 Hi everyone, I'm Emma, I am the Director of Studies at Griffith College here in Cork. And I'm going to talk about controversial issues in EFL classrooms. This is based on some of the research that I did as part of my dissertation from my MA in English language teaching and applied linguistics. So I'll explain a little bit more about the context in a second, but first I just want to show you a few examples of some recent world events really and I just want you to have a think about what happened in your classroom surrounding these events. So did they come up in class? Did you raise them? Did students raise them? And as a result was any controversy emerge from them? So the US elections and I guess since then as well, Brexit, the equality referendum here, the refugee crisis and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. So if you want to just have a think about it and reflect on it for a few seconds or if you would prefer to maybe choose one or two of them to have a quick discussion. Okay. So the reason that I selected these topics, I could have chosen any number of topics, but the reason that I selected these was for the most part, quite a few of them are seemingly fairly innocuous, but in my experience they have led to potential controversy in classrooms, in multilingual diverse classrooms. And it was actually the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the aftermath of that that led me to my research. So before I, again, before I go on to that in more detail, what have we got here? Parsnips. Yeah. So what are the parsnips? What's the relevance? So parsnips is this acronym for a kind of a list of taboo topics that publishers, so publishers use this list of kind of taboo topics as a guideline for what not to include in course books. Okay. So politics, alcohol, religion, and sexuality, narcotics, the I, it's isms, basically ideology. So anything from communism to racism. Pork can also be sometimes it's pornography, this is a non-official list. And so my kind of second question that led me to the research was, is this sanitization that is appearing increasingly in globalized course books, is this creeping into classrooms as well? So there are the kind of two questions that led me to my research, which was how teachers approach politically and culturally sensitive issues in multilingual classrooms. A bit of a mouthful and a huge area, but what I was interested in looking at was, you know, I wasn't so interested in the specific topics, or I thought it was more about how teachers deal with them when they arise both in a planned way and spontaneously in class, which is why I was looking at it as a kind of the springboard, I guess, was the kind of current affairs things, the more unavoidable topics. So I interviewed experienced EFL teachers with the track record of excellence in the classroom. So it was teachers that I was working with who I had, you know, who I knew for a long time, who I, who were very, very experienced and had, you know, high levels of qualifications. I was in a typical language school context, it was actually in London, very, very mixed demographics and very mixed motivations as well of the students and very mixed ages, a super diverse multilingual setting. So there was a huge range of nationalities among students. And the key thing is that, you know, in a language school where people are there specifically to learn English language, there is no specific content. Okay, so the content is driven by the language. So I was focused on what, you know, what teachers are using in the context. So the first question was, what are teachers' attitudes towards sensitive issues? And overwhelmingly and surprisingly, given that they were experienced teachers who considered themselves to be, you know, very politically aware, the overwhelming attitude was fear. And that seems quite dramatic, but actually the language that teachers used during the interviews was very dramatic and it was very much related to fear and I'm afraid and I'm terrified of approaching these kind of things. So what kind of things were teachers afraid of? So they were afraid of the teacher causing offence of being ethnocentric, possibly, you know, as I said, it was in London, so maybe a bit of colonial heritage, colonial guilt there as well, but they were afraid of offending students and imposing their views in some way. They were afraid of students causing offence. They were afraid of relinquishing the expert, their expert status. So if there was a topic, say for instance, if it was a geopolitical conflict between learners' regions. So at the time, it was while the Russia and Ukraine incident was ongoing and the teachers were dealing with classes with, you know, a lot of Russians and Ukrainians in the classrooms. And rather than, you know, moving to them, moving to the students and getting their thoughts and feelings and opinions and expertise really as people from the area, they were more comfortable with just standing back and not approaching it at all because they didn't want to be the ones who didn't know. And they're afraid, of course, of conflict and tension within the classroom, especially given situations like what I just described. So the strategies then the teachers use. So if fear is the main approach, the main strategy that they used was avoidance. So rather than approaching these topics. And again, I'm talking about a lot of topics that that would have been, you know, world issues, global issues that would have been there, you know, in the classroom, at the touch of a button. All of these teachers were dealing in classrooms with technology, with Wi-Fi. So they all had access to various news sources. They would have used them quite a lot. But still, they were reluctant to approach any of these kinds of issues. But what I found through, so throughout the interviews, through reflection and narrative inquiry, where the kind of conclusions that the teachers almost unanimously came to themselves when they thought about it was actually this fear and their assumptions were mostly unfounded. It wasn't based on anything. They, as I said, experienced teachers, they hadn't actually had any experiences that justified the fears. The worst case scenario that they discussed was a kind of, okay, let's agree to disagree on that one, you know. Or there might have been kind of some mild tension in the class, which quickly blew over. And then, you know, again, teachers came to the realization that actually, that was kind of good because it broke the ice and it freed up discussion. Okay? This is just a quote from one teacher who described a situation where there was, from the coursebook, there was a discussion on evolution. And there was a student in the class who had never heard of the concept of evolution. And other students were surprised and shocked and were kind of, you know, quite aghast at it. And the teacher got into this difficult situation where he felt very ambivalent. He didn't know how to deal with, he didn't know how to deal with it. And this is what he said in the interview, that if it was anywhere else apart from a classroom, of course, I would say that evolution is a fact, not for debate. But I think in a multicultural, multinational classroom, it's difficult to be so forthright. So something that he even considered, you know, that he would consider to be a fact, even that he didn't want to, he didn't want to project his own beliefs. And what ended up in his words happening was that the student who, he described it himself as a mislearning opportunity, because the student who hadn't heard of the concept of evolution, because it wasn't in his educational background, through no fault of his own, felt, I think, a little bit ostracised and distanced from the rest of the class, because he just kind of brushed over it, but was never actually dealt with. And, you know, he felt that other students were kind of talking about him and laughing at him, and it created a bit of a division in the class by not confronting it. So I want to look at how these types of incidents can be developed as positive learning opportunities. And also the teacher's role in that. Okay. So I'll shut up for a second to just let you read that. So research has shown that what those, the beliefs of those teachers, what they showed was actually unfounded in terms of learner beliefs. So research has shown that learners, the teachers tend to underestimate learners' resilience, their ability to manage conflict, and their emotional intelligence, keeping in mind, of course, that these are adult learners with a very broad background. However, there is evidence of benefits of approaching these issues. So it increases learner and teacher motivation. More challenging and controversial content can lead to deeper engagement. Non-trivial content, as it's sometimes described, can engage learners both cognitively and effectively, leading to fuller self-investment. So when learners are more concerned about their message rather than how it's getting across, teachers who are willing to embrace sociocultural difference are received better by learners. So acknowledging difference. And as one of my interviewees said, if it's a good, healthy discussion, the elephant in the room is let out and they can relax and talk about something that matters rather than shopping. So finally, just some suggestions for the teacher's role in avoiding this kind of avoidance. Facilitate respectful debate. Encourage critical thinking among learners. Allow space for more than one narrative. So allow multiple perspectives. Don't position yourself as the expert. We're experts in language, not necessarily in the content. And allow the students themselves to be cultural informants. So give them that power. And there's plenty of other ways, so anything else that you might be able to think of yourselves. That's it.