Learning to teach again: my experience working with displaced people at Big Help

Despite having taught for seven years around the world in all sorts of difficult conditions, I have to admit that I was nervous when I first entered the meeting room at Hope House and began to prepare to teach my first crash-course English lesson.

It feels like a lifetime ago, but when I first moved to Ukraine in 2015 my first job was to connect with schools and universities to find out ways to help with improving their English language teaching. This meant that I was in and out of classrooms all day long teaching children and adults, in private schools with fancy uniforms and underfunded schools for children with chronic diseases. All day long, I was giving seminars, holding talks, meeting teachers, and having a great time talking to students of all ages.

Ukraine is a country that really values academic learning and takes pride in its highly qualified citizens. That meant that there were times when I had access to incredible teaching resources: whiteboards, projectors, assistants, and (most importantly) an eager audience.

However, this wasn’t always the case. Sometimes it was just me, a class of forty students, my faltering Ukrainian, and (if I was very lucky) a ball.

The benefit? You learn how to make teaching work in any situation.

However, after a few job changes and a global pandemic, I was feeling thoroughly rusty. I’d been very privileged to meet so many wonderful Ukrainian language learners over the years that I spent there but I had also become very comfortable with booting up my laptop and setting up a slideshow while teaching online.

Too comfortable, perhaps.

So while I had no doubt that the language learners that were about to join me in the meeting room had their own worries about what this crash course in English might be like, I was just as nervous. Maybe more so.

What level of English would people be familiar with? What would the mix in experience be? How would I manage a group with different abilities? How many people would I be working with in the end? And crucially… would anyone turn up?

Fortunately, people did turn up. Sometimes regularly, sometimes irregularly. For some, the level of English was too high: it’s difficult to work out where to start when some people are relatively advanced English learners and others are true beginners. But despite a mix of languages, abilities, and English familiarity, we quickly found a common tongue. That’s the wonderful thing about a room full of non-native English learners, everyone happily accommodates everybody else’s level. This is true even when students don’t necessarily share a common language. I’d experienced this phenomenon before, and it was very encouraging to see that this experience still held true after so many years.

My job then was to try to not get in the way too much and to allow people to find a common ground. When we finally were all communicating with each other, we could fix problem areas or answer questions. But the first step in any language classroom is to build a safe environment where people can make mistakes and support one another. I’d be the first to admit, nobody was going to come away after three months of English refreshers sounding like Oscar Wilde (myself included), but there was a real chance that students would be much more confident if they had an  environment to practice and a teacher who didn’t mind being a figure of occasional ridicule.

This sort of teaching requires a lot of trust that the students will be attentive and welcoming to each other, as much as in the teacher to know when to step in and how to approach new topics. I am immensely proud to say that the classes so far at Big Help have risen to the challenge. No matter the level going in, everyone gets involved and encourages each other to try.

As much as I want to help out and do the most I can for the local displaced community, especially recent Ukrainian arrivals, it’s clear that I’m getting a lot out of these lessons too. It’s good to feel useful and have a sense of purpose and it’s a great opportunity to help me remember that those rusty skills aren’t quite lost just yet!