Why I volunteer

New IATEFL BESIG Joint Coordinators:

Marjorie Rosenberg and Sarah Plochl

 I’ve just been to the annual BESIG Conference, a conference for Business English teachers, trainers, and coaches and got a new job there: BESIG Joint Coordinator! I’m honoured to be taking on this new role together with Marjorie Rosenberg, an ELT (=English Language Teaching) legend and Past President of IATEFL, the worldwide English language teaching association that BESIG is part of.

Why I volunteer

For the past four years, I’ve been Chair of HELTA, the Hamburg Language Teaching Association. Since yesterday, I’m Joint Coordinator of IATEFL BESIG. 

Both of these organisations are charities and so the positions are unpaid volunteer positions. And both of them are —time intensive and demanding as they can be— deeply rewarding. 

As language teachers, trainers, and coaches, many of us are self-employed freelancers and lack regular contact with colleagues in the same field. Even those of us who work in schools and other institutions (like I also did before I started EDGY) don’t always have very meaningful exchanges with other teachers between classes, and are essentially alone in designing and teaching our classes independently. 

This is why conferences, workshops, and other CPD programmes (CPD=continued professional development) are so vital. 

At conferences like IATEFL BESIG and IATEFL, we get to exchange our best practices, learn about the latest research in our field, and discuss how to best navigate and embrace the changes of our times. We learn how to deal critically and responsibly with innovations such as the rise of AI so that we can pass on our knowledge and skills to our learners, showing them how they can use new tools effectively and safely. We go to these conferences so that we become better language professionals and get even better at our work of helping people speak languages more freely and joyfully. 

I volunteer because I want to support my community of dedicated, inspired and inspiring colleagues. I volunteer because I want us to continue to come together and have this place where we can learn from and support one another. I volunteer because I want to continue to learn and to be excellent at the work that I do.