Today students and workers across the world are uniting in a day of action for Climate Change. This activism, inspired by Greta Thunberg, who has become a symbol not just for her own generation but for concern and crisis that affects us all, but that so far we have failed to address. Greta herself was inspired by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who organized the March for our Lives. A recent Pew poll says that one in four under 25's have engaged in some form of activism around climate change.
In teaching language and culture we have a responsibility to talk about the climate crisis and global heating, both terms incidentally that we should be using in our discussions.
We've added some links further down for additional sources of information and I'm interested in how you might be using them in your class. If as some suggest, only a Luddite revolution will save us, then what place is there for technology, how can we be sure that we are acting responsibly when we recommend that students use a particular piece of hardware or adopt a learning tool in class?
Other Links
Class Central has updated its list of the most popular free online courses and it is interesting to see that there's a mixture of STEM and humanities courses, including the brilliant Mountains 101 from the University of Alberta, alongside language courses such as Introduction to Dutch from the University of Groningen and Tsinghua Chinese from Tsinghua University. It's worth noting that many of these courses offer an educator or observer view for those academics interested in the content and production of the course.
My new favorite film site is Eastern European Movies which has an incredible collection of national films from seven countries including Germany, Bulgaria, and Hungary. It's the Polish films that caught my eye, including the Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog films and Three Colours Trilogy. You can watch them with a selection of subtitles, including Spanish, French, and German.
Japanese Culture & Language for Traveling 旅行の日本語と文化 from Behance
Climate Crisis Resources
The Zinn Education Project has a series of stories from the Climate Crisis which you can use to introduce the subject to students through aural and video histories. 8 things schools can do to tackle the climate crisis from the UK Times Education Supplement provides a list of actions for their staff and students. The Climate Reality Project has a Climate 101 course to help students with the basics and the ever-reliable people at Common Sense Media have Four Free Tools to Teach About Climate Change.
Follow updates throughout the weekend on the Global Climate Strike from The Guardian.
You can watch this using Google Glasses or scan around using your mouse.
On Screen
Bill and Tonya Martin don't speak English anymore. This is the story of Martinese.
It took us a little time to figure it out, but you can now read and download archived issues of the Modern Languages Digital Digest. Enjoy.