Developing empathy should be a natural fit for language teaching. Shouldn’t it? But how do we actually encourage students to move from being mere spectators and tourists to seeing life from another person’s point of view and to stand alongside them?
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The Italian piazza is the centre of community for Italian cities, towns and villages. How people connect in the piazza, and have done over centuries, is key to understanding Italian culture and language use.
As I began planning a teaching unit for Primary, Stage 3, I wanted to design lessons and activities for my students to learn not just the vocabulary associated with the piazza – the shops, the buildings, the amenities - or even the conversations they may have there. I wanted them to go deeper, to think about what we can learn from the piazza. How we frame learning will shape what students imagine they are doing. Is their expectation that they are learning a language simply to accumulate knowledge and become proficient at useful phrases? Or can we invite them to imagine a purpose beyond themselves? In this case, to consider how we connect with others, in order to better understand and meet the human need for connection and community. Inspiration can sometimes arise from unexpected sources.
The following is a quote from The Lieutenant, a novel by Kate Grenville, set in the early colony of NSW. The quote refers to the main protagonist, Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, an astronomer, meteorologist and linguist, who sets himself the task of acquiring the language of the local indigenous people. "What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you do not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you..... The names of things, if you truly wanted to understand them, were as much about the spaces between the words as they were the words themselves. Learning a language was not a matter of joining any two points with a line. It was a leap into the other." p.233 It’s a new term. For me it’s a new school, for a term, and a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with a colleague to design Italian language learning experiences that will encourage our students from Pre-K to Year 6 to become attentive and reflective listeners, interested in the lives and stories of others and what they can learn from them.
As we prepare, we have been questioning and considering: Why do I teach this content this way? How can we shift the focus from ‘I’ to ‘other’? How can we create more meaningful language learning opportunities with a focus on hospitality? How can we infuse our lessons with a winsome mix of authenticity, humour, collaboration, action and reflection which will engage an energetic jumble of boys? All in 30 minutes a week. Will we succumb to "let's be realistic"? Or take up the challenge to be ambitiously real! 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? In my Italian language classes it is not unusual for a variety of language backgrounds to be represented. One way we practise hospitality towards classmates in Kindy is to learn to count in each other’s first language (L1), establishing the foundation that language forms an important part of our identity and that all people (represented by their languages) are welcome.
However, I had not really given much thought to building and encouraging L1 or heritage language in subsequent years. After all, learning Italian is the goal, isn't it? It was the last day of term. My Kindy students were putting the final glittery touches on their Christmas Nativity wall hangings, Italian Christmas songs on repeat in the background. Buon Natale! È nato Gesù! (Happy Christmas, Jesus is born!) We were celebrating the birth of Jesus and the end of Kindy’s first year learning a language together.
A day later, the classrooms were strangely quiet, emptied of their chatter, endless energy and laughter. It was time to reflect. Had I used the time wisely? Had I taught them well? What foundational understandings and attitudes of hospitality would these Kindy graduates bring to their next language class? How would I grow as a teacher from this year’s experiences? What might I do differently next time? “What does it mean to have a mind that is open? A heart that is giving?”
The Year 7 Mandarin class I was visiting at St Andrews Cathedral School had been asked to consider these questions and discuss. In the middle of the tables were tantalising “party bags” full of pictures and realia, waiting to be emptied and explored. It was an introductory lesson to the topic Celebrations, to be taught across the three languages offered at the school. First, however, their teacher Dominique Haynes was guiding her students to explore the underlying learning attitudes that she would be encouraging them to bring to this inquiry unit. “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'. |
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