EdYOUfest History

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EdYOUfest was born of Giovanni Rottura and Chuck Sandy’s ideas in the summer of 2015. After hundreds of training and development events for English language teachers all over the world, it was felt that there was a need to organise an event which could give more time to teachers to share their training experiences while also enjoying some fun together.

The principal objective was to create a meeting place in which growing friendships could reinforce collaboration between teachers and would last the whole year.

The name chosen and used from the start was EdYOUfest, ‘educational festival’, with teachers and educational professionals at the heart.

At the start of September 2015, in Genoa, Italy, we collected some of the most well-known trainers from a variety of specialisations from all over the world with the remit to create the basis of a project which, from the very start, would prove to be effective. We then spent 3 days working: presentations, group work and discussions and naturally some great moments for socialising. In the end, an event was revealed and EdYOUfest was born.

2016 saw the first event being publicised to all English language teachers and the chosen venue was ‘la Baia del Corallo di Palermo’, in Sicily. This was the year in which the operational team, Philip Pound, teacher and owner of EFL Magazine and Steve Hirschhorn, well-known teacher-trainer got together. EdYOUfest Sicily put the project into practice; teachers took part in various workshops and had time to get to know each other better through evening activities with music, song and excursions. The success of that first event was and still is evident. This was also when EdYOUfest first became a presence on social media.

In 2017 EdYOUfest took place in France, in the countryside near Paris. Amongst the trainers was Dorothy Zemach – EdYOUfest had really taken off!

In 2018, we were ready for the next step, 3 plenary sessions would be added, and we were aiming for a venue which would have all the necessary, high-level facilities. Millfield School was the ideal destination with the great support team of Millfield Enterprises, directed by Mark Greenow. The result was tremendous, we had 75 participants, 12 workshops and 3 plenary session, 5 business sponsors and 9 new partners.

In November 2018 the new website was presented, a new committee created comprising 6 people, extra support from Millfield Enterprises, 12 Fellows and lots of volunteers.

In 2019, we were at Millfield and we’ll be creating the first event fund to support
teachers who might otherwise not be able to join us.
In 2020 because the COVID 19, we organised an online 2 weeks event.

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EdYOUfest will continue to promote training and development workshops and will be ever more present on social media.

Our Motto: exploring the joy of teaching.