Por: Arleth Salazar de la Torre
Last Wednesday, September 11 of this year, the students of Advanced English and Academic English had the opportunity to receive Jaime García y Espinosa, in charge of the Intercultural English area at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla.
With the two groups gathered in the classroom, the teacher began introducing himself and later showed us a video called Man by Steve Cutts. The video, even when I have seen it already repeated times, always shows me something new. Well, it addresses the issue of consumerism of the human being based on the exploitation of nature, explaining how since its origin, the human species has endeavored to maintain a relationship with nature while trying to know it, because its survival depends on it.
Thus, the human being, with the purpose of having a total domain of nature, not only collected those fruits that nature gave him but also learned to sow and harvest them, initially with his own hand, then with help of animals and finally he created machines that did the heaviest work for him. It is in this way that dissatisfied with the benefits that it offered, he chose to destroy it, overexploiting it, deforesting it, and ending all its resources.
But it is now, in the 21st century, with the presence of technology and social networks that young people have, not only the duty, but the obligation to change this reality immersed in political, economic and social conflicts.
After watching the video and analyzing the lessons he left us, the students did a very interesting activity from my point of view. Think long-term, and imagine ourselves as adults: I imagined myself as a very funny adult but with responsibilities with myself and of course with the world. As adults we have the opportunity to be independent and earn money for our work, but from my perspective adults become individualistic and do not think about their environment, so that’s why I image myself as someone who helps to restore the planet in every way even with small actions. This also led us to talk about everyday habits and the way in which by changing these we can generate a positive transformation of our reality.
At the end of the session the professor requested a brainstorm in which the students shared our thoughts to change the world.
In conclusion, I believe that the conference was one more call for young people like us to act for a better world, free of any conflict and of course, free of pollution leaving us with the question “How can we transform reality?” It also served a lot to practice our tools of speaking, writing and listening in English, because I believe it is the aim of the dynamic by having the name of English Learning Strategies: Speaking, Listening and Writing.
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