I was recently invited to speak at IATEFL Chile, an international teacher conference in Santiago de Chile. The British Council had flown me over for a plenary talk on teaching Shakespeare to language learners and as they added a second engagement for a teacher training session I made my way across the Andes.
Having never been to Chile, or indeed Latin America, before and speaking close to no Spanish, it was certainly an adventure – a little earthquake included – but the team from the British Council took good care of me and made sure I always ended up in the right taxi that would get me home. The conference at the Universidad San Sebastian ran smoothly and was very well attended and to my surprise I found myself among some of the bigger names in English Language Teaching on the other plenaries.
On the Monday after the conference, which also happened to be the first day of term after their winter holidays, I delivered a teacher training workshop for about 85 teachers who’d braced torrential rain earlier that day to join us at Universidad Major. The idea of staging a Shakespearian insult battle with their language learners went down pretty well, as did our Shakespeare Week resource Shakespeare’s Eleven which combines football with some of the Bard’s characters. It was a fantastic experience and a great opportunity for Learning and Participation to take our educational programmes and ideas to a new continent altogether. I look forward to future conversations with that part of the world.