Finding myself between jobs, I have lately gone back to the Primary classroom as a casual substitute teacher...
Working as a ‘sub’ can be very instructive to understanding what it’s like to be a stranger in a foreign land, without the tiresome plane trip. In processing the experience I've realised there is value in considering: could there be applications here for the Languages classroom?
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“Our rich multicultural nation maintains a frustratingly monolingual mindset”, begins a recent scholarly article. It is a reality with which teachers of mandatory high school language courses are all too familiar.
Rachel Moore, my guest blogger, is a Year 7 French language teacher at Nepean Christian School. In this post she shares her approach to unlocking the hearts and minds of her students to understand the value of language learning. “What if my students could learn from a person of another culture and language, not merely about them?”
This was the question Anna Kowalik from Broughton Anglican College considered as she prepared a language and culture unit on Barcelona for her Spanish classes. The focus of the unit was to be examples of the work of the famous architect Antonio Gaudí, popularly known as 'God's Architect'. Let's be realistic. Time for reflective planning is a luxury we don't always have. But let's not give up! Sometimes the best ideas come in a flash of inspiration. Even in those last moments as we prepare for a lesson, we can be open to seeing a new way to engage young minds. To ask: "What if...?"
What if that we could take our students, and maybe ourselves, to new and meaningful places of discovery and learning? Sometimes all that is required is a simple, yet effective, pedagogical shift. |
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