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.
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On Tuesday afternoons my classroom shrinks to the size of a kitchen bench. Perched on the bar stools among the afternoon snacks, bits of abandoned craft and preparations for dinner, my young student and I work our way through an Italian language course.
His grandma offers to make me a coffee. Mum puts business calls on hold for a minute to play with her youngest on the sofa behind us. Little sister Emma*, the craft generator, sidles up and shows me her latest artwork. Darcy* gets the giggles. He insists a drawing of a goat in his workbook looks like a donkey. It becomes our private Italian joke of the day. It dawns on me that teaching and learning in this space is a delightful exercise in shared hospitality. We could sit in a quieter spot, away from ‘distractions’, but the kitchen bench is Darcy’s choice for today. Although ‘learning a language’ is the parents’ desired extra-curricular outcome , relationship building is at the core of what’s really happening. Language learning is the conduit and the by-product. What can I learn from this experience? Can I re-imagine the learning spaces and what could be achieved in the learning process in a classroom setting? This is something I want to keep exploring. 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 |
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