{"id":6297,"date":"2017-11-26T12:29:16","date_gmt":"2017-11-26T12:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/?p=6297"},"modified":"2017-11-27T08:27:10","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T08:27:10","slug":"punk-diy-art-elt-conferencing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/2017\/11\/26\/punk-diy-art-elt-conferencing\/","title":{"rendered":"Punk, DIY, and the Art of ELT Conferencing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Timothy<\/p>\n

Punk, DIY, and the Art of ELT Conferencing<\/strong>
by Timothy Hampson.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When people think of punk, they think of\u00a0mohawks, boots and safety pin piercings, but they often forget punk\u2019s DIY ethos. Punks were making their own clothes, making their own album art, and self-publishing records.\u00a0This gave them a huge amount of control over their own output and independence from a society they felt was overly consumerist. While I\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0know any English language teachers with safety pins through their ears, there is definitely is a very strong punk DIY ethic in the ELT community. In this\u00a0article\u00a0I\u2019ll draw from my experiences of founding and\u00a0organising\u00a0an ELT conference to give three lessons for anyone interested in DIY ELT.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My own experience being part of\u00a0the\u00a0excitELT\u00a0conference<\/a>\u00a0team was definitely DIY. The conference started from a frustration with \u201ctraditional\u201d\u00a0conferences which\u00a0were often overpriced, overly academic, and overly cliquey. We wanted to change the way conferences happen and, like the punks, we\u00a0weren\u2019t\u00a0afraid of a bit of DIY to make that happen. With a small team (varied in size between two and four),\u00a0we\u2019ve\u00a0all had to learn new skills to make things happen. Over the last two\u00a0years\u00a0I\u2019ve taught myself web and logo design, typesetting, advertising, scheduling, management, and many other skills.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first thing\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0learned from\u00a0excitELT\u00a0is that\u00a0you can make small changes that have a big effect<\/b>\u00a0and that\u00a0it\u2019s okay to think small<\/b>. For example, if your dream is to start your own academy, that\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0mean you have to quit your job, get a mortgage on a nice piece of property and hire a full teaching, HR and advertising staff. Instead, it might be a better idea to start taking on private classes, building word of mouth and slowly reducing the amount you work for your primary job. Similarly, if you want to change a curriculum, you can, but improving the worst 2-3 classes of a curriculum is a good way of making some positive change without committing to a complete rewrite.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The original plans for the conference were small; although we had 80 attendees for the first conference, we had originally never imagined having more than 30. The changes we made to the \u201ctraditional\u201d conference format were also not huge but ended up being very effective. Switching out hour-long lectures for short plenary speeches and hands-on workshops\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0take any more effort for the\u00a0organisers\u00a0but it changed the whole tone of the conference. Forcing speakers to trim their speeches to ten minutes forced all of the plenaries to be \u201call killer no thriller.\u201d When selecting workshops, we deliberately picked the ones that were hands-on. As a result, the main feedback from the conference was that the whole day was engaging!\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We really wanted the conference to be a more audience-focused and social experience. Simple things like ditching conference booklets in\u00a0favour\u00a0of large schedule posters created congregation points for people to ask, \u201cWhat are you going to see next?\u201d and build new friendships. For the second conference, we introduced the \u201changout\u201d as a session type based around conversation on an issue, drawing the focus away from the presenter and allowing teachers to meet one another. Making sure that someone from the\u00a0organising\u00a0committee was on the registration desk at\u00a0all\u00a0times meant everyone at the conference met at least one of us during the day. The day before the conference there was a social gathering in the park to hang out for the afternoon, and I met\u00a0lots of\u00a0teachers that day that I\u2019m still in touch with now.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The second lesson is that\u00a0you should ask for help<\/b>. If you do want to change something about ELT,\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0likely that other people feel the same way as you do. In my experience, people in ELT are extremely willing to help one another and are very responsive to twitter messages and emails. You\u00a0might be surprised\u00a0by how much\u00a0traction your ideas get. People might be willing to give advice, or they might be willing to\u00a0help out\u00a0in a bigger way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The more I spoke to people, the more people wanted to\u00a0help out. Wonderful people volunteered to help with the organization and offered their expert advice on everything from general goals to graphic design. Incredibly prestigious speakers like Scott\u00a0Thornbury\u00a0and Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto volunteered their time and gave inspiring presentations. The amount of time and effort that people were willing to contribute astounds me and I think shows how giving the ELT community is.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The last lesson\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0learned is that\u00a0you don\u2019t need to be an expert to get things started<\/b>. Often the willingness to make a change is more important than ability. One of the beautiful things about DIY is that you learn as you go along. You might find yourself learning all kinds of skills you never knew you were interested in and these skills might find their way back into your classroom practice. For example, after using blogs for conference advertising\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0used blogging as a task in class.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of my mentors jokes that\u00a0I\u2019m\u00a0a person who \u201cwent to an ELT conference and decided he could do that too\u201d (which is deeply unfair: I\u2019d been to two ELT conferences). No one on the\u00a0excitELT\u00a0team had a background in\u00a0organising\u00a0conferences, but all cared deeply about the conference and were willing to learn the skills that they needed to make the conference happen. If we can do it ourselves, you can definitely do it yourself, too. If you do, remember that\u00a0your\u00a0that your first steps might be small; that if you\u2019re identifying a real problem, people will be willing to help out; and that you don\u2019t need to be an expert to make things happen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Punk, DIY, and the Art of ELT Conferencingby Timothy Hampson.   When people think of punk, they think of\u00a0mohawks, boots and safety pin piercings, but they often forget punk\u2019s DIY ethos. Punks were making their own clothes, making their own album art, and self-publishing records.\u00a0This gave them a huge amount of control over their own … Continue reading Punk, DIY, and the Art of ELT Conferencing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teachers-conferences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}