Sylvia Karastathi Talks about her Session at the Image Conference in Lisbon

sylvia-karastathi

 

Teacher, trainer, researcher and writer Sylvia Karastathi talks about her  session “Adapting Museum Education Resources for Language Learning” at the Image Conference in Lisbon on 13th October.

Within a new communicative landscape where multimodal communication is the norm, still and moving images are gaining ground even in traditional educational settings. The inclusion of aspects of visual literacy within language education places additional demands on language teachers but also offers exciting opportunities for professional development. We need to empower teachers in this new communicative landscape and my talk in the Image Conference in Lisbon seeks to do exactly this with the help of museum education resources from major Anglo-American museums.

I will explore a list of online resources that are freely available from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the UK National Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum which are currently developed for teaching in the galleries and as part of visitor engagement programs.

How can these help language teachers?

I will be proposing that as language educators, we do not need to “re-invent the wheel” and create visual literacy tasks ourselves in order to use art images creatively in our classrooms. Rather we can adapt the already existing museum resources and texts by foregrounding linguistic elements through language awareness activities.

We will explore ideas for exploiting creative writing resources from the Victoria and Albert Museum, podcasts for pictureless viewing from the UK National Gallery and a lesson sequence on the concept of borders from the Metropolitan Museum. These educational tasks that target visual literacy primarily can be easily adapted for language teaching contexts within the framework of content and language integrated learning.

If you are looking for fresh ideas for materials development that use authentic visual resources and extend your classroom walls to include major cultural institutions, my session on Friday 13th October will give you lots of support, suggestions of resources and activity ideas to try out with your learners.

 

Biodata

Dr. Sylvia Karastathi is a teacher educator and lecturer in TESOL at New York College, Athens, Greece. She holds a PhD on contemporary literature and visual culture, an MA in Modern Literature and Culture, and she has recently completed her DELTA. Sylvia’s current research interests are in visual literacy in higher education.

Title

Adapting Museum Education Resources for Language Learning

Abstract

This talk will introduce valuable resources for creating visual literacy tasks sourced from major museums and galleries. Exploring the work museum education departments do to deepen the engagement with their image collections, this talk will suggest ways teachers can adapt these image resources and related texts for language learning contexts.

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