The American Cultural Association (ACA) is pleased to announce the 30th All-ALC Conference, the largest gathering of English-language educators in Morocco. As the not-for-profit, bi-national parent organization of the American Language Centers (ALC) in Morocco, the ACA is dedicated to promoting English as a foreign language education. With 12 ALCs across the country, the ACA boasts a diverse workforce of over 1,000 teachers and approximately 200 administrative and support staff members.
The 30th All-ALC conference provides an opportunity for English teachers from Morocco and beyond to come together, learn from one another, and explore new ideas in the field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education. We cordially invite teachers and teacher educators from Morocco and beyond to submit proposals that align with this year’s conference theme:
As language teachers, we constantly explore our classroom procedures, student learning outcomes, and trends in teaching, looking for problems to solve, techniques to tweak, or apps to try… We discover.
We also plan new activities, devise new teaching strategies, shake up modes of interaction… We design.
Often, we implement the results of our discovery and design in our own classrooms. Sometimes, these ideas grow into a workshop or presentation for our colleagues at international conferences… We deliver.
We hope the 3 Ds of Discover, Design, and Deliver at our 30th All-ALC Conference will inspire you to look at challenges from a different perspective and try new approaches and tools to improve your teaching and your students’ learning!
We encourage proposals related to the 3 Ds, and also welcome submissions on other EFL/ESL subjects:
We invite proposals for sessions of the following formats:
Proposals must be accompanied by a 100-word abstract. For presentations, classroom activity shares, workshops, and panels, a short video is also required to support your proposal.
To submit, please complete the online form available at:
If you have any inquiries, please contact us at conference@acamorocco.org
We look forward to receiving your proposals and sharing this transformative experience with you at the 30th All-ALC Conference!
Sincerely,
The 30th All-ALC Conference Committee
*This includes all plenaries, sessions, and coffee breaks. Lunches on January 12th and 13th are also included.
Payment information will be sent via email after successful registration.
Executive Director Foundation Dar Si Hmad
“When Fog is Not Just a Problem” An Invitation to Reconsider Sentience in the Age of the Anthropocene
At best, a foggy day is an excellent excuse to cuddle under the covers with a mug of hot chocolate and watch old movies. At worst, fog is an enemy to aviation, but beyond these two poles—as a benign invitation to a comfortable space of warmth and sweetness and a cause of death, destruction, and loss—there is a wide expanse of other connections and potentials. My plenary talk anchors itself exactly within this expanse, and sometimes even embraces the two extremes. Following a decade of applied work in Southwest Morocco, in the heartland of the Anti-Atlas Mountains, on a fog-harvesting project, I have come to live with fog in its multiple faces. From a sort of “haunting” esthetics to fog, as if the tiny floating water particles create an impressionist painting but one that lives and moves, continuously altering the landscape, to that of fog being a simple extractable resource. Beyond these images, and as the anthropocene continues to spread and disseminate its hold on the planet, alternative voices from the depth of history, from the wealth of human experiences, and the multiplicity of ecological actors are calling for a reconsideration of the categories we live and decide by; of what animate and inanimate are. This talk is an invitation to the American Cultural Association members and guests to interrogate what brings life to the English language they teach, beyond rules and norms, where connections and flows reside and how to suspend normality to enter the realm of this other language of the heart where all things and all phenomena are alive; a driving question is how the English language, much identified as a global lingua-franca today, shapes these ponderations and conversations. Under a heavy fog when a towering minaret appears from afar to loom large with no base, a tree that looks like a pencil-drawn contour in a Chinese painting, or a human silhouette that slowly fades into the vanishing point, these are potent invitations to the sentient planet.
Jamila Bargach is a scholar-activist who works currently in under-resourced communities in Southwest Morocco, creating sustainable initiatives through education and scientific innovation. She is the co-founder of Foundation Dar Si Hmad, which operates the largest functioning fog collection project in the world, a system which fosters the independence of Amazigh women in Aït Baâmrane by delivering potable water to households and creating opportunities for the community to learn and prosper.
Bargach, an anthropologist by training with a PhD from Rice University (1999), has taught at The National School of Architecture in Rabat (2000-2009) and is currently teaching at the Architecture school in Agadir, Morocco. She spent decades as a human rights activist, assisting residents in slums and informal communities in Salé-Rabat Morocco. In 2006, Bargach co-founded a shelter for women in Casablanca, which she directed till 2011 when she joined Foundation Dar Si Hmad. Bargach has published several articles on adoption practices, unwed mothers, gender and development, as well as her book Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in Morocco (2002, Routledge & Littlefield).
Bargach is the recipient of multiple fellowships and prizes. She is the first Moroccan scholar to be selected in the WeAfrica leadership program, was awarded an Oak Fellowship for Human Rights, 2019 on the theme of water, she also received the Vera Campbell Fellowship for Women Scholar-Practitioners from Developing Nations at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, which allowed her to lay the foundation for the fog-harvesting project with Foundation Dar Si Hmad. She has been a research fellow at the Ford Foundation, at the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies, and at the Transregional Institute, Princeton University. She is currently working on creating the very first environmental and ethnographic field school in Morocco, setting up an environmental education program for underserved school children from the fog collection villages.
Dr. Bargach is passionate about fog, about ecology, about what possibilities might emerge from where we stand today for the future of this sentient planet.
Senior Professional Development Manager, Oxford University Press (OUP)
This virtual talk is sponsored by OUP
Choose Your Own 3D PD Adventure
You have come to a fork in the road. Which path ahead will you choose? Professional Development (PD) equips teachers to find their way through the ever-changing world of language education, but it can be a grueling quest along winding paths. This talk will guide you to discover fresh PD possibilities and design doable development activities to fit your aims and interests, enabling you to deliver more engaging and effective lessons to your students. Join this session to illuminate and direct your next PD journey.
Mark Richard is a Taiwan-based teacher trainer with 25 years’ teaching and training experience in East Asia and France. He has taught English to all age groups in private schools and government agencies, and has also taught English Literature in international high schools. He is currently Senior Professional Development Manager for Oxford University Press (OUP). He regularly presents at TESOL conferences and language institutes, and is heavily involved in the Oxford Teachers’ Academy as a certified trainer, an online course design specialist, and co-author of the new Online One-to-One Tutoring course. In the last few months he has completed an MSC in Digital Education (Edinburgh, Distinction) to develop his awareness of technology’s potentials and limitations in language learning.
Poet
An introduction to the English language through poetry
In this plenary, I will take a walk through the wonders and weirdness of the English language, using the medium of poetry. Unfortunately, the poems which I intend to read shall be my own. By the end of the forty minutes, I hope to equip delegates with some of the skills, tools and confidence to think that they, too, could become a poetry sensation like me.
Brian Bilston has been described as the unofficial Poet Laureate of the platform formerly known as Twitter. With nearly half a million followers on social media, Brian has become truly beloved by the online community. He has published four collections of poetry for adults, including a collection of his early Twitter poems, You Took the Last Bus Home (Unbound, 2016) and the bestselling Days Like These (Picador, 2022), which features a poem for every day of the year. His novel Diary of a Somebody (Picador, 2019) was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award. He has also published a collection of football poetry, 50 Ways to Score a Goal (Macmillan, 2021), and his acclaimed poem Refugees (Palazzo, 2019) has been made into an illustrated book for children.
Whether you are a local business, non-profit, educational institution, or corporation, the ALC Conference welcomes your sponsorship. Please click on one of the links below for more information about how your organization can be a part of this exciting gathering of EFL education professionals from across Morocco and beyond.
Or, send an email to sponsorship@acamorocco.org to request a sponsorship package.
Join us at the Kenzi Rose Garden Hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco from January 12-14, 2025, for an enriching conference that promises to shape the future of English education in Morocco.
Conference logo: Designed by Othmane Zerouali
English idioms by theidioms.com
