Position: Professional Volunteer English and Spanish Teachers Wanted for Global Voyage
The Global English/Español Training Programme is Peace Boat's English and Spanish school. On our voyages, this programme is run by international teams of passionate volunteer teachers who inspire our students to use language to make connections with people from all over the world.
Peace Boat's language training programme, GET, is now accepting applications for English and Spanish language teachers for the 118th Global voyageuntil March 25, 2024. Interviewswill be conducted onlinefrom April 15th-19th JST.
How is the GET Programme structured?On an average Peace Boat voyage, approximately twenty percent of the total number of participants pay to enroll as students of the GET Programme. Depending on this number, between 6-12 teachers are invited to join a voyage, the majority of whom teach English while a small minority teach Spanish (in certain situations, teachers may be asked to teach both English and Spanish).
In addition to English and Spanish teachers, GET may occasionally invite teachers of other languages to create new programmes and facilitate lessons for short courses. For this reason, the ability to teach multiple languages is looked upon favourably. GET students have a variety of learning backgrounds and range in age from 18 years old to in their early 80s. Two staff members coordinate the GET Programme on each global voyage, one primarily responsible for overseeing the teachers and the other the students.
Private Lessons
• Course length: 20 classes
• Lesson length: 40 minutes
• Workload: each English or Spanish teacher will teach anywhere from one to three private lessons/day (for a maximum of 120 minutes).
• Materials: rather than preparing a worksheet before the lesson, written feedback is provided during and after each lesson.
Open Classes
• Apart from its regular paid programme, GET also organises Open Classes in English and Spanish, which can be attended by all Peace Boat passengers, free of charge. These classes are held on days when the ship is at sea in the largest spaces on board.
• There are three levels of English Open Classes:
Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. There is also a Beginner-level Spanish Open Class.
• Each class is 40 minutes and is taught with translation support from an interpreter (CommunicationCoordinator, or “CC”) for all levels other than advanced. The number of participants who attend fuctuates from day to day and can reach as many as 200 people.
Challenge Programmes
• There are between one to four GET Challenge Programmes on a regular global voyage. These are special in-port programmes that provide opportunities for GET students to apply their English and/or Spanish to real-life situations. They may be one-day cultural exchanges with local students or overnight home-stays with local families. GET teachers will be assigned to Challenge Programmes on a rotational basis.
Additional Programmes
• Depending on the unique needs of each voyage, GET teachers may be involved in:
• organising events, such as: speech festivals, language games, a ship-wide all English/Spanish day, English/Spanish karaoke, student graduation ceremonies, etc.
• running a series of language-related workshops, such as: book clubs, introductions to a language relevant to a port of call, writing (e.g. poetry, speeches, letters, emails) workshops, intercultural communicationworkshops, etc.
• organising language-based student-centred projects, such as: video projects, theatrical projects, children's book projects, manga/cartoon projects, band/choir projects, etc. Each voyage is unique and offers its own opportunities and responsibilities for GET teachers. As both a volunteer staff member and a member of the onboard international division, the duties of a volunteer teacher extend beyond GET-related teaching duties.
Self-organised events (SOEs)
• Self-organised events (SOEs) may be educational, entertaining, or both, and vary greatly depending on the unique experiences, talents, skills, knowledge, and background of each teacher. They might be a one-off event or a series, and aimed at attracting a crowd of hundreds or engaging a group as small as ten. A crucial part of every voyage, SOEs enable teachers to meaningfully interact with participants outside of Peace Boat’s GET Programme.
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