In this 2023 conversation with Justine Willis Toms, award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield takes us beyond our analytical minds and lands us in an embodied experience. Hirshfield offers that this helps us meet the despair which inevitably rises up in the darkest moments. She adds that poetry can cut windows and doors in your despair and give you a way to walk back into the world with others*.* Against the torrent of data and information that issues from an increasingly polarized and rageful cu...

In this time of global uncertainty good poems can soften the heart and help us face another day with curiosity, wonder and hope. It gives us another lens to view the world and helps bring what is often unseen into view. Poetry opens us to feel our connection to one another and to nature. It gives us the opportunity to recalibrate our perspective on our place in the world.

Jane Hirshfield points out that many people turn to poetry in times of great life transitions. She says, “You know when people fall in love, or when they lose love, or lose someone they loved, that is when they want a poem. When they get married, they want a poem. These great transitions are larger than the normal, ordinary consciousness. And what poems do is give us a vocabulary for understanding things, which isn’t available through any other use of language.” Her poetry alludes...

Timely and important revised edition of a significant, influential classic text which is still peerless in the field.This new edition builds on Jane Willis’s classic textbook to reflect the changing needs and priorities of language teachers in today’s classrooms. The book has been revised and expanded to reflect the widespread use of technology and the internet in language classrooms, as well as recent debates and developments in research on language learning....

A Framework for Task-based Learning is a complete guide to the methodology and practice of task-based language teaching. For those who wish to adopt a genuinely learner-centred approach to their teaching, it offers an alternative framework to the “presentation, practice, production” model. This book is based on sound principles of language learning and combines the best insights from communicative language teaching with a systematic focus on language form. It explains and exemplifies each ...

Task-based teaching has created enormous interest among teachers in recent years. But how does the idea of designing tasks (e.g. discussions, problems, games) that encourage learners to use real language work in practice? This book explains the basic principles behind task-based learning and teaching and gives practical examples of how to make it work in different teaching situations.

I write for pleasure and when I feel strongly about something I find it much easier to be articulate writing my feelings down than trying to explain myself vocally. Some of the poems I wrote when my marriage broke down after twenty years are quite dark and depressing, but there is always the golden thread of hope running through which lifts the spirit at the end. It would be nice to think that readers of my work could relate to some of my sentiments, especially the humour in poems like The...

Melanie and her partner Henrietta are two small-time crooks who have chosen crime as their hobby rather than their living. From the sleepy village of Mallowmarsh, Mel plans to steal a valuable double row of pearls belonging to the late, wealthy Claribel Louise. These she intends either to sell on, or give as a present to her partner Henri whom she rightly believes would rather not take part in these dodgy, amateur escapades. But try as she may to pull off the perfect crime, Mel's efforts t...

An unforgettably funny animal adventure story about a little bird with big dreams, from award-winning author Jeanne Willis. One of the fantastic titles in the brand new Awesome Animals series – the funniest fiction, starring the wildest wildlife, from prize winning authors.Rory the rockhopper penguin loves showing off, but with few visitors to the zoo, life has become a little dull. If things don’t improve the zoo might have to close.So when the keepers install PENGUINCAM R...

In this 2025 interview with Justine Willis Toms, James Fadiman, Ph.D. and Jordan Gruber, J.D. discuss protocols, the legality, safety, and other facts about microdosing. Microdosing involves taking small amounts of psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, typically every other day, to enhance physical health and cognitive function. Research, including participatory citizen first-person accounts, indicates that microdosing has alleviated symptoms of depression, ADHD, chronic pain,...

How will making friends with death inform our lives? Gignoux invites us to see into this great mystery as we relate to a friend. She has assembled stories that people have been telling one another over many centuries about the mysteries of life, death and beyond.

In this text various specialists in education honsider the merits of current thinking on self-esteem in relation to their field of expertise. Each concludes that a radical reassessment of the ways in which we think about