Five hundred talks and workshops in five days! That’s the first thing that caught one’s attention about the 46th International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) Annual International Conference and Exhibition (March 19 to 23), which concluded in Glasgow, Scotland, last week.
The heavy programme may have been on the minds of other delegates, too, and realising this the organisers, headed by IATEFL President Eric Baber, were willing to go the extra mile in order to facilitate them. As it turned out, the plenary sessions, signatory events, talks, workshops, symposiums, forums, etc., were happening over the length of four and not the initially presumed “five” days as the first day (March 19) was consumed in getting oneself registered, touring and familiarising oneself with the interconnected Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) venue, mixed with a bit of socialising, of course.
It was a great opportunity to network, discuss and socialise with the English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals at the conference from around a hundred countries. Many of them shared their experiences as part of a talk or presentation. But more about that later.
The first milestone was to gain as much as possible from the experience of being there. Still one can only be at one place at a time and with 22 workshops taking place simultaneously, the thought of missing a lot of good lectures was constantly nagging at the back of one’s mind.
The very first session on March 20 “How to get the most out of this conference” with Susan Bardhun helped ease the mind to an extent as it offered tips on how to go about and “track” the treasure of knowledge on offer. One had the option of forming learning groups in order to jigsaw their conference experiences. The entire conference programme in the shape of a voluminous spiral-bound edition was handed to each delegate upon registering but those with smart phones could also download the conference app.
The app allowed one to browse and search the extensive programme to select individual sessions to add to one’s conference planner, view a map of the venue to navigate as well as see what others were saying about the event through an integrated Twitter channel. Also it was revealed that one could, like the 50,000 people not present at the conference, catch the missed lectures online courtesy the British Council, who had a team recording and uploading all the sessions for them.
The SECC is a huge place with plenty of maze-like winding corridors, staircases, halls and rooms and getting from one session to another may have you lost and failing to attend the desired lecture with limited places for each. Thus the lecture rooms Carron 1, Carron 2, Morar, Barra, Leven, Ness, Lomond, Jura, Shuna, Orkney, etc., often witnessed frantic delegates reaching one to find it packed to capacity before running off to another that they had marked as second or third choice on their planners.
Thankfully, the five plenary sessions were held in the Clyde auditorium with a 2,000 audience capacity for all to attend. The initial such session was by educational consultant Adrian Underhill on the morning of March 20. It was amazing how the learned gentleman kept the entire audience engrossed with his acoustic skills and singing.
One poem he read out was called ‘Autobiography in Five Short Chapters’ by Portia Nelson that had to do with learning from experience. It went well with his talk titled “Mess and progress”, which had to do with systems thinking and action, and post-heroic leadership practices.
Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies Diana Laurillard, World Languages and Literature expert Steven L. Thorne, Professor of Biology James E. Zull and popular local singer Derek Dick, better known as ‘Fish’, made up the list of other plenary speakers though the last one mentioned was more of an entertainer bringing the conference to its conclusion with his delightful music and lyrics on the afternoon of March 23.
Meanwhile, daily sessions started from 8.15 am and ended at around 6.30 pm each day intermingled with ELT resource exhibitions, poster exhibitions, job offers for the visiting teachers and a special scholarship stand (this year there were 33 IATEFL recipients) for 26 teachers to be able to attend next year’s conference in Liverpool.
Apart from this, the organisers had also arranged daytime tours for nominal fees to places such as Loch Lomond, the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow Transport Museum, Charles Rennie Mackintosh House for An Art Lover Museum, etc.
The evening events included a civic reception by the Glasgow City Council on the inaugural day, a networking reception by the British Council, another by Oxford University Press, an authentic Scottish shindig where the delegates were treated to local cuisine while being entertained by a pipe band, a Shakespeare extravaganza, an event to mark 50 years of teacher training, a Language Learner Literature Awards ceremony, book launches by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, a ferry ride, a vocal event where delegates were invited to share some of their national songs, a quiz evening and what not. So it wasn’t all work but plenty of education mixed with a generous amount of entertainment.