School of Education

The book chapter ‘Pedagogies of Hope and Resistance: English language education in the context of the Gaza Strip, Palestine’, in Erling E., (2017) English across the Fracture Lines, British Council, co-authored by Maria Grazia Imperiale, Alison Phipps, Nazmi al-Masri and Giovanna Fassetta, has been included in the British Council Massive Online Open Course: Migrants and Refugees in Education. The book chapter has therefore become a key reference for all those involved in intercultural language education with migrants and refugees.

The book chapter, which is based on Imperiale’s doctoral research which Phipps and Fassetta supervised, discusses values and goals of English language education in the context of protracted crisis of the Gaza Strip (Palestine). The Gaza Strip has been under siege for over ten years, resulting in restrictions on mobility, increasing poverty and unemployability, loss of lives and mental and physical wellbeing. In the study, it was found that English is viewed as a means of creating counter-discourses which manifest Palestinians’ voices and existence to the world outside the Gaza Strip. English also is a tool that offers the possibility to nurture relationships by breaking the isolation. The authors recommend that English language teaching pedagogy should nurture learners’ wellbeing by equipping them with a language in which hopes, dreams, injustice, experiences of pain and pressure are articulated and expressed to the world outside the Strip.

In the MOOC it is suggested that learners, which are over 11,000, download the book chapter and reflect upon it. The book chapter is inspiring language teachers worldwide to reflect on their work and their approaches, moving beyond an instrumental approach to language teaching.

It is free to download – together with the whole book – at https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/english-across-fracture-lines

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First published: 14 December 2020