research in your teaching, direct and remote, and Exploratory Practice. EAR and EP are very much in the spirit of both men’s thinking about education. Despite differences, linkages also reverberate between what the espoused and sought to change. You’ll be surprised by parallels. You can explore, find what you like, and puzzle why. Each book mentioned is a work onto itself. Graeber’s books are all online as open-access pdf, Ken’s books are in part, but all are available low-cost. You can decide what you what to listen to, ponder, read, implement – alone or in small communities of practice, perhaps creating a project.

This programmatic paper argues for a 'paradigm shift' in rethinking our approaches to teaching ELF (English as a lingua franca) as a more effective international means of communication, especially in and for the Global South. It suggests looking at and experimenting with two modes of EFL-Basic English 850, developed by Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards, and VOA Special English, a venture maintained by the U.S. government-for a kind of 'plateau proficiency' in skills both of reception and production, particularly for average learners. The paper also explores alternative ideas on what authentic mass literacy in plainer, less complex English as L1 could be. In this, it looks to the field of research and extensive practical application known as Plain Language (http://www.plainlanguagenetwork.org/ [accessed 20 July 2008]), or more specifically Plain English. The two terms will be used synonymously here. My broader orientation in language pedagogy is to a world of greater ed...

The article seeks to contribute to working-class and social justice pedagogy by developing concrete angles on teaching/exploring some of the (a) short fiction, (b) journalistic-photographic work and (c) sociography of poverty by the Danish-born US immigrant, muckraker (http://goo.gl/6WeGtM) and social reformer Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914, http://goo.gl/xmNDTD), a writer and activist still too little known outside the U.S. The article suggests approaches for teaching material by Riis as a focus in a critical EFL classroom, centered on real historical and contemporary social issues such as poverty in capitalist relations of production, immigration and its myriad aporias. Through the prism of Riis, it suggests looking at concrete social deprivation in the ‘Gilded Age’ from the context of a critical pedagogy in the ‘New Gilded Age’ (McAlevey, 2016) today, also with classroom materials for today, including David Rovics’ political folksong. On one level, the article is largely aimed at pract...

Educators across the world are asking “What does teaching and learning for an equitable and democratic society look like? What are the obstacles that must be overcome to achieve democratic education?” The present paper is in that spirit, and that of Jim Cummins (2001:2): “… when students’ language, culture and experiences are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning.” I look at aspects of a key question in Bulgarian public education: rethinking and restructuring multicultural education through new experiments with bilingual education for pupils whose home language is not Bulgarian. This means attention in the main to the literacy needs (and language rights) of ethnic speakers of Turkish and Romani, seeing them as “emergent bilinguals” (Menken 2011: 121). I argue that the time is ripe for a paradigm shift in language policy in the  Bulgarian schools, also rethinking multicultural education for identity-building and mutual tolerance

It is important to 'indigenize' the English syllabus in Bulgarian schools where possible, using more materials specifically related to Bulgaria, and also including fiction for children and young adults. Dobry (New York:Viking, 1934, 176 pp.) is the first novel in American young people's fiction set in Bulgaria-in a village on the Yantra near Veliko Turnovo (https://tinyurl.com/42bevxxf). It was co-written by Monica Shannon (ca. 1890-1965), a well-known children's writer in California, and the Lyaskovets-born émigré artist Atanas Kachamakov (1898-1982), perhaps the most renowned Bulgarian sculptor in the U.S. from 1924 until his death in Лясковец after his return to Bulgaria in 1979. A special exhibition of his work, 'Bread', was organized in Nov. 2021 in Vienna (https://tinyurl.com/4at2uzz).. Richly illustrated by Kachamakov, Dobry was awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal for the "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" in 1935 (https://tinyurl.com/3rp4ne7s), a unique distinction. The novel deals with the life, dreams and aspirations of Dobry, growing up in a farming village ca. 1910 on the Yantra. Dobry is a typical village boy with an extraordinary love for nature, and early on discovers his budding talent in drawing and sculpting. Against his mother Roda's wishes, he dreams of becoming an artist, and is encouraged in this by his very wise mentor, his grandfather.

Today more than ever there is urgent need to create and deepen channels for effective communication between Arabs and Jews ("Effective communication among communities and their individual members is essential for peaceful coexistence"; "The TESOL Forward Plan," 1998, p. 4). Universities in the Arab world are one natural matrix for such dialogue and interaction, and TESOL is now in a phase of truly phenomenal expansion on the Arabian Gulf. In the spirit of the aims of TESOLers for Social Responsibility (see Cates, 2000), classrooms (and staff rooms) in Arabia would seem to offer a prime potential site for encounter between Arab students and colleagues and Jewish TESOLers-as we link language learning and the values of teaching for tolerance, social awareness, and solidarity. Yet as anyone who has worked in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, or elsewhere on the Gulf knows, blinkered ministry and university officials have long practiced what is in effect a pervasive anti-Jewish bar in TESOL recruitment and staffing: Jews need not apply.

This collection began with Marx’s observation that the logic of capitalism, in its rapacious hunger to accumulate, leads inexorably to the immiseration of the direct producers of the system’s wealth. By and large, the beneficiaries of this logic are the unproductive elite that, vampire-like, suck the life out of the producing class. Marx’s observation is no fanciful conjuring of a dewy-eyed dreamer. Rather, as we see in the pages of Capital, it is the outcome of hard-edged critique cut from the steel-gaze of dialectical science. And what is Marx’s point? What are we to take from his critique of political economy? Well, simply, it is that history is no accident. Nor is history the preordained prize of the ‘deserving’: be it the ‘meek’, capitalists or even workers. We learn from Marx that history is to be won. History is struggle and, more concretely, class struggle. It is to such struggle and its intersections with education that his book has been directed. In Marx’s days, he and his...

In a number of East Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, and across much of the Arab world, there is a discriminatory impediment to improving the quality of English teaching that should be addressed: ageism in work permit laws. Ageism, best defined as “systematic stereotyping and discrimination against people because they are old” (Templer, 2002, 2003) is common in many countries. Ageism in employment involves setting arbitrary mandatory age limits for employees, such as teachers or civil servants, or practicing discrimination, often hidden, in hiring or retaining employees even in their 40s and 50s. It may be especially insidious directed against older women. A survey by the author of EFL job openings posted in Thailand in March 2004 indicates that some ads specify that candidates over a set age (often 45, sometimes 30, in one case 58) need not apply. Clearly, some of this is overt ageism.

This article argues that discourse in first and additional languages, especially more 'official, state-sanctioned' discourses inculcated and learned at school, are overly complex for most ordinary, workingclass, non-privileged learners. The article, centers on four 'focus points' for thinking about how to counter such complexity, discussing: (1) the Plain Language movement, (2) the need for a 'satisficing' English as a lingua franca for most average EFL learners (ELLs), (3) key resources for such models, and (4) the often neglected question of social class in the classroom. It argues the urgency to rethink and 'reboot' the 'E' in TEFL, viewing the classroom as a battleground in a class war over discourse, both in native and L2 language instruction as part of a 'democratizing of discourse,' creating a new 'people's plain talk' for schooling and communication in the public sphere. Plain Language needs to be explored more in literacy pedagogy everywhere, and certainly inside the teaching of EFL. The article is also written in the spirit of interrogating and countering some of the innumerable negativities in the headlong expansion of the TEFL-Industrial-Complex (TIC) and its multiple inequities. A final section explores the need, through a prism of situated literacies as social practice, to connect with learners' Vernacular Peer Discourses {comics/e-life/video games/pop music}, in effect 'borderland discourses' outside the 'officially sanctioned' elite & often elitist middle-class 'schooled literacies' that we teach and represent. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.-A. Einstein

A far-ranging review of a new book for young readers on how to get involved in and build a real movement, here & now, to transform awareness and take local action hands- and hearts-on as active agents in confronting climate change: a transformation eco-agenda: Naomi Klein, HOW TO CHANGE EVERYTHING. The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other. With Rebecca Stefoff. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers. Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 2021. Written by Canadian-born, US social activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein, it is meant for young readers still in school, esp. tweens and teens (and their teachers). It is loaded with information and stimuli to take practical action to stem climate change, and also to change various aspects of our grossly unequal society and economy.

Freedom as a pedagogical focus is about the deepest echelons of our everyday reality.
In its dismaying dialectic, COVID’s oppressive lockdown has also turned some lights on inside our heads about what freedom is and isn’t. This article seeks to offer some ideas on stimulating colleagues and their students, even quite young, thinking about how free or unfree we are or should be, also in a virtual metaverse. What rights need expansion, constitutional guarantees? These are questions kids can be asking as well. A critical core thread running through the reflections here is: It’s about people and their daily lives and stories, simple people resisting, together, galvanizing something new. The article underscores the core need to recognize, render visible and confront power inequalities, injustices, rights inequities, also climate catastrophe and its fallout on human existence and all existence, human rights and freedoms, and Nature’s rights.

This article explores organizing and mobilizing social justice unionism in education and in the communities where we work. Seeking to build vessels of collaboration for change, resistance and fightback grounded in solidarity. Empowering the We, as in the final stanza of Marge Percy’s great poem epigraphed above. Take a minute to reflect on the whole poem, now -- via the hyperlink. And watch it performed. Now listen to the old union and later civil rights movement song, ‘We shall overcome’, it frames♫the article.
This essay seeks to provide some vistas/resources –  in print and on video US/UK – useful for exploring the how-to and whys & wherefores of social justice unionism in confrontation with the present dysfunctional System, where ‘racial division and Machiavellian Othering are rooted in the nature of the national and world capitalist system’ (Street, 2021). Such teacher unionism is also termed ‘social movement teacher unionism’ (cf. Weiner 2012, Section 3).

This is a lesson plan published on the GISIG IATEFL site in 2016. centered on sexual harassment in its many modes at school or at work. It contains numerous links.

==> Is 'bullying' a problem at your school? Tell students they are going to see a short video (1:13 minutes) about a special form of bullying. Ask students to think about 'bullying' in their own experience. Ask the class to define what 'bullying' can mean, get some input from different students. Students can divide into groups of 3-4 and briefly discuss their own personal experiences with bullying, and then give a very short summary.  A serious form of bullying is 'sexual harassment'.

The article's core thesis core thesis is there is clear need to explore the crucial links between what educators do and who they are—that is, between their work and their identities—and to do so through narrative inquiry, tapping teachers’ voices: “what matters is that teachers’ voices are heard comparatively and contextually” (Hargreaves, 1996: 17), including the voices of marginalized and disaffected teachers. It offers a working introduction to the research subfield of LOT, Lives of Teachers MENU: A research agenda centering on the teacher’s voice / A working catalogue of questions / LOT inquiry: where to begin? / Teachers as workers / Exploring gendered terrain / Countering teacher burnout and rustout / Longitudinal studies / Conclusion See: http://goo.gl/jb3utK

This programmatic paper argues for a 'paradigm shift' in rethinking our approaches to teaching ELF (English as a lingua franca) as a more effective international means of communication, especially in and for the Global South. It suggests looking at and experimenting with two modes of EFL—Basic English 850, developed by Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards, and VOA Special English, a venture maintained by the U.S. government—for a kind of 'plateau proficiency' in skills both of reception and production, particularly for average learners. The paper also explores alternative ideas on what authentic mass literacy in plainer, less complex English as L1 could be. In this, it looks to the field of research and extensive practical application known as Plain Language (http://www.plainlanguagenetwork.org/ (accessed 20 July 2008)), or more specifically Plain English. The two terms will be used synonymously here. My broader orientation in language pedagogy is to a world of greater ed...

Among the most popular and moving short stories by O. Henry (William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910) is “The Last Leaf” (1907). It is a tale about friendship and self-sacrifice among struggling artists in Greenwich Village in New York City during a deadly pneumonia epidemic set in the ‘Gilded Age’ around 1900, with a characteristic O. Henry ‘surprise’ ending. This is one of the first short stories by any US writer to be set in Greenwich Village, the famous neighborhood of artists and writers in Lower Manhattan. The article presents a range of ideas for working with the story in the EFL classroom, and also links to the simpler & shorter VOA English version of the story (as well as the lexically challenging original). Teachers can alert students to the various versions of the story in cinematic adaptations, several accessible online. The best-known is in the Hollywood film “O. Henry’s Full House” (1952), based on five of his stories. ‘The Last Leaf’ is dramatized from min. 34:45 to 54:20. There are numerous differences from the original tale, but basically it remains the same.  The simpler version can be read with students at beginning intermediate level (B1), and students can also compare passages in the VOA version with the original. Students can also make connections with their current experience of the corona pandemic.

This brief 3-page programmatic paper is about rethinking and decolonizing intercultural education in our work and teaching (a) with migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in particular who are among us – and how they view, relate to their countries of origin and the communities, life worlds and identities they’ve left behind. And (b) our engagement with students in a host of countries, many of whom who are potential migrants, to guide them more critically in their thinking about possible exodus. It explores key dialectical oppositions.
      In TEFL and elsewhere, ever more educators are teaching migrants and preparing lessons about migrants and ‘Human Flow’ (tinyurl.com/weiflow), and also helping to prepare students of all ages in a slew of countries for future envisioned migration, homeland adieu. The GISIG/LiTSIG IATEFL PCE in Manchester April 2020 (postponed to the Harrogate GISIG PCE June 2021 https://gisig.iatefl.org/pce-2021/) is centered on a spectrum of teaching ‘migrant narratives’, fiction and non-fiction, a timely focus in current global issues inside teaching English as a foreign language. Breaking down binaries should be our guiding watchword. Equity cum togetherness, solidarity not stigma. Countering our ‘me-first society’ and its ‘possessive individualism.’ The galvanizing vision and its radical praxis in im/migration teaching, research and policy should and can strive proactively to turn walls of exclusion for potentially traumatized, marginalized and vulnerable migrants and the disadvantaged in any society into bridges of social and socialist solidarity, horizontality, autonomy and the need for open borders..
      Yet the focus here is to highlight a controversial aspect of present-day migrant upsurge often neglected in analysis: its iterated deleterious blowback back home in the countries of emigration outflow, in terms of demographics, skills, expertise and talent drain, national implosion, also encompassing the downsides of exodus of educational migrants, both students and academic colleagues (Bothwell 2020 tinyurl.com/recruit999). The article seeks to stimulate a broader rethink of critical public pedagogy (CPP) on migration and its myriad aporias (tinyurl.com/apo987), its irresolvable internal contradictions, to stay or to leave, and the dialectics between those positions.

This programmatic paper is about rethinking and decolonizing intercultural education in our work and teaching (a) with migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in particular who are among us – and how they view, relate to their countries of origin and the communities, life worlds and identities they’ve left behind. And (b) our engagement with students in a host of countries, many of whom who are potential migrants, to guide them more critically in their thinking about possible exodus. It explores key dialectical oppositions. In TEFL and elsewhere, ever more educators are teaching migrants and preparing lessons about migrants and ‘Human Flow’ (tinyurl.com/weiflow), and also helping to prepare students of all ages in a slew of countries for future envisioned migration, homeland adieu. The GISIG/LiTSIG IATEFL PCE in Manchester April 2020 (postponed to the Harrogate GISIG PCE June 2021 https://gisig.iatefl.org/pce-2021/) is centered on a spectrum of teaching ‘migrant narratives’, fiction and non-fiction, a timely focus in current global issues inside teaching English as a foreign language. Breaking down binaries should be our guiding watchword. Equity cum togetherness, solidarity not stigma. Countering our ‘me-first society’ and its ‘possessive individualism.’ The galvanizing vision and its radical praxis in im/migration teaching, research and policy should and can strive proactively to turn walls of exclusion for potentially traumatized, marginalized and vulnerable migrants and the disadvantaged in any society into bridges of social and socialist solidarity, horizontality, autonomy and the need for open borders..
      Yet the focus here is to highlight a controversial aspect of present-day migrant upsurge often neglected in analysis: its iterated deleterious blowback back home in the countries of emigration outflow, in terms of demographics, skills, expertise and talent drain, national implosion, also encompassing the downsides of exodus of educational migrants, both students and academic colleagues (Bothwell 2020 tinyurl.com/recruit999). The article seeks to stimulate a broader rethink of critical public pedagogy (CPP) on migration and its myriad aporias (tinyurl.com/apo987), its irresolvable internal contradictions, to stay or to leave, and the dialectics between those positions.

This programmatic paper is about rethinking intercultural education in our work and teaching (a) with migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in particular who are among us – and how they view, relate to their countries of origin and the communities, life worlds and identities they’ve left behind. And (b) our engagement with students in a host of countries, many of whom who are potential migrants, to guide them more critically in their thinking about possible exodus. It explores key dialectical oppositions. In TEFL and elsewhere, ever more educators are teaching migrants and preparing lessons about migrants and ‘Human Flow’ (tinyurl.com/weiflow), and also helping to prepare students of all ages in a slew of countries for future envisioned migration, homeland adieu. The GISIG/LiTSIG IATEFL PCE in Manchester April 2020 (postponed to the Harrogate GISIG PCE June 2021 https://gisig.iatefl.org/pce-2021/) is centered on a spectrum of teaching ‘migrant narratives’, fiction and non-fiction, a timely focus in current global issues inside teaching English as a foreign language. Breaking down binaries should be our guiding watchword. Equity cum togetherness, solidarity not stigma. Countering our ‘me-first society’.
      Yet the focus here is to highlight a controversial aspect of present-day migrant upsurge often neglected in analysis: its iterated deleterious blowback back home in the countries of emigration outflow, in terms of demographics, skills, expertise and talent drain, national implosion, also encompassing the downsides of exodus of educational migrants, both students and academic colleagues (Bothwell 2020 tinyurl.com/recruit999). The article seeks to stimulate a broader rethink of critical public pedagogy (CPP) on migration and its myriad aporias (tinyurl.com/apo987), its irresolvable internal contradictions, to stay or to leave, and the dialectics between those positions. Pernicious blowbacks abound within exponentialized global neoliberal precarity, cutbacks in social services; ‘post-socialist’ anomie and socio-economic freefall are especially severe in most Balkan countries: Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia in stark particular. This is interlaced with falling demographics, due to population exodus and a declining fertility rate in most post-socialist counties in Eastern Europe, such as Hungary, Poland. Bulgaria, my second home for nearly three decades as a long-standing educator, in a personal sense an ‘academic migrant’ for the ‘long haul’ (tinyurl.com/oversea99), is focused on as iconic exemplar of such blowback.
      But that drain of brain, muscle, multiplex skills, expertise – human capital in all vocations and age brackets – is also pronounced across much of the Global South, and is mounting in the present ‘refugee crisis’ and enduring mayhem of planetary Capital’s multiple dys-functionalities and imbalances. Guy Standing, The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class (2011, 90 https://tinyurl.com/precar99) notes: “Migrants make up a large share of the world’s precariat”, and are perceived in parallax as victims, villains, heroes. Goodfellow (2019) looks at migrants in the UK and the xenophobia they face. Standing has a full chapter on migrants (pp. 90-114). COVID-19 is a further Black Swan disruptive trigger within webs of traumatizing neoliberal precarity, touched on in the paper.
      The article goes on to explore rethinking a more critical migration public pedagogy and its challenges, likewise addressing the need to ‘decolonize’ multilingualism and craft a manifold decolonial migration pedagogy – coupled with a robustly counter-hegemonic TEFL. Today TEFL has become a massive, ever-expanding, corporate-infused, resolutely neoliberal instructional industry that remains a key and complicit migration arch-Enabler. The article also taps ideas in two areas too little known inside critical pedagogy: xenosophia  to counter xenophobia – and perspectives from phenomenological xenology (Waldenfels) as germane for such a migration CPP. It likewise broaches aspects of the Society of the digital Spectacle (a la Debord) in nexus with Human Flow in Spectacle 2.0, and urges a frame for migration public pedagogy that is resolutely post-capitalist in core orientation.
      In my view, a ‘decolonial educator’, self-decolonizing in their praxis, needs also to encourage migrants to think about returning to their homelands, to rebuild there where they are often urgently ‘needed’. The guiding vision and its radical praxis in migration teaching, research and policy should strive to turn walls into bridges of social and socialist solidarity, horizontality, autonomy and open borders. Yet open borders where ever more individuals have no need to flee from their homes and homelands. The motto: ‘Go abroad, OK – but strive to return and stay!’, envisioning a balanced dynamic of ‘circular↔migration’ (OIIP 2019, 19ff. tinyurl.com/balknew2030), building the mutual grassroots struggle for radical social transformation in people’s home countries of exodus and host lands of influx.
      It comprises eleven sections: I. Introduction  II. Critical Public Pedagogy (CPP) as epistemic frame  III. Exodus exponentialized: Human Flow’s destructive impact back home  IV. A case in critical point: Bulgaria as iconic exemplar V. Rethinking migration pedagogy  VI. Social justice and equity in migration pedagogy inside TEFL  VII. Decolonizing migration pedagogies and literacies, multilingualism  VIII. Teaching EFL through a more parallactic lens  IX. Critical diopters on Otherness  X. Society of the Spectacle 2.0: teaching for “dangerous citizenship”
XI. Conclusion

This article, written 18 years ago in 2003, focuses on ‘reinventing politics in Israel and Palestine,’ which means laying the groundwork now for a kind of Jewish-Palestinian Zapatismo, a grassroots movement to ‘reclaim the commons’ (Klein 2001; Esteva and Prakash 1998). This would mean moving towards direct democracy, participatory economy and genuine autonomy for the people; towards Martin Buber’s vision in his Paths in Utopia (originally published in Hebrew in 1945) of “an organic commonwealth . . . that is a community of communities” (1958: 136). We might call it the ‘no-state solution.’

Forms of neoliberal governmentality do not work here, are unsustainable. At all spatial scales, Israelis and Palestinians have learnt they have no security from the bankruptcy of its iterations: a tale of Sisyphus, Tolstoy’s ‘government is violence’ writ monstrous, its icon the Separation Wall. Indeed, the impasse in Israel/Palestine is, in its distinctive form, a microcosm of the pervasive vacuity of our received political imaginaries. And the ruling elites that administer them. In a sense, this conflict is emblematic of the “perverse perseverance of sovereignty,” its “vicious, security-based ontology” (Burke 2002). We need to turn that authoritarian ontology on its head. Precisely where community has imploded and the commons is controlled on both sides of the divide by hierarchies of violence.

The conflict and Israel’s self-identity and national myth are at a ‘liminal’ moment. A time for fresh vision. Israel/Palestine offers a unique microlaboratory for experimenting with another kind of polity, advancing, to echo Kropotkin, from mutual struggle to mutual aid (Salzman 2002, 2003; Cleaver 1993). Its very aporia demands a new array of algorithms: “This does not mean unity for socialism or any other singular post-capitalist ‘economic’ order, but rather the building of … a new mosaic of interconnected alternative approaches to meeting our needs and elaborating our desires” (Cleaver 1997). And in that sense drafting alternative models of polity to address the general crisis of the capitalist world-system that Wallerstein (1998) diagnoses.

I speculate here on a staged transformation: moving from two states (Stage One) to a unitary, bi-national state (Stage Two), and on to what we might call the ‘Jerusalem Cooperative Commonwealth.’ Paradoxically, the present Geneva Accords initiative, its endgame a Bantustan-like Palestinian state, is a potential step forward in this dialectic. The public mood on both sides of the divide and international geopolitical configurations demand some such exit. Ordinary Palestinians under Occupation require oxygen, a shell for security. A stopgap emergency measure on which to build a dialectic for its sublation.

Paths in Utopia?
In charting new decentralized institutions, Wallerstein speaks about ‘utopistics’: “not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better, and historically possible (but far from certain) future” (1998: 2). A utopistic heuristic, in some ways along the lines of Martin Buber’s envisioning in the mid-1940s – a “Commune of Communes” or “League of Leagues” (Buber 1958: 147-148) – drained of its now largely toxic Zionist marrow, is in order in the disorder of Israel/Palestine. To generate another kind of political and economic imaginary. Harvey has noted that there is a time and place “where alternative visions, no matter how fantastic, provide the grist for shaping powerful forces for change. I believe we are precisely at such a moment. Utopian dreams … are omnipresent in the signifiers of our desires” (2000: 195).

This essay, written from a left Jewish-Israeli viewpoint that is the author’s own, provides a range of ideas and links for introducing students and teachers to the challenge of including the Israel/Palestine conflict, its roots and realities, in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom: within Israeli schools, in Palestine and among the Palestinian diaspora, as well as elsewhere in the world of international teaching of EFL. The focus here is largely on Gaza, since in the mind of many students it stands as a recent violent icon (2014, 2021) of the endless and brutal struggle, and a wrenching core icon of Israeli state terrorism and war crimes against a largely innocent population, which peaked in the 51-day war against Gaza in the summer of 2014, killing 2,145 Palestinians (over 500 of them children), and is being reiterated as I write on 15 May 2021, Nakba Day. (https://truthout.org/articles/my-grandparents-lived-through-the-nakba-now-its-happening-again ). The times are a-changin' even in the US Congress: https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/how-many-palestinians-have-to-die-for-their-lives-to-matter-progressive-dems-condemn-israeli-violence-on-house-floor/
And  watch Aljazeera, as in this INSIDE STORY  feature, 'Is a third intifada on the way?', 15 May 2021: https://youtu.be/Bhi7qGHfbZc  And: 'Can young activists change the dialogue on Israel-Palestine?", 14 May 2021: https://youtu.be/zYflAwlAZz0  17 May 2021: 'Are international laws respected in Israel-Palestine conflict?' https://youtu.be/QfVP7i3qqR4
An excellent online source for news and analysis is the Palestine Chronicle run by Dr. Ramzy Baroud, who was born and grew up in Gaza.  https://www.palestinechronicle.com/
This from Canada, 13 May 2021:  >In Solidarity With the Palestinian Struggle< https://socialistproject.ca/2021/05/solidarity-with-palestinian-struggle/#more 
May 15/16, 2021: >Nakba 73: Actions in 75+ U.S. cities remember the Palestinian ‘Catastrophe’ of 1948<
https://www.liberationnews.org/nakba-73-actions-in-75-us-cities-remember-the-palestinian-catastrophe-of-1948/  Unprecedented engagement and marches in support of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle in city streets across the US to Mark Nakba 73.:

Of current 2021 interest is an incisive interview on Democracy Now! (May 14, 2021 in the states with Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, a Professor of English (doctorate in literature from U Virginia) -- formerly at Birzeit University in the West Bank (she founded the English Dept. there) -- and a key member of the PLO until very recently. And Prof. Rashid Khalidi:  https://youtu.be/-K1vYhdoJyY  Hanan was the main woman in the top echelon of the PLO and Palestinian Authority, and decided recently to leave the PA leadership. Our colleague in TEFL, she is very critical of Israeli policy. Rashid is the Edward Said Prof. of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia U. His latest book (2020) is THE HUNDRED YEAR’S WAR ON PALESTINE: A HISTORY OF SETTLER COLONIAL CONQUEST AND RESISTANCE, 1917-2017.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, foregrounded in this 2015 article in section 3.,  speaks here in a recent interview  'How Palestine is represented in Israeli school books' (1 Oct. 2020):  https://youtu.be/maG3qBVRD0s . Her younger brother Miko Peled is also a peace activist, now based in San Diego/CA, here his blog, well worth consulting and recommending to students, colleagues:  https://mikopeled.com/blog-articles/  One of his books is THE GENERAL’S SON: JOURNEY OF AN ISRAELI IN PALESTINE (2016), see: https://mikopeled.com/books/ .

Razzan Quran, activist and psychologist, great brief (3:59 min.) interview on Aljazeera, 17 May 2021 in Ramallah: https://youtu.be/l0H5cGLfKVE  Discuss with students & share! Razzan also feature in this panel '‘Is U.S. opinion shifting on the Israel-Palestine conflict?’ Aljazeera, Inside Story, 21 May 2021
https://youtu.be/OMEJBAPZcQk 

And introduce this excellent article, for discussion with mid-intermediate students and colleagues:  Lana Tatour, ‘This isn’t a civil war, it’s settler-colonial brutality’  https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/this-isnt-a-civil-war-it-is-settler-colonial-brutality/
What is settler-colonialism?

An earlier shorter version of this article (same title) can be found here on academia/edu under DRAFTS, and over time had some 100 views. This present version is meant to replace it. Neither expanded version has been formally published.

The article presents an ‘arsenal’ of angles and range of sources teacher can draw on in approaching this concrete hot spot to generate critical consciousness among learners, a kind of hands-on radical ‘critical CLIL’ within the context of Global Issues in the EFL classroom. A shorter version of this article, in part originally censored by the IATEFL Head Office,  was published in the IATEFL GISIG Newsletter, summer 2015, pp. 25-32, titled “Gaza in the Critical EFL Classroom: Opening Eyes, Hearts, and Minds.” Sections censored there have been included and expanded here. Lotta continua.

The article focuses on eco-pedagogy in the ELT classroom -- getting students and teachers concerned about, active in confronting climate change, many ideas for discussion and numerous hyperlinks. A paper for nurturing critical eco-awareness and eco-activism at a range of levels in ELT classrooms and beyond This is a revised version of an article originally published in the BETA E-Newsletter in Bulgaria, May-June 2019.

A distinctive element of Israeli academic life is the extent to which university staff and researchers actively or more often tacitly support the broader aims of the government and the Occupation.  Government contracts and a perfected meshwork of ties between academe, the defense & hi-tech industries, and the military, driven by an entrenched framework of national chauvinism, characterize the topography of Israel academe in a striking way. Yet far too many Israelis of all social strata function in a perverse bubble of denial, a radical disconnect from the political and human realities of oppression and injustice around them.  A vast morass of inaction abounds within the vortex of what some of us think is a national political psychosis.  Those calling for an international boycott of Israeli academe, like Virginia Tilley, warn of a situation where "moral paralysis becomes moral culpability."
That "moral culpability" manifest in Israeli academe is nowhere more visible than on the growing campus of the College of Judea and Samaria (CJS, Ha-Mikhlala Ha-Akademit Yehuda ve-Shomron) in the ever expanding settler fortress city of Ariel on the Occupied West Bank.  Recently unilaterally restyled as a "University Center," the function of this institution as a "power tool" of settler ideology and the consolidation of the Occupation is perhaps unique to higher education in an "advanced" industrial economy, where a campus assumes what is in effect a vanguard geopolitical role.  The present brief essay, written in 2007 but perhaps still relevant in key essentials, reflects on that role and explores some counter-hegemonic alternatives for the boycott movement. First published in MRzine 2007 https://mronline.org/2007/08/11/oppose-the-new-settler-university/

An expanded version of an article by the same title that appeared in the new e-zine FUTURITY, No. 1, July 2020, Global Issues SIG IATEFL

The article, aimed at teachers of English as a second or foreign language, provides ideas and many basic and critical resources for teaching about the current anti-racism BLM-inspired Upsurge sweeping from the US across the planet. The article contains many hyperlinks to all sorts of interesting materials, activities for students and for their teachers. Many interesting videos linked. Among resources for working concretely with students are:
-- J. Spiegler, “Teaching Young Children About Bias, Diversity, and Social Justice,” Edutopia 2016.
-- J. Croteau, “10 Ways Teachers Can Fight Racism and Teach Tolerance,” We are Teachers 2020.
-- H. Nichols, A GUIDE FOR EQUITY AND ANTI-RACISM EDUCATORS, Edutopia 2020.
-- C. Halley, “Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus,” JSTOR 2020.
-- A. Chang et al. “Effective Anti-Racist Education Requires More Diverse Teachers, More Training.” ‘All Things Considered,’ NPR, 8 July 2020.

A practical introduction with many poems, largely by and for African-American children, to be used in teaching African-American poetry in English classes in West Africa. Contained in a special joint Newsletter of the Global Issues SIG IATEFL and the English Language Teachers' Association -- Guinea-Bissau (ELTA-GB), Sept. 2019, pp. 14-18. Many other articles of interest in that same Newsletter issue, take a look.

An extended book review of an excellent study on >cultural memory< in the former German Democratic Republic: Jonathan Bach, What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany. New York: Columbia Univ. Press (2017) 259 Pp. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/whatremains/9780231182706 
The review appeared in Vol. 19 of the Bulgarian journal edited at Shumen University, Lyuboslovie. Here the journal issue, this article pp. 283-299. http://lyuboslovie.shu.bg/2019/19-2019.pdf  This a webpage in English on the journal: http://lyuboslovie.shu.bg/indexen.html 

The article also makes numerous comparisons with cultural memory of socialist times in Bulgaria today, where a nostalgia for many aspects of socialism, what is called Ostalgie in German,  remains quite strong among an older citizenry. The review is relevant for those interested in German contemporary history, cultural studies, post-socialist studies, with thick description of aspects of everyday life. Jonathan Bach develops here a powerful ethnographic lens for looking at these phenomena in the former East German federal states of today’s Germany. All URLs in the article are live, but some are split at the end of a line, and so have to be copied to be searched and opened.

In the spirit of critical thinking and the climate crisis as discussed by Aston (2017) in the previous IATEFL GISIG Newsletter (June, 2017), and Lóránt Kácsor’s (2014) stimulating suggestions on environmental education in Hungarian ELT in GISIG Newsletter #31 (March, 2014), the guiding idea of the present paper, originally published in 2006 in LTSIG CALL Review, here expanded, is simple: the actual concrete visions, campaigns and programmes of Green political movements need to be built into modules within the socially engaged EFL curriculum. They should be integrated at several levels, primarily utilizing webquesting and the Internet, honing ecocritical ‘rebooted’ citizenship consciousness, models of a Green Pedagogy. The focus here is on learning ecologies for a more critical EFL pedagogy where students have the intermediate-level proficiency in English to be able to work creatively with materials in the complex textual worlds on digital offer. Green sociopolitical thought and policy touch on all global issues, bar none, centering in part around the planetary crisis in ‘public goods,’ such as healthcare, education, environment, owed to all citizens. Indeed, part of the rationale here is to get students interested in Green political thinking and action in an English-speaking society as a ‘school of ideas’ for vibrant social change—with direct reflexivity back to their own country and local community: becoming pro-active citizens. The article appeared in the IATEFL GISIG Newsletter, #37. It can be read first, and then continued in a second follow-up paper also here online, 'From Greed to Green ...' (2018).

The present paper (3,270 words) centers on teaching an award-winning documentary film in six parts (a total of some 285 min. viewing time), aired  by Aljazeera (AJ) in 2015 and readily accessible online: >Hard Earned<.
        Hard Earned provides a deep authentic look into the working lives of five different low-income US families trying to ‘get by’ in difficult circumstances. It contains much memorable dialogue, strong visuals (that students can describe) and often gripping narrative, everyday authentic colloquial language. The series takes a singularly penetrating look at whether the American Dream is still alive and well in the 21st century post-recession America.
        This is a docu-filmic, real-life study unit for students at mid- and upper Intermediate level (B1/2), but also beyond, and even at lower A2 level, selecting smaller excerpts: like this of server Emilia in Chicago or that of mall sweeper Percy’s Black family in Milwaukee. It will also stimulate more curiosity about realities for ordinary Americans talking about their dreams, hardships, “living paycheck to paycheck.” AJ notes: “Hard Earned follows five families around the country to find out what it takes to get by on $8, $10, or even $17 an hour. The series turns an intimate lens on a group of 21st century American dreamers. They fight against all odds to thrive, when it takes everything they have to simply survive.”  The unit is integral to American Studies and socio-economic realities and inequalities in the US today. Thinking about the issues and questions this topical documentary film series raises, such as student debt, is also relevant for civics, and discussion about equality, inequality, social justice for the many ― issues important in ‘obstinate’ democratic education everywhere.  What is resilience, how people cope and ‘make ends meet.’
        Teachers can also be stimulated to do Exploratory Action Research (EAR): how do students respond, what do they actually learn, how much does it improve their listening proficiency, their lexis, spoken syntax, hearing working-class Americans talk about their experience-as-lived, their daily struggles? The article contains sections inter alia on >Honing student empathy as a lens of discovery<, >Extensive Listening (EL) + Reading (ER)< and > Engaging in collaborative EAR<.

A potpourri of questions probing the actual often difficult realities of EFL teachers’ professional daily lives. Such questions can serve to help spur emergent, face-to-face or small local “peer circles” − dialogic spaces clearly needed – in Bulgaria and well beyond.  The article presents a largely rough-hewn catalogue of questions as focal points for interviewing, self-reflection, idea interchange with colleagues in “communities of practice” in your own local setting, and in various digital spaces. It speaks to perceived TEFL realities in Bulgaria, and well beyond. It also has a number of hyperlinks worth exploring at your leisure. This an article originally published in the BETA E-Newsletter 2018 and here slightly revised. In the spirit and practice of LoT,  LIVES OF TEACHERS, and as a basis for exploratory "narrative knowledging" inside TEFL.

This is a revised and expanded version of an earlier article (published 2014 in Bulgaria) on a classic Christmas story in American English fiction, and one of my favorites for learners aged 10 or older (including adults),  O. Henry’s famous short story, “The Gift of the Magi” (1905). It adds elements of social justice pedagogy, references to the work of the Global Issues SIG in IATEFL, and a section on >Bethlehem today<. Published here:  https://www.hltmag.co.uk/dec18/teaching-a-classic-american-short-story

How should anti-authoritarian socialists respond to the politics of the Great Wall of Water of 12/26, 2004 and the Spectacle of its havoc in the corporate media? The tsunami’s horrific tragedy is interwoven with the very architecture of our world system built on inequality, privilege and greed, inequity and vast asymmetry − structures of neo-colonial control and dependency, wealthy centers and desperately impoverished peripheries. The tsunami becomes a text through which to read the contradictions of this system, highlighting the need for a world built on socialist principles of Mutual Aid and self-organization.
      This article, written on the Thai Andaman coast several weeks after the 26 Dec. 2004 tsunami – whose earthquake and subsequent tsunami 2 hours later the author experienced directly at his seaside university RMUT Srivijaya near Pakmeng Beach in Sikao District (amphoe), Trang Province in southern Thailand - looks at a few of those contradictions. In conclusion it suggests how communalist structures could make a difference when facing natural disasters or the ’silent tsunamis’ of disease, deprivation and oppression that sweep regularly across much of the Global South.

This article is a complementary sequel to my article in the Dec. 2017 GISIG Newsletter, issue 37 (‘Galvanizing critical citizenship through the Internet: Exploring green political parties as a focus in the EFL classroom.’)

Perhaps reread that article (Templer, 2017 https://tinyurl.com/y8llzuwy ) in conjunction with this latest piece, where I start by foregrounding recent discussion around Earth Day 2018  - inside GISIG and beyond.  I then revisit a potential focus on the Green Party US and UK and their multiple foci; this sequel article also provides several exploratory multimodal mini-modules, and in a final section presents five fundamental ‘theses’ regarding moving on in Green Pedagogy in TEFL more broadly.
The title here alludes to the book by eminent sociologist and US public intellectual, Prof. Charles Gerber, Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy (2010) His book is a key treatise on the environmental crisis and crisis in capitalism in which we are ever more immersed.

We live in remarkably perilous political and social times: images of war, violence and suffering bombard us. Ominously, a new East-West nuclear arms race (Cold War 2.0?) may now loom, exacerbated by rhetoric from London, Washington and the EU. 
This paper introduces a multimodal approach to 'poetry in motion' (Templer 2009): images, animation as an online frame. The paper's second half explores one famous short poem through this lens, about the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, an exemplary form of "Peace art: words and images interwoven" (Brzezinska 2017). The text by poet Nâzim Hikmet  is simple, haunting, a plea by a dead child aged 7 for an end to war and violence. The article stresses the value of poetry visualized as a prism for insight and empathy (Krznaric 2012; 2014), also in looking at social issues today (Maley & Peachey 2017; Xerri 2017). Such ‘kinetic art’ can open learners’ hearts and mindspace, fostering critical digital literacies (Albers 2018).

One can wonder whether colleagues in TEFL or DAF in Bulgaria, or teaching Bulgarian history, Bulgarian civics, politics, journalism, have published lesson plans or articles on the Ohio-born American journalist and war correspondent J.A. MacGahan (1844-1878), one of the most famous reporters in the 19 th century. MacGahan wrote powerfully with passion shining a dark light on the Turkish massacres in Ottoman-controlled Bulgaria 1876-78, published mainly in the London Daily Newsto which he telegraphed many articles. He also covered the preliminary Peace Treaty in San Stefano 3 March 1878, and passed away in Constantinople in June 1878 (typhus). Earlier on, he was a key US-born journalist reporting on the Paris Commune (1871). The famous Scottish war correspondent Archibald Forbes, writing in Sept. 1891 in The Nineteenth Century, 30(175), said of MacGahan: My most prominent colleague in the Russo-Turkish war was Mr. Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, by extraction an Irishman, by birth an American. Of all the men who have earned reputation in this profession of ours, I regard MacGahan as the most brilliant. […] He it was who stirred Europe to its inmost heart by the terrible, and not less truthful than terrible, pictures of what have passed into history as the 'Bulgarian Atrocities.' It is no exaggeration indeed to aver that, for better or worse, MacGahan was the virtual author of the Russo-Turkish war.
The article provides a broad range of resources for introducing and expanding on the unique journalistic role of Januarius MacGahan, American journalist extraordinaire, in galvanizing public and official support in Britain and beyond for the Bulgarian uprising against Turkish Ottoman rule and occupation 1876-78.

Voluntary Community Service, Caregiving and Service Learning: Nurturing Young Changemakers in Bulgaria and Beyond

In guiding students on their lifelong academic and self-discovery journey, encouraging them (and their teachers as well) to become changemakers hands-on, we need to help create new structures and opportunities for learners from an early age for new modes of volunteerism, unpaid voluntary community service (VCS) and caregiving, in their neighborhoods, towns and villages. Such caregiving is also a powerful means of new learning, outside the classroom.
                  Article overview
● For starters, explore these
● A potpourri of introductory VCS links 
● Service learning in the community
● Pupils assisting the elderly 
● Cinema extraordinaire: Blaga’s Lessons / Уроците на Блага
● Students aiding orphans, children with disabilities or suffering abuse
● Fellow students helping pupils with difficulties at school
● Local outdoor/indoor service tasks galore
● Civics education
● Nurturing young changemakers
● Getting kids out into the world
● Democratic, self-determined learning 
● Project-based learning PBL
● Hands Up Project: Linking the Gaza classroom with the world
● Learning through an artistic lens on Gaza
● Palestine House of Freedom (Dar Alhurriya) and Miko Peled’s campaign
● Direct Action: Putting your body on the line
● Further reading about mutual aid and The Care Manifesto
● Opening eyes, minds, hearts
● Musical ♪♪♪ epilogue

In guiding students on their lifelong academic and self-discovery journey, encouraging them (and their teachers as well) to become changemakers hands-on, we need to help create new structures and opportunities for learners from an early age for new modes of volunteerism, unpaid voluntary community service (VCS) and caregiving, in their neighborhoods, towns and villages. Such caregiving is also a powerful means of new learning, outside the classroom.
                  Article overview
● For starters, explore these
● A potpourri of introductory VCS links 
● Service learning in the community
● Pupils assisting the elderly 
● Cinema extraordinaire: Blaga’s Lessons / Уроците на Блага
● Students aiding orphans, children with disabilities or suffering abuse
● Fellow students helping pupils with difficulties at school
● Local outdoor/indoor service tasks galore
● Civics education
● Nurturing young changemakers
● Getting kids out into the world
● Democratic, self-determined learning 
● Project-based learning PBL
● Hands Up Project: Linking the Gaza classroom with the world
● Learning through an artistic lens on Gaza
● Direct Action: Putting your body on the line
● Further reading about mutual aid and The Care Manifesto
● Opening eyes, minds, hearts

Bill Templer & Silviya Templer           
Back to the Future in Health Care Visioning and Praxis

This is an article co-written by Bill and Silviya in 2014 and submitted to the journal Slingshot, #117, 15 Nov. 2014, https://slingshotcollective.org/back-to-the-future-socialism-2-0/, in California. They decided it was too lengthy to publish and instead included a very short version, now still online.
Our revised and expanded article 2023, grounded on many years of direct experience in provincial NE Bulgaria, suggests pondering pathways that we might term ‘back to the future,’ seen through an interdisciplinary lens. Such a wide-angle prism is multiplex, in some ways an ethnography scrutinizing many interlocked aspects of everyday life, economic, political, cultural, social, ideological. Are there past paradigmatic experiments that strove over decades to create in large part what some American socialists today envision? Is there any precedent, any set of historical experiments worth examining in concrete existential depth and possibly learning from? In what sense is Marxism a primary lens for analyzing the injustices and inadequacies of contemporary capitalism, everywhere? Listen to this superb highly understandable basic talk https://youtu.be/z6szCMhrSPM by Prof. Richard Wolff, 3 April 2023, not yet in the article now online.
In the sense of recovering what was positive and unique in ‘socialism 1.0,’ we wish to argue here a simple enough proposition: that we need to revisit the various experiments in universal health care in the socialist states of Eastern Europe, as exemplified here in Bulgaria. Those experiments now lie largely dismantled, demonized by the neoliberal corporate and political (dis)order that has descended on much of the former Eastern bloc. Our guiding thesis: in moving toward ‘socialism 2.0,’ the international left needs to look unblinkered at redeemable past real-socialist achievements in medicine, housing, guaranteed full employment, people’s education, salvaging and retrofitting what seems viable. This essay explores one such ‘experiment in people’s medicine’ that lost the Cold War, namely in the socialist People’s Republic of Bulgaria. That look back to the future is conceived here in a spirit, to paraphrase sociologist Erik Olin Wright (2010), not only of envisioning real utopias, but contributing  to making utopias real.
After a brief introduction (2), section 3 sketches the Bulgarian socialist medical system as it existed in the 1970s and ‘80s, before its destruction with the disastrous advent of capitalism resurrected beginning in 1990. Section 4 provides some sense of the severe plight existing today under capitalism reborn upon the detritus of socialism dismantled—a stark contrast with what once was and is still part of the living memory of a substantial proportion of the Bulgarian population. Section 5 stresses the need for building a grounded, grass-roots people’s oral history of socialist medicine as it existed and was experienced in Bulgaria and elsewhere. Section 6 presents a 2023 postscript on health care in the GDR, based on the work of the new research center in Berlin Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR, and publishing reports in English, including on health care in the GDR, see https://thetricontinental.org/studies-2-ddr-health-care-2/ See also this new article by Vijay Prashad, ‘The True Test of a Civilisation is the Absence of Anxiety about Health: The Eighth Newsletter (2023),’ published by the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 23 Feb. 2023. https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ddr-health-care/  You can explore the highly interdisciplinary work of the IFDDR here: https://ifddr.org/en/home/  Read a brief overview of what the IFDDR seeks to accomplish in knowledge production and civic enlightenment here: https://ifddr.org/en/about/ https://ifddr.org/en/about/  Section 7 has ‘Final thoughts 2014’, including a sub-thesis about the need for social anarchists (and other North American progressives) to try to learn ‘dialectically’ from what some of the ‘experiments’ in real-socialist medicine really achieved. Looking at such socialist health care embedded in its non-capitalist broader system involves  a range of multidisciplinary angles, necessarily so. Section 8 provides “Post-lude reflections 2023’ concluding the article.

The present draft paper seeks to stimulate future discussion and implementation of a range of creative ideas for a reinvigorating of BETA, restructuring/redesigning BETA activities, dynamic interaction from the bottom-up, Ново Начало. Generating beacons of hope. It's time for a total reset. We have to grasp the ELT nettle. Actions speak louder than words. Read this article, co-written by Richard Smith, 'Decentring ELT: Teacher Associations as Agents of Change,' ELT Journal 2021, open-access online. In rebooting BETA we can also learn from other ELTAs nearby, such as ELTA Serbia, HUPE in Croatia, ELTAM in NM, and Greece TESOL, NELTA in Nepal, JALT in Japan, NATECLA SC. Yes, also YALS in Serbia, an Associate in IATEFL and a cousin of OPTIMA in BG. Hyperlinks below are all xxx. Abstract here: https://tinyurl.com/233jk9se. PRELUDE ♪♪ We'd like to frame the article with this great poem/song by Bob Dylan, classically sung by Joan Baez, lyrics on screen. The lyrics esp. relevant in our situation here & now ♪♪♪.

Bill Templer & Silviya Templer (Shumen, Bulgaria)

This paper is an introduction to teaching Global Issues in the ELT classroom and getting students interested in talking about issues of all kinds, also issues inn their own lives. We'd like to say as educators, quoting Paolo Freire:: "poor are those among us who lose their capacity to dream, to create their courage to denounce and announce..."
We live in extraordinary times. Many of us think it is a singular turning point in the history of the human race and its experiment on earth. As Chris Hedges (2012) reminds us: "The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding." Jeff Noonan (2012, p. 1) shares that view: "The struggles across the Middle East and North Africa and ongoing resistance to austerity in Europe catalysed a fightback in North America the Occupy Movement that no one saw coming. Together, all testify to the pervasive and deepening crisis of capitalism, not just as an economic system, but as a comprehensive way of living and valuing […] The growing material, social, and cultural-spiritual exhaustion of capitalist civilization is becoming more evident to ever more numbers of people." (Noonan, 2012, p. 1). Across the planet, there are powerful new struggles for social justice and economic equity crystallizing in many countries.

This essay provides a range of ideas and links for introducing students and teachers to the challenge of including the Israel/Palestine conflict, its roots and realities, in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom: within Israeli schools, in Palestine and among the many nodes and refugee camps of the Palestinian diaspora, as well as elsewhere in the world of international teaching of EFL. The focus here is largely on Gaza, since in the mind of many students it stands as a recent catastrophic icon of the endless and brutal struggle and carnage, a veritable trope of Israeli state terrorism and war crimes against an innocent neo-colonized population.

Written from a left Jewish-Israeli viewpoint that is the author’s own, this is not a set of articulated lesson plans, but many such mini-plans could be developed from the aspects and sources highlighted. The article seeks to fashion a bricolage (Steinberg, 2006) for a ‘critical CLIL’ (Content and Language Integrated Learning) in the Israeli EFL classroom at Jewish and Arab schools, among Palestinian learners wherever they may be, especially in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, and in EFL “issues-oriented’ learning elsewhere. The essay is also in the spirit of Paulo Freire, whose ‘critical pedagogy was unashamedly tasked with liberating both the oppressed and their oppressors from the self-perpetuating dynamics of subjugation” (Evans & Giroux, 2015: 9).

Importantly, a longer version of this same article (same title) appears here in Academia/edu under Articles, expanded in the summer of 2015.

An earlier version of this article, in part revised upon pointed request from the top echelon of IATEFL, who held up publication of the article and entire GISIG Newsletter for several weeks, appeared in the summer issue of the IATEFL GISIG Newsletter, #32, 25-32, and has been  expanded here; what some within IATEFL regarded as potentially ‘objectionable’ paragraphs have here been included.

We need to nurture among students what Donaldo Macedo, born 1950 on Brava in Cape Verde and Freire's closest colleague over many years in the US, terms the “literacy of power” in an increasingly power-inscribed world (see Giroux 2015; Kincheloe 2008, 84-85; McLaren 2007; 2016). This is central to Critical Pedagogy inside TEFL, social justice pedagogy par excellence, a “critical reading of the word and the world.” This paper provides an introduction, especially for teachers of EFL, to Prof. Donaldo Macedo's thought in Critical Pedagogy, along with the work of Paulo Freire, with whom Macedo collaborated many years.
This paper was written specifically addressed to  teachers and teacher trainers in EFL in Guinea-Bissau. A shorter version will be published in a joint IATEFL Global Issues SIG / English Teachers Association Guinea-Bissau Newsletter in September 2018, with a hyperlink to this fuller article. Here a link to that article in the Newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/y96kxb4p (pp. 35-36).
The focus here on Critical Pedagogy and ELT specifically through the prism of the work of Prof. Donaldo Macedo can also be of interest to teachers and teacher trainers in Cape Verde and elsewhere in Lusophone Africa, and to the British Council in Senegal to the immediate north of Guinea-Bissau and the RELO in Dakar (https://sn.usembassy.gov/education-culture/regional-english-language-office/ ).

• The paper examines aspects of a key question in Bulgarian public education: rethinking and restructuring multicultural education through new experiments with bilingual education for ethnic minority pupils whose home language is not Bulgarian. This means attention in the main to the literacy needs (and language rights) of ethnic speakers of Turkish and Romani, seeing them as “emergent bilinguals,” and as marginalized minorities, in need of “literacy with an attitude” (Finn, 1999), firmly grounded on their own home language, Mother Tongue First! I argue that the time is ripe, after 26 years of ‘transitional’ chaos within capitalist ‘democracy’ restored on the ruins of Bulgarian socialism, for a paradigm shift in language policy in the schools, also rethinking multicultural education for identity-building and mutual tolerance within the context of class conscious pedagogies for social change. In Bulgaria, such multicultural values face a formidable challenge given the powerful anti-Ottoman narrative on which Bulgarian national history and modern identity are grounded.

The present paper was written in 2008 in Kuala Lumpur as an Afterword to a projected volume, Capitalist Education: Globalisation and the Politics of Inequality (in the Routledge series: Education and Marxism), eds. Dave Hill, Sheila Macrine & David Gabbard, Dec. 2008 (https://goo.gl/9SBNMu).  A decision was later made by the publisher not to go ahead with that particular volume in this larger critical series. I think the ‘Afterword’ can be read without the specific chapters I occasionally comment on, given the overall focus of my thoughts.
The article deals broadly and critically with the current 'war on the workers' from above, and the impacts on bourgeois capitalist education.

In this non-published paper, written in Thailand in 2006, I address some constraints and distinctive difficulties, seen from my vantage of experience teaching at a non-elite university in a very provincial peripheral corner. I focus on several structural problems that may undercut the sustainability and effectiveness of teacher training programs, especially outside the major urban areas — what might be called the ‘negative ecology’ of teacher development — coupled with a few suggestions for remedy and reflection, and further research. Many ideas expressed here are still relevant for the overall topography of EFL teaching in the country, though of course various changes over the past decade (now 2016), a number positive, have not been commented on.