For over 15 years the Bethune Institute has been offering high quality TESOL training to Canadians and Americans alike. Our executive director Dr. Jim Garrow was first exposed to ESL learning as a special education teacher in Alliston Ontario. Even though the programs and lessons he was teaching were designed for special needs children, he realized the potential to use the English curriculum as a form of ESL. He eventually was promoted to the department head and was then responsible for the development and implementation of new course material.
Over time Dr. Garrow became vice principal and then principal of several high schools in southern Ontario. It was after accepting a job as principal of an exclusive school for Chinese students that he became aware of the great need for quality people to teach English in China. He conversed with the students and listened to stories about China and their way of life.
Several years later Dr. Garrow was working as president of Shaw Business College in Toronto when he brought in a group of Chinese students and set up his first true ESL course. He found that the methods used as a special education instructor were very effective for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. He started writing and compiling useful TESOL material to help his international students understand English.
Dr. Garrow then became the principal at Nunavut Arctic College, Teacher Education Program. During his tenure there, he acquired the skills to effectively train English teachers. He combined this knowledge with his ESL material and started the Bethune Institute TESOL certification program.
We continue today…
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You never know where that first step in a direction will take you and we marvel today at where we came from as an organization. In October of 1968 a classroom history project in a rural Saskatchewan school exposed a group of students to Dr. Norman Bethune and the marvellous legacy of this unknown Canadian hero. I happened to be one of those students.
The project was simple enough. Find a Canadian worthy of the title "Hero" and explain why they rightly earned this epithet. The regular names were researched, Billy Bishop, Alexander Graham Bell, Banting and Best,et al. A comment from the school librarian produced a name that was not familiar and a book that chronicled his history. Voila! The light went on and we were fascinated to read about him. "Why haven't we heard about this guy before?" was the common lament. Our librarian went on to point out that we weren't exactly in favour of "Communists". Our natural inclination to rebellion and with cries of "thats not fair", "look what he did", we decided to do as much as we could to see that everyone heard about a "real Canadian hero, shamefully ignored in the teaching of the history of Canada". In spite of warnings that a project based on the life of an avowed Communist and non-conformist may not attain the high mark that we were after, we pressed on. She was right.
We did not do well on the project but we certainly had our eyes opened. We decided to form the Bethune Society in honour of Dr. Norman and that is really the beginning of the enterprise we now know as the Bethune Institute. That is why our seal has the date of 1968 as the founding date. Our small group of students decided to remember "a great Canadian" and do things in his honour.
For over 15 years the Bethune Institute has been offering high quality TESOL training to Canadians and Americans alike. Our executive director Dr. Jim Garrow was first exposed to ESL learning as a special education teacher in Alliston Ontario. Even though the programs and lessons he was teaching were designed for special needs children, he realized the potential to use the English curriculum as a form of ESL. He eventually was promoted to the department head and was then responsible for the development and implementation of new course material. 
You never know where that first step in a direction will take you and we marvel today at where we came from as an organization. In October of 1968 a classroom history project in a rural Saskatchewan school exposed a group of students to Dr. Norman Bethune and the marvellous legacy of this unknown Canadian hero. I happened to be one of those students.