Equality policies ELT in events: how organisers can make a positive impact

This year has been quite challenging for the Dmitry Nikitin School, as well as for many other schools and ELT event organizers worldwide. However, thanks to a great number of colleagues who supported us, we managed to run our major ELT event, called #YarConf, online. 

The name of the event originally came from the name of the city where our school is based – Yaroslavl. It started as a small pre-summer school event in 2017 and in just two years it became one of the biggest and the most influential ELT conferences in Russia, making our home town, as we joke, the Russian ELT capital. 

We believe that the key to the rapid success of the #YarConf was the equality policy we adopted at the very beginning, which was new for the ELT industry in the country. At #YarConf we came to an agreement to carefully balance the number of male and female speakers as well as native and non-native speakers. Also, there are always a certain number of places for first-time plenary speakers as well as for presenters who deliver non-plenary talks and workshops.

We are a non-government, commercial organisation which means we have to run profitable ELT events to make ends meet. However, we have never even considered the option of abandoning our ELT equality principles in order to run bigger-budget conferences. Surprisingly, that is why we do have sell-outs before every #YarConf event, even this year. I think the secret of our success is in the special experiences the participants get at the conference: the sense of belonging to a vibrant diverse professional community which shares the same highly ethical principles and trying to change the world (well, at least ELT world), to be a better place. 

We are so proud to be recognised by EVE, as the EVE badge gives us more opportunities to share our experience with a great number of ELT event organisers worldwide and learn from their experiences as well. We really hope that the EVE platinum badge we’ve received will become a new crucial step in creating equality in ELT both in Russia and internationally.

Below you’ll find some photos of the event and a link for the closing plenary. 

Dmitry Nikitin, PhD,

Dmitry Nikitin School, 

Yaroslavl, Russia

Searching for equality in ELT

There are two main issues that have preoccupied me during my professional life.

The first is, does it really matter if the person giving a plenary or a keynote at an international ELT conference is a man or a woman?

Your reply will most likely be: No, it doesn’t matter, as long as the speaker is a professional. However, for many years, I wondered whether there were no female Big Names in ELT precisely because the vast majority of plenary and keynote speakers were, and in many events still are, men. Women are under-represented at the top of the tree even though ours is a profession where most practitioners are women.  I don’t mean to say that conference organisers actively discriminate against female speakers. Maybe they just don’t think about it, and I do see that as a problem, because there are many women on the organising boards of these conferences. 

The second issue is a passport-related one.

I arrived in Spain 16 years ago, and soon afterwards I started offering my services as a teacher of English.  Although I had considerable experience teaching a range of levels and ages, was in possession of a post-graduate degree from a British university, had served as a Cambridge Oral Examiner in my home country, Argentina, and was already a published ELT author, I found I lacked what apparently was ‘the most important qualification’: I wasn’t a Native Speaker. ‘You have a fantastic CV but you’re not ‘a native’ was the mantra I kept hearing. And I wasn’t the only one! However, I have also discovered that native English teachers could also be discriminated against. Some employers demand specific accents: British as opposed to American or Scottish or Irish, not to mention African native speakers of English.

In due time, I joined TESOL-SPAIN and I must say I have been very lucky to find a group of like-minded fellow members and Board members, male and female, native and non-native, who actively work to eradicate discrimination in all its forms.

For many years, even when gender balance was not an issue in ELT, TESOL-SPAIN Annual Conference Coordinators tried hard to ensure equal representation in the line-up of their plenary speakers.  In recent years, we have extended our efforts to ensure that this balance is also present in our line-up of keynote and general speakers for our Annual conventions as well as in our regional events. 

In 2018 and 2019, we received an EVE (Equal Voices in ELT) awards for our Madrid and Oviedo Annual convention line-ups, for which we are deeply grateful.

As for the NEST/NNEST issue, TESOL-SPAIN is particularly worried about the situation in Spain, where it is common for non-native English speaking teachers to be discriminated against, in favour of native English speaking teachers, regardless of their respective qualifications, even for positions in official government  organisations.

Back in 2014, the Board issued the following position statement against discrimination:

In compliance with Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, TESOL-SPAIN stands in opposition to discrimination against teachers on the basis of their national, ethnic or linguistic background, religion, gender, gender identity and sexual orientation, in terms of hiring, promotion, recruitment for jobs, or employment conditions.

With respect to the common, long-standing notion, unsupported by research, that a certain ethnicity, accent, or national background gives a person an advantage as a teacher of English, TESOL-SPAIN firmly believes that all teachers should be evaluated and valued solely on the basis of their teaching competence, teaching experience, formal education and linguistic expertise. Therefore, TESOL-SPAIN does not condone job announcements that list “native English,” “native command of English,” “native-like fluency,” “standard accented English,” or similar, as required or desirable qualities.

There’s still a lot to do to achieve equality in the workplace at all levels, but we feel that if teachers’ associations, researchers and teachers all work together , we can make the change and set an example to other sectors. We are educators, and we can fight against discrimination at all levels through education.  

Annie Altamirano

MA ELT & Applied Linguistics

Teacher, teacher trainer and author

Former President of TESOL-SPAIN, current Vice-president of TESOL-SPAIN.

Unity Through Diversity

Cíntia Rodrigues

Last April, the Brasilia BRAZ-TESOL Chapter and the Voices SIG joined forces to deliver one impactful event about diversity in Brazil: Unity Through Diversity. The event was accredited by EVE and we were honoured to receive a Bi-Purple EVE awards. If you don’t know what that means, follow me and I will explain it later, but let’s first talk about this amazing day.

I was the plenary speaker for the opening and closing sessions. I started the day with a plenary called “What’s your story?”. I got the title from Varinder Unlu when, last year, the Voices SIG had the pleasure to team up with  the IP&SEN (Inclusive Practices and Special Education Needs) IATEFL SIG and Varinder gave one of our PCE (Pre Conference Event) sessions at 15th BRAZ-TESOL International Conference. I found what she said about each of us bringing many different stories into a classroom simply brilliant and decided to create a plenary from this starting point. The focus was  the importance of bringing diversity to light and guide the audience to reflect upon their own privileges, understand a bit more about empathy, value differences, and end up by introducing the idea of diverse leadership.

After the opening plenary, there were two moments of co-current sessions divided into 3 main topics: gender issues, lgbtqia issues, and special education needs. To close the event, I mediated a panel in which we showed NGOs and other social projects to help people learn English in Brazil and had the chance of listening to four major Brazilian English institutes presenting their philanthropic projects.

Have you ever been to an event solely focused on the topic ‘diversity’ ? This was my third and all  of them shared a few features:

1. Talks/workshops about gender issues and feminism, LGBTQIA+ issues, ethnicity and colour and Special Education Needs and inclusion

2. A small audience that already connects and is sensitive to most of the topics discussed

3. Speakers that are invited and encouraged to talk about a certain issue. Call for papers tend to be very unsuccessful in this type of event.

A question some people might ask themselves: if it is a conference about English teaching, why is it relevant to raise matters such as gender, sexual orientation, prejudice, so on and so forth?  

Have you realised I opened and closed the Unity Through Diversity event? A Bi-Purple EVE is for single-plenary events that show parity over the current and previous events. While it was fantastic to receive this award, having only one plenary speaker wasn’t a matter of choice.  

I am 100% sure there were many very knowledgeable people in Brasília who could have delivered a plenary and organisers contacted them. However, all of them said they did not feel comfortable or prepared enough to deliver a plenary on diversity. After participating in some of the workshops I am sure they would be prepared for that, but they don’t feel comfortable. Why is that? There could be many different answers for this question, but one sounds stronger: Brazil is a very conservative country and we do fear losing our jobs, especially if you work for a regular school. Not everyone is as lucky as I am to work for people who are proud of the topics I speak about.

Lastly, one of the things that I have noticed from the moment I started talking about minorities issues is that my audience would mostly consist of people who are part of a minority group or also talk about similar issues. I spoke to a few people to try and understand why they wouldn’t spend a day at an event on diversity and I heard many different answers. The two responses that struck me the most were: many people believe that once they do not belong to a minority group, it is not their issue and they might not feel a sense of belonging; some people believe they already know a lot about it (do they? I am sure I don’t).

I was given some suggestions to change this scenario and joint events with other SIGs to attract a different audience is one of them.  I do believe it would work, but I will close this blog post just like a closed the event on 26th April, 2019 – by making a pact!

If you are reading this post and got to the end of it, I am sure you are also sensitive to this topic/cause; therefore, I would like to propose a pact here: Next time you go to or know of a conference on the topic of diversity only, you will try and convince someone who is not sensitive to the topic to join you. Let’s spread the word to make sure we will reach out to a larger number of people to build a more inclusive environment inside our schools!

Some participants of Unity through Diversity – 2019

Cintia Rodrigues is a Pedagogical Coordinator, a teacher trainer and a Cambridge Speaking Examiner for Seven Idiomas. She holds an MA in Applied Linguistics, a BA in Linguistics, CELTA, and CPE. She’s also a founding member of Voices SIG.