NAP Conference 2024

It has been some time since the EAL New Arrivals teachers in Victoria have been able to come together for their conference (were there really 500+ attendees?!). I really gained a sense of the solidarity and identity of these wonderful teachers who believe in their students’ full potential to learn and succeed. Amazing keynote speakers by game-changing young people who themselves experienced English Language Schools when they first arrived in Australia. I personally felt very inspired!

It was wonderful to see many of my MTeach and MTESOL graduates who are now leading teachers in their schools. No longer students sitting in my classroom, I was the one sitting in their sessions taking notes. Special shout out to Cath Ferla, Thea Ho and Jodie Whitehurst – so happy and proud of all of you!

Raf, Shu and I presented two back-to-back workshop sessions engaging teachers in multimodal hands-on experiences to expand the possibilities of meaning making for students through ARTP. Raf led an activity demonstrating how embodied approaches work, Shu on how to think about language when content is involved, and I on how we can activate students’ multilingual knowledge throughout this learning experience. It was truly a wonderful collaboration where we each brought our expertise to unpack the rich possibilities for meaning making when we bring our knowledge together. Nothing can say it better than what one of the participants said to us afterwards, “That bringing together of ‘the arts’, ‘content and language’ and ‘translanguaging’ made perfect sense!” It really brought home to me – we’re stronger together! Way to go Team!! 👏🏻👏🏻