Teacher Development In Context: The Africa ELTA Conference
Amira Salama, Nile University, Giza, Egypt
In Africa, these teacher networking groups are very common and popular using WhatsApp groups. Teachers resort to WhatsApp to develop teaching materials and share teaching resources with colleagues. These groups also offer online WhatsApp presentations for teachers so they can easily access them at any time using low bandwidth.
Despite the challenges with technology access in Africa, online teacher network groups and teacher development efforts are non-stop. This inspired the leadership at Africa ELTA, the regional association of English Language Teachers in Africa, to adopt WhatsApp and Zoom as two online platforms for the Africa ELTA 2021 virtual conference during the pandemic. Thanks to this approach, the conference attracted more than 1000 teachers globally and in Africa and was the first ELT Conference to use these two platforms at once.
Using this bottom-up approach to teacher development, the Africa ELTA annual conference is held every year in a different African country (in Sudan, Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, and Angola) with the aim to reach out to more teachers in the continent and offer the opportunity to organize and host an international ELT event in this context. The conference has a context-based model; every conference is organized using the available resources in the host country and responding to the professional development needs of the local attendees. The Pre-conference Event (PCE) is usually organized around a topic of interest to the local teachers and Africa ELTA offers expertise and support in selecting the speakers of the PCE to respond to these needs. The main conference always features speakers from Africa as plenary speakers as African speakers are under-represented in the ELT conferences. This conference is organized to be the platform to amplify the voices of ELT experts from Africa while welcoming international speakers and attendees.
In Cairo 2024, The Africa ELTA 8th International Conference was held at the University of Hertfordshire in Egypt. The PCE featured experts on materials development to train attendees on ways to develop materials using the available resources. This was also a step forward towards the ongoing Africa ELTA Open Educational Resources Project that aims to help classroom teachers develop good quality materials for their classes since the lack of textbooks or teaching resources is an issue in many African schools. The main conference features sessions from more than 50 countries and more than 600 participants. Sessions included a variety of topics such as social justice in the classroom, decolonization of ELT, using technology in low-resource contexts, women empowerment, developing materials, and assessment issues among others.
The conference welcomed local delegates of refugee teachers who live in Egypt from Sudan, Syria, and Palestine as it offered a discounted and complimentary registration for those teachers. More than 50 association leaders from Africa also got the chance to meet in Cairo to attend the Africa ELTA-TESOL Association Leadership Program which was organized in collaboration with TESOL International and funded by the State Department through the six RELOs in Africa. This was an amazing program that was developed jointly between Africa ELTA, TESOL, and RELOs to fill in the gaps in leadership development and training in this context. The program was co-organized and implemented by Africa ELTA and TESOL, showing an example of a localized teacher development initiative that is also international.
The Africa ELTA Conference in Cairo was a manifestation of the grass-roots teacher development initiatives that are born in difficult and crisis contexts in Africa and are developed by teachers for teachers in Africa and around the world. It was a successful representation of the efforts that place teachers and context at the forefront of teacher development conferences.
Photos of the conference can be found on the Africa ELTA FB Page
Amira Salama is an academic English instructor at Nile University, Egypt. She is the Past President of Africa ELTA, and the Chair of TESOL Research Professional Council (2024-2025). She has an MA TESOL from the American University in Cairo and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in inclusive education. Amirais the winner of the TESOL Outstanding Advocate Honor Award 2024. Her research and professional interests include teacher mentoring and leadership, women leadership and inclusive education and ELT materials.