Critical ELT Materials

January 24, 2025

Animals

Cem Berkay Eminoğlu’s reflection and experiences:

As an animal rights supporter myself, using the critical space ELT provides us was crucial for me to give students some insight or awareness about the issue of animal abuse. They are most of the time overlooked while we let them suffer in silence in the background of our daily lives, which should not be the case. When my group members and I prepared the earlier version of this lesson plan for another course, we had such an agenda in mind. I took it, developed and adapted further for its in-class conduction in the same vein; in hopes that it would estrange students from the daily life where animal abuse is so normalized and put in the front row where we can critically engage with the issue further. When preparing the materials, a hardship I faced was to find images of abused animals that were not too graphic but to the point and appropriate enough to represent animal abuse. Even though, I usually tend not to I had to refer to AI to generate such an image of a dog as most of the pictures I found were too graphic for a 5th-grade in-class display. I asked students to create their own animal shelter in the production part. I thought that having such a responsibility would give them enough sense of a protective ethical relationality to animals when they engage with them. I know that such an agenda is perhaps too grand-scaled to be perpetuated in such a limited space as a 40-minute-long English lesson. However, as a trainee-teacher of English at a state school with relatively limited ability and mobility, this was what I could do to achieve my goal of giving students an opportunity to develop such critical consciousness about the issue of animal abuse.