EFL – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

British U Egypt: Academic Director of TESOL/EFL (Egypt)

Academic Director of TESOL/EFL, British University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt. Deadline: 21 May 2021.

The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of managing TESOL/EFL British academic English provision in a higher education setting, along with experience of transnational and/or intercultural education. They will offer evidence of a mature approach to risk and a willingness to step outside their comfort zone in search of creative solutions to problems, and to deliver change within a complex international environment. They will demonstrate a commitment to make learning and growth an inherent part of the culture of English Language provision, will lead by example, and work collaboratively, flexibly and with cultural sensitivity.

Ruben Mazzei Profile

Ruben Daniel Mazzei is a university EFL and literature teacher and a sworn translator (Universidad Nacional de La Plata) and is currently working on his thesis in Linguistics. He teaches at primary, secondary, tertiary and university levels, and is a researcher for University of Buenos Aires.

Ruben Mazzei

He has delivered and produced CPD courses and materials since 2005 for Dirección de Formación Continua -Province of Buenos Aires- and has coordinated the team of CPD teachers for the Ministry of Education for nine years.

He has recently participated in the updating of the Curriculum Design for English in Primary School for the Ministry of Education and for Secondary School (E.S.B.) He is also a speaking examiner for Cambridge University. He has participated in several of the British Council activities such as developing material, facilitating reading groups and coordinating the Connecting Classrooms programme for Argentina. He has facilitated workshops for the British Council on Global Citizenship and Global Education accredited by the University of London and workshops for the British Council Core Skills Programme both in Argentina and abroad.

He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Buenos Aires –College of Pscychology- where he coordinates and designs materials for E.A.P reading courses and academic literacies. At initial teacher education (profesorado de inglés) he teaches World Literature with a strong connection to intercultural competence/awareness, identity, otherness, and language as a resource to convey meanings and cultures.

Ruben Mazzei´s research interests are interculturality (also as part of the international projects he coordinates at primary and secondary school), academic literacies, genre-based pedagogy- including multimodality- and didactics in Higher Education.

Some of his publications can be found on his Academia.edu page.

Work for CID:
Ruben Mazzei translated KC11: Intercultural Discourse and Communication, and KC44: Multimodality into Spanish. He has also served as a judge for the 2019 CID Video Competition.

Teaching EFL with a Hidden Agenda: Introducing Intercultural Awareness through a Grammar Lesson

Guest post by Dr. Paola Giorgis. Teaching EFL with a Hidden Agenda: Introducing Intercultural Awareness through a Grammar Lesson.

Is there anything more standardized than grammar? How can it then work to dismantle the standard, favoring non-standardized and non-stereotypical readings and representations of individual and collective cultural identities, and promoting intercultural understanding?

Here’s a brief example of an actual unit of two lessons, which I conducted some years ago, on simple past during a course on English as a Foreign Language.

The context

a vocational high school with an art curricula in Turin, a city in the northwest of Italy
a class of 25 students, the majority of Italian origins, a couple of students from Morocco, another three from Romania, and two from Peru. Most of the students of Italian origin came from families who had experienced migration, belonging to the third generation of what is known in Italy as the “internal immigration”, a phenomena which, from approximately the Fifties to the Seventies, moved families and work force from the south of Italy to the industries of the north.

Read the full essay.