Teacher and teacher trainer, Aleksandra Jevtović talks about her Image Conference experience in Lisbon.
What did you enjoy about The Image Conference?
I liked that the images, be it moving or still, were colourful and beautiful to look at, touching and funny, thought-provoking and powerful. The activities based on those images were creative and engaging and generated a lot of thinking and a lot of language production. Every workshop that I attended offered not only ready-made activities for my classroom but stimulated my own creativity. I was left with both my notebook and my head full of classroom ideas.
How was The Image Conference different from other conferences you’ve been to?
It focused on only one aspect of teaching input, the visual one, and therefore if you are interested in exploiting images in the classroom, you can be sure that every workshop or talk you go to will cater to your interests and it eliminates the ‘hit-and-miss’ aspect that occurs at other conferences.
At the same time it offered a huge variety within that one aspect and demonstrated the breadth of what ‘visuals’ are. There were short and feature films, music videos and magazine ads, photographs and paintings, cuisenaire rods and visualization, picture books and graphic organizers. It was a unique way to learn about all these different ‘visuals’ and get ideas about how to use them in our teaching.
Sum up your talk briefly.
In my session I demonstrated how illustrations from picturebooks can be used to practice vocabulary and grammar and get students speaking and writing and how we could use those activities with teens and Young adults and not just with Young learners.
What were the main discussion points to arise in The Image Conference?
A few themes were recurring, to a lesser or greater degree, in most of the presentations and those were: empathy, diversity, multiculturalism, ethical issues and critical thinking.
