Hello and welcome to Renewable English.
The idea really started back in 2016. I spent a few years working in a private school not long ago where nothing was done in any way shape or form about changing habits. Air conditioners were left on in rooms which were unoccupied, and I was seen as being crazy for suggesting people bring a bottle to work instead of using 7 or 8 plastic cups a day. The final straw for me (pun intended) was when the head of year openly mocked my attempts to heal something that didn’t even exist.
It drove me crazy; it was 2018 and there were educated people still denying the existence of climate change. It’s time we stopped asking people if they believe in in climate change and start asking if they understand it.
Inspiration isn’t hard to come by when it comes to climate change activists. A term that, in my opinion, shouldn’t need to exist. A two decades we had Al Gore. Then Leonardo Di Caprio brought his ideas forward and now we have Greta Thunberg. Climate Change, Global Warming, The Greenhouse Effect. Whatever you want to call it has been on the spectrum since I was at school (that was quite a while ago) yet we are now left clinging to last hopes. It is the 11th hour and things need to change on both a micro and a macro scale.
Something a huge number of people are currently doing within the ELT industry and across the globe of course are trying to raise climate change awareness and of course change habits. The ELT footprint group for example, are taking huge strides in raising awareness and it was a chat with one of its founder members, Ceri Jones at the FECEI conferences (the first paperless conference I’ve ever spoken at) in 2019 that really got me thinking.
Why is it course books always have 1 unit on the environment? Any why is it that unit is always about plastic and recycling? Of course, we need to do our bit in these areas but that simply isn’t enough. The subject becomes tiresome. There is a kind of double failing here in that students have “early closure” that is they are already sick of this climate change unit by the time they’re really old enough to properly understand it and see how each and every person on the planet can make a difference. Especially if we all try to make that difference.
Secondly these units aren’t enough to really address the situation. What Ceri and I spoke about, albeit briefly, and what my wife and I often speak about is raising awareness with every unit we do. So, I’ve created this course to run alongside most coursebooks and they’re most traditional unit titles. It’s aimed at ages between 10-16 with a level of between a2 and b1. However, as the topic is so universal you can obviously adapt it to your students' needs.
The materials will be available free to download in PDF. Feel free to follow me on twitter and even subscribe to this channel. I’ll be trying to get a Renewable English Episode out every week and they’ll be supplemented by some regular training videos.
If you’re a student doing the lessons then feel free to press pause to complete the activities whenever, If you’re a teacher please do get back to me with any feedback and feel free to send on any project videos your students do (if they have permission) or post them in our closed Renewable English Facebook group.
