Ingrid Naumann TESOL

In the closing weeks of my fellowship, I wanted to make sure that the teachers have improved, upgraded, and re-energized curricular materials to use with the incoming batch of students. We spent five days creating and adapting supplementary materials–both print and digital–to coordinate with the existing curriculum. From review games, role plays, and kinetic grammar blocks to worksheet practice, vocabulary slideshows, and Quizlet flashcards, we created both the materials themselves as well as the teacher guides and adaptations for our curriculum.

Each class researched a country where their language of study is widely spoken. They created booths to display cultural artifacts, including food, music, fashion, and iconic symbols to represent the country. After guests and students visited cultural booths, the classes performed skits, songs, and fashion shows demonstrating their cultural understanding. Students did a great job of embracing the event and enjoying their time while carefully navigating stereotypes.

English language students at the Police Language School in Jakarta hosted “Movie Days” for their fellow classmates. The classes prepared the venue and the concessions. Fellow Ingrid taught the students how to pop popcorn and flavor it with salt and butter – American style. The faculty selected police investigation television programs that coincided with the English Language curriculum for the week that each class hosted the event. After the program, each class prepared a language comprehension activity to review some of the vocabulary and procedures shown in the episode.

Police language students visited four local schools to practice their English speaking abilities in an authentic professional community engagement activity. This was an opportunity for them to feel comfortable practicing their English skills, and keep the energy and motivation level high during the middle of the Police Language School’s intensive three-month English language course. Furthermore, since one of the primary duties of professional police officers is to serve the local community, this service learning opportunity was an excellent pairing of professional language skills practice, community service, and fun!

I have been struggling and struggling to find a better way to teach students how to make correct embedded questions. Before working with English for Special Purposes with the police and journalists, this was not a grammar lesson I devoted much time or energy to -- it's difficult, complex, requires a lot of foundational grammar understanding, and the grammatical errors do not usually impede communication, so it just did not meet my criteria for a lesson that was worth our focus. However, in professional police and journalism work every single interview, investigation, and interrogation WILL use this grammar structure. Can you tell me....? Would you explain....? Do you remember...? Today I taught this lesson for the fourth time and I finally found "the missing link." Lego trains!!!

After a heartbreaking month of terrorist attacks, it is heartwarming to find a gleaming moment of praxis, "reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed," according to Freire. Today we took our police language students to community schools -- Christian, Islamic, and public schools alike -- so that they could use their English skills to teach kids about community helpers and community safety. This is where the commitment to "serve and protect" meets "service learning." It's a beautiful day for critical consciousness!

Happy International Women's Day! Celebrate Mothers!

Palau is on the front page of the NYT and I'm ready to teach an incoming batch of Indonesian maritime officers. Ke b**g! Ayo! Let's do this!

"Palau employs a marine police division with just 18 members and one patrol ship. Yet it has authority over roughly 230,000 square miles of ocean. Under international law, a country’s ‘‘exclusive economic zone,’’ the waters where it maintains fishing and mineral rights, extends 200 nautical miles from its coasts. That means that a country roughly the size of Philadelphia is responsible for patrolling a swath of ocean about the size of France, in a region teeming with supertrawlers, state-subsidized poacher fleets, mile-long drift nets and the floating fish attracters known as FADs."

..

"Palau’s work suggests a hopeful future. It offers a model for successful ad hoc collaboration among countries, companies and nongovernmental organizations. Palau has also emerged as a testing ground for some of the technology — including drones, satellite monitoring and military-grade radar — that might finally empower countries to spot and arrest the pirates, poachers, polluters, traffickers and other scofflaws who prowl the seas with impunity."

..

"Fish ignore borders — and, it turns out, so do many of the people pursuing them. While port inspections, wheel-room cameras, locational transponders and onboard observers are essential to better monitoring the oceans, policing is the only thing that will make Palau’s new reserve, and others like it elsewhere in the world, more than just lines drawn on the water."

Palau vs. the Poachers The island nation has mounted an aggressive response to illegal fishing in their waters. How they protect themselves may help the rest of the world save all of the oceans.

Well, it's Tuesday. So far this week I presented my counterpart a publication she and I contributed to (that the US ambassador presented to the minister of education), I taught a lesson on money laundering (that included a video clip from Breaking Bad, unpacking the INTERPOL definition as it relates to transnational crime, connected use of passive/active voice to Al Capone, and tied in cognitive linguistics research on English-speakers' tendency to link agents to objects), also I planned next week's lesson on corruption, I interviewed twenty INP LEOs who want to study criminology abroad, I got a police es**rt, and I had coffee with an award winning Indonesian journalist who is on the board of Human Rights Watch. I love this job!

Move over Frayer model and Venn diagram! Thanks to Casey Mooreman and Sultan Stover, there is now a graphic organizer named after me: "The Ingrid Model." Hahahahaha.