Conceptual Literature

At Vienna International School, we put together a short list of great books by Black authors in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and sent this list to students for suggested summer reading.  Visit the link here.  Please let me know of your favorites!

Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, speaks of writing and reading as a form of protest in an interview with The Paris Review: 

Now, mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. 

Salzburg, Austria: “Sphaera,” Stephan Balkenhol (2007)

When COVID fever first hit Europe and we were anticipating what would happen next, my students in Vienna naturally wanted to talk about it.  Many of us had recently hit the ski slopes and feared we could be carrying the disease even as we pondered its impact.

I expected questions, anxieties about the disease, about what would happen with school, exams, sports.  What I didn’t expect was that the moment the topic was breached in my sixth form students naturally navigated toward an unbidden discussion of ethics.  They wanted to talk about the impact of the virus and the closures on different types of people, wanted to discuss their disappointment with world leaders.  Rather than investigating their feelings about simple cause and effect or ways the pandemic could impact themselves, they spoke like chess players:

If we close things down and the economy collapses, then so will health care, and how many more will die? 

There were warning signs; governments could have used these to lead with foresight and shut down earlier.  Wouldn’t this have been better for the economy, too? Maybe they can learn from this to deal with climate change.

What can we do now to prepare for our learning at home?  How can we best use our time?  Can we maybe swap that next unit we were going to do for one that’s more independent?   

There are a lot of articles out there that current school closures are changing schools forever because of the use of technology.  Schools have been changing because of technology for a couple of decades, and students are learning skills to help them enhance collaboration or creative and critical thought, but this pandemic is merely making technology visible to the public.  It’s also making disparity between schools or households more visible.  I posit that the real change in education will be the teaching of ethics, something that is not reliant on income or resources. This approach to learning is more important for our workers and leaders in the future than how much time is spent working from home or in the office. 

The greater good.  The impact on humanity.  The reasons we make difficult choices.  These elements of ethical considerations are all the news today as we navigate uncertainty and choices for governments moving forward.  Rather than shield our students from the difficult conversations, we should throw them into it.  They are thinking about these things anyway, and many have strong opinions.  By allowing forums for conversations where multiple perspectives can be considered, logical fallacies identified, and research vetted and presented, students can learn about ethics as well as the importance of the Truth.

Schools with the International Baccalaureate have a class dedicated to such questions called Theory of Knowledge, which is also meant to be interdisciplinary.  Some other schools have courses on ethics, or include this in religious studies or critical thinking classes.  The French study philosophy, both in theory and applied.  When I taught Theory of Knowledge, I would use contemporary case studies for debates from different perspectives that included different subject areas as well as ways of thinking about the world.  As a teacher in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement, we held debate as businessmen, market stall workers, bus drivers, triad members, immigrants, police officers, artists, local politicians, and world leaders.  Students were able to see the issue was not so black and white, and try to find a solution to best serve the community.  

We would then apply ethical lenses, such as universalism or consequentialism, to determine what we thought the best solution should be.  This practiced was mirrored in a recent article from The New York Times: “Restarting America Means People Will Die Soon.  So when do We do it? : Five thinkers weigh moral choices in a crisis.”, where economics, science, statistical data, and more were used to consider how we should move forward in this pandemic.  This was not unlike the conversation my classroom of seventeen year olds first wanted to have. 

Learning about and applying ethics can happen in any classroom.  With a structured understanding of such ways of thinking, students can consider perspectives and work toward a greater humanity.  And isn’t this what we really want our students to learn when they graduate high school? 

We need to help students learn these structures and then give them unstructured time and space to apply them.  This pandemic has also taught us that sometimes less is more when it comes to content, that we should prioritize and condense.  John Hattie’s research of students who missed school after the Christchurch earthquake demonstrates that this extra time could help students actually learn better. Without commutes and scheduled activities or tutors, students have had opportunities to play: to philosophize and form opinions, to create in response to tragedy, to pursue lines of inquiry.  We hear a lot more about the benefits of head space in the world of work these days, such as from Arianna Huffington on the Your Brain at Work podcast.

Let us start thinking about how we aim to move forward.  The English teacher is often trying to help students learn by studying tragedy.  This pandemic is no different, only that the story is real.  Despite, and perhaps because of, its terrible toll on lives through sickness, death, unemployment, anxiety, domestic abuse, and more, we must take the gifts that it leaves in its wake before they are swallowed up by a mindless return to status quo.

How can we take our current difficult learning situation and make it meaningful?  I’m not going to give you the rundown of balancing time or all the tech tools you can use with your students.  Instead, here are a couple of tips for teaching from home (that can also be used in the real classroom).

Synthesize Creatively

We probably all have ways of synthesizing work or reading content.  Teaching students to summarize and recall in their own paraphrases is essential to student progress. Writing summaries is an art form and an essential skill.  A variety of tools to orally recall and synthesize information are also useful in a physical classroom.  

But with e-learning you might want to use more creativity to help students engage when teachers are not present to verbally motivate.  We can do some of these things as normal on our virtual class discussions or with written work that students turn in.  However, self-motivation at home might be easier when a little more creativity is involved.

To illustrate the key points of a text, you can instead ask students to: use tableau photographs of themselves (or their pets), tell the story with emojis, write in a different language, create a storyboard, or make a playlist/video mash-up.  Any of these can easily be brought together on a collaborative slide show whether the student’s work is on a computer or on paper and captured with photograph.  In a virtual meeting, students can explain their slides and respond to each other’s work.

Choices, choices, choices!

Most of us use some student agency in the classroom.  Whether this looks like allowing students to self-differentiate some of their work or reading, decide as a text to read as a class, choose among several assessments to demonstrate their learning, or all of these things depends on your classroom and your students.  

However, e-learning is a time when student agency can especially help with motivation.  Additionally, you may find it easier to manage students who work at different paces or want to pursue different aims during this time.  Without peer pressure, constraints of a classroom, and perhaps without the need to cover certain content (depending on your school), you may find more freedom in allowing choice:

• Allow a choice of methods to communicate (email, Hangouts, voice recording, etc.)
• Give options for class reading related to a conceptual idea
• Let students choose online platforms to showcase their learning, and therefore learn about these tools together (consider the pros and cons)
• Create virtual navigation through a unit with opportunities for different guided inquiry approaches
• If assessment requirements have been eased, allow more choice in expression of an idea

We have an opportunity to reinvent for new methods of student learning.  Allow yourself and your students to experiment and you may find that some of these more progressive choices become your new normal.  

Secret Extension

We all offer extension and optional work; sometimes this is done in the classroom under our guidance and other times it is something that highly motivated students do at home.  However, you can trick students into wanting more and taking extension in their own directions by using a small part of something online that offers other great resources.  For example, the BBC has some great mini lessons.  Something both useful and funny is the character song for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Students might then access the other great resources on this website.  Or direct students to a current article related to the concept you are exploring, for example from Quartz Ideas.  Then, suggest students explore the website for ten minutes after the lesson.  

The lesson doesn’t have to be online.  Instead, you might ask them to explore the bookshelves at home to search for something related to the concept or walk the nearby streets (if it’s safe to do so and age appropriate) in order to write a pastiche of poetry (Baudelaire, Yesi, Dickinson, etc.).  In these instances, students are sure to make other discoveries on the bookshelves and the streets around them.  You might ask for related photographs, journaling, or a quick comment to start your virtual lesson.  Turn them onto great stuff without it feeling like a lesson.

Channel Mindfulness

In our classrooms, we try to make mindfulness a part of our classes: balance, presence, meditation, or even yoga might enter the communal space.  In the e-learning environment, it is even more important to help students relax their minds, get out of their chairs, and tap into the current learning moment.  

We can start a lesson by asking students to do simple movements (not necessarily yoga) or by listening to a song to set a mood or intention.  We can start live classes by asking each student for a word to describe an intention for that lesson or the entire day.  We can even use movement as metaphor for something we are teaching to engage with the mind-body connection.  For example, dancing freely to a song (perhaps embarrassing in the classroom!) can help us understand independence or creativity in a certain way.  Learning ways to differentiate Tree Pose can help us think about our learning styles or different perspectives in a text.

Personally, the first three weeks of e-learning were just about surviving.  With loads of information (often changes, and changes again) from admin or the government, an eighteen-month old boy to take care of and juggle with my husband, and trying to process the transition and pandemic, I didn’t have the head space to think carefully about what I wanted my students’ home learning experience to be.  Teachers on my team each had their unique challenges, whether isolation, single parenting, vulnerable relatives abroad, or simply anxiety – about the disease, about e-learning, about the future.  I just got through what I had planned and started listening to feedback from the kids.   But in the time that followed (including a much needed spring break after the first three weeks), I was able to more clearly consider how we could use this time for good.  

I think it’s important that we always teach our students to both acknowledge the problems in our world (personal or universal) and look on the positive side, look for the hope and “look for the helpers” (Fred Rogers).  In the same way, e-learning can be seen as a hindrance, a lack, a pain in the butt just as a lack of exams can be seen as unfair and problematic.  But it is what it is.  We have to work without what we’ve got.  Yoga teaches us to let go of what we cannot control and find balance and positivity through what we can.  Hopefully these four key areas can help you to think of how you approach e-learning with your students and take advantage of it as a unique time for their learning.  

Hiro Murai is a Japanese filmmaker living in the US.  One of his specialties is in the music video text type, although he has also directed the television series Atlanta, created by Donald Glover (Childish Gambino).  His recent work with Glover on the “This is America” music video has generated discussions about the valuable, political nature of music videos.  

The Political Reader - concept focus

We started the year with a unit on “The Political Reader” as a concept focus (see more on this in my book) and with a look at literary essays from George Orwell.  We investigated politics through a variety of lenses, including ethics, governments, writing as political, and individual political acts.  I then asked students for input as we selected our BOW, and we settled on Hiro Murai music videos, Greta Thunberg speeches, and the feature length film Invictus.  

BOW in the new course: student agency

The addition of the ‘Bodies of Work’ (sets of ‘non-literary’ texts under the same authorship) came as a late addition to the new DP Language A course, and therefore has been a stress for many teachers.  Despite this, I’ve found it to be a more meaningful way to engage in different text types beyond the core literary genres in the Language & Literature course.  It allows students to go deeper in analysis and context as they work towards understandings of Global Issues. 

I have found that a great way to make the BOW come alive is to include students in the decision process of your BOW and the particular texts within it.  We know that the new guide encourages student agency and IB teacher resources suggest students can investigate further texts in a BOW to use for assessment with some teacher guidance.

Murai works with many genres of musical artistry, which allows many students to get involved in his work.  We literally hear a multitude of voices through his videos, allowing different forms of cultural expression to be valued as we aim to understand their importance to both individuals and communities.  

Analytical skills 

For the Hiro Murai videos, we first took a careful look at “This is America” (musical artist: Childish Gambino) through different analytical lenses.  These types of analysis were: cinematography & mise-en-scene, editing, music & sound, language (lyrics as well as any other dialogue or written text), and narrative (including characterization).  Then, groups analyzed “Black Man in a White World” (musical artist: Michael Kiwanuka) from particular lenses and presented to the class.  This allowed for my oral feedback and additions as well in order  to continue to develop the analytical terminology.

Finally, the groups selected another Murai video from a list of my suggestions to analyze from all lenses and share in relation to a Global Issue in a carousel group.  They did not present all of the analysis; rather, they selected what helped them to make a point about the Global Issue.  Students selected “Cheerleader” (St. Vincent), “Dis Generation” (Tribe Called Quest), “It’s Only Life” (The Shins), and “Smooth Sailing” (Queens of the Stoneage).  

Preparing for the Individual Oral

We are currently preparing for a written version of the Individual Oral where students must select an Orwell essay and one of the videos.  Because the text types are so different, it allows students to really focus on the Global Issue to connect the texts.  They have to be more creative in the way they develop their points.  I have found that this G.I. focus as well as the rich differences between the works have prompted creativity.  Students have had lightbulb moments about power, justice, racism, guns, and more and been able to articulate their line of inquiry in a careful and nuanced way.

Some teachers have asked practically how to bring in extracts of the videos to the oral. The new FAQ from IB identifies the ability to bring in both screen shots and a script from multimodal texts such as this.  I have guided my students to select a 20-40 second clip with 2-4 screenshots and any lyrics from the chosen clip, up to 40 lines.  This has been enough for students to talk about without feeling overwhelmed by analysis.

An Auteur!

Murai is truly an auteur.  His videos are diverse in message but always much more than what you might expect for a song before you see it.  They tell stories and they provoke the viewer.  In this way, my students tell me, he is political.  And for this reason, looking at his films as a Body of Work is a useful and relevant study of artistry.

Oneworld Publications, 2018, by Ahmed Saadawi, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright

On Book Depository

This is a beautiful novel and adaptation by Ahmed Saadawi of one of my favourite’s: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I love reading Shelley’s text with students in November, the time when the ‘monster’ is created (“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.”).  We often do so as part of a unit on ‘beauty’ or ‘ethics’.  You’ll see below how this original and its Iraq-based adaptation could be used in conceptual focus units like these.

The novel —

The story is complex about war in Iraq, less about sides and politics and more about the way people are affected - families, individual soldiers, journalists - by the ongoing threat of terror.  The Guardian calls the book “strange, violent and wickedly funny.”  Saadawi questions religion and god in general, a discourse on the disgust of the splay of bodies, and an unnaturalness to the loss of sons and loved ones in this way.  The ‘monster’ is similar to Shelley’s in that it, the unnamed, helps us understand the problems and shortcomings of humanity and society through his naivety and new look at those around him by whom he is mistreated.  Yes, he is a monster - killing and terrorising those around him - but can we blame him?  Or is this who we all are at essence?

The outlook is bleak, but there is humour here, too, and moment of pure humanity that make us consider our own place on this earth and the reason that a war zone (arguably void of culture and society) brings out the worst in people.  Let’s look at the top five reasons to teach this text.

1. Adaptation

Of course, adaptations of the book itself are plentiful.  I love, for example, the Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro version (1994) that includes some subtle but well thought out changes to the plot.  Less successful, in my opinion, is the more recent version (2015) featuring Daniel Radcliffe as Igor (cinema’s version of Shelley’s Henry Clerval) that takes a lot of liberties but doesn’t get creative enough to be an interesting parody like Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012).  There are loads of different versions; IMDB lists 47 entires under “Frankenstein Adaptations” that go back to 1910.

However, we can use this text with an adaptation unit, including film, perhaps not just specifically of Frankenstein but also films like Edward Scissorhands that question man’s response to unknown creatures as well as human’s desire to make something in an unnatural way, for selfish reasons.  We can extend this to the genetic engineering and designer baby debate by looking at news articles on the topic, or films like The Island or those that connect it to AI, of which there are many but I prefer Ex Machina.

You can have students do their own pastiche of the original Frankenstein to illustrate a global issue or help us understand the allegorical connection of Shelley’s story to the new context.  

2. Intertextuality (the dialogue of literature)

Intertextuality is different in that we look at texts in dialogue together to understand new meanings.  You would consider the relationship between Shelley’s classic text and this modern adaptation.  But, you would also likely consider texts like Paradise Lost, which is alluded to in Shelley, or other works of literature that use similar themes.  Additionally, you can use inquiry into the context of this story to better understand its themes.  You may choose to hand select several journalistic pieces, for example, that discuss ongoing conflicts in Iraq and the involvement of foreign military (especially from the US).  

3. Ethics

There are many ethical questions in this text (as well as that of Shelley).  If you are at an IB school, this might be taught in conjunction with TOK, or at least by using the ethical lenses your students will learn.  

You can again look at ‘designer babies’ and genetic engineering, at the manifestation of grief, at the struggles of war.  Is war ever ethical?  How can one create one’s own moral and ethical perspectives within a war zone?  

You might also consider the monstrous elements in humans and human elements in the monster.  Is the monster actually human or not?  What is the distinction?

4. Perspective

We see different perspectives of war and conflict in Iraq.  None come out as winners or as righteous; in fact, all seem to lose, to struggle.  Consider the connections among perspective, empathy, and ethics.

Look at a world issue from the perspective of the monster.  Use at least four media articles from different sources and perspectives on the issue to conduct your research.  Use at least one WOK explicitly in your understanding of the issue.  Deliver your perspective in one of these forms: Op-Ed, interview (written transcript or performed), series of Tweets, speech, political advertising campaign, or another appropriate method you clear with your teacher beforehand.  

5.  World Literature & Translation

This novel is translated from Arabic.  Why is this important?  What audiences does the text reach in Arabic and English, respectively?  How is Arabic both a unifier and a separator as a language, when we look at different dialects as well as the diaspora?

Depending on where you live and teach, you might not be familiar with much literature from the Arab world.  I came to these rich discoveries late.  My exposure before had been the Arab world through the eyes of others, like Albert Camus.  Perhaps you look at several examples, like the poetry or memoirs of Darwish, novels of Mahfouz, and poetry of Fadwa Tuqan.  Of course, there are many others.  If you have any students with Arabic as a mother tongue, they might have examples to suggest.  And if not, they might be excited to read something originally in their home language.  

So, these are just a few ideas of how to use this text.  Consider adding it as a central work to study or as an extension or book circle text.  Further, any Language A Arabic teachers might use this as a core text in the original language of course.  My next post will refer back to the idea of the unnamed monster.  Thanks for reading and do let me know how it goes if you end up teaching this.

Kathleen

London, November 2019

Concept Based Learning unit development for IB DP Language A

A two day workshop with the author of Language A for the IB Diploma: Concept Based Learning

Bratislava, March 2020 

*Sign up here

Guiding Questions

• What do cities tell us about texts and vice versa?
• How can we read the city as a text?
• How do written texts and the cinematic tell different stories of a city and its people?
• How can we create meaningful conceptual units that combine content and skills?
• How can conceptual unit design allow us to include differentiation and extension?

Description

Especially from the dawn of Modernity, writers and artists have been interested in the concept of the city.  This workshop investigates different texts that make use of the city and the way the city can be a text itself.  We draw on ideas from: the uncanny, the cinematic, the ghostly, Modernity, urbanity, urban culture, globalisation, and space’s relationship with personal and cultural identity.  We look at ways you can use this concept in your classroom in analysis, creative writing, text discovery, and experiential learning.

During this weekend long workshop in Bratislava, we will investigate how to set up a conceptual unit within the framework of the new IBDP Language A course.  The workshop is appropriate for the Literature or Language and Literature courses in any Language A, but the language of instruction will be English.  I will draw on examples from a variety of text types, literary works, and cultures to prompt our discussion and activities.  We will look at Dublin, Hong Kong, New York, Prague, and more cities and their texts through this lens. During the workshop, you will then form your own unit designed for your interests and the needs of your students.  The workshop will be interactive and immersive with a lot of hands on activities and opportunities to use your creativity and critical thought while collaborating with colleagues.  It will include a professionally guided literary tour of the city.  There will be light pre-reading material and opportunities following the workshop for collaboration and feedback; a longer duration of this manner is proven to give your PD more impact.  

Details

Dates: March 28-29, 2020 (Saturday - Sunday)

Place: Crowne Plaza, Bratislava, Slovakia

Cost: 590 Euros (includes all workshop materials, a professional literary tour of Bratislava, snacks, and lunches as well as follow-up feedback and an official certificate upon completion)

Room & board: Crowne Plaza workshop deal for 95 euros/night, including a beautiful buffet breakfast, swimming pool, gym, etc.

Participants: maximum 20

Workshop leader: Dr. Kathleen Clare Waller of Conceptual Literature (conceptualliterature.com)

Sign up form

More details to come upon confirmation.  Please wait for confirmation before booking.

In this recent post as a guest on Hodder Education’s blog, I discuss the ways you can make a current hot topic into a concept for your Language A classroom and point to areas in my book that can help you to achieve this goal.  

You can further connect a concept like this one to student CAS work through writing, volunteering, or activism and interdisciplinary work including biology, earth science, or geography as well as ethics in TOK.  In this way, it can be a case study, a pedagogical method I can help you develop through workshops.  

Related reading:

• Climate change vs. Global warming articles (power of language): CNN, The Guardian
• Local vs. global, geography interdisciplinary BBC
• Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
• Student activists in London; article in The Guardian

Part of developing the voices of our students is in listening to the topics or texts they want to study.  Student choice on your syllabus will not only motivate your students to read but will also help the entire classroom, including yourself, hear new perspectives.  Even if students are choosing from a set of topics or texts you have pre-selected, the reasons they vote on particular items help us to understand the children better and allow us to see the matrix of our selections in a different way.  

You can build student choice into your course in a variety of ways.  This is something I address at several points in the IB DP Language A concept-based learning book.  In this recent post on Hodder’s blog, I discuss these aspects.  It is also something we can work on together in a workshop or through consultation.  This is just one of many ways to make the learning in your classroom more relevant, dynamic, and fun.  

This post is relevant either to language A/B teachers or to educators looking at whole school literacy implementation ideas.  

Thank you, Yi Shen (Sandy) for showing me the power of a language profile in our workshop in Hong Kong (Sha Tin College, September 2017)!  This is something any of you can try with your teaching staff or your classrooms to make language a truly dynamic part of the learning process at your school and help people become aware of the power and challenges that come with personal language knowledge.  

Some schools will already have a language profile for each student.  Often, this only lists the home language(s) and level of English (or language of instruction) of the student.  We can do more!  Also, sometimes the level of English listed is from an application filled out by parents trying to impress the school.  Find out where the information comes from to really understand what it means.  Essentially, there are many ways to get more information that can help gain knowledge for the student’s personalised learning strategies, but likely the best person to create this portfolio is the student, at least in secondary schools.

In order to understand how this works for students, try to do it yourself:

Think back to your infant development and schooling: what is your language story?  Where and when did you learn language(s)? What dialects do you speak?  What slang do you know?  Especially if you live away from where you grew up, this dynamic has probably changed over the years.  Even if you only speak English, you have probably had exposure to different kinds of English and use a certain type with friends, family, and students.  You probably also at one point learned a second language in school.  What was this experience of language learning like for you?  What excites you about (other) languages?  What scares you?  How does language give you power?  How does it make you powerless?

There will probably be a wide range of responses to these questions from colleagues and students alike.  Sharing your language story with a colleague or two can help you to express what language is for you and to have empathy for others who may find difficulty with language.

Try drawing a map of the language(s) you use today.  With whom and for what purposes do you speak different languages, dialects, or slang?  Maybe your register simply shifts; that is ok as well. Maybe you speak some languages for fun and others out of a need.  

I was raised an anglophone.  Hailing from Boston, I avoided the accent and local dialect due to the nature of the transplant and immigrant town of Lexington that I grew up in.  My parents came from Minnesota and Texas, and each had lived in Boston since just after their university years.  We had a blended American English at home.

My mom also studied French extensively at school, so when I started lessons at age 7 in our school system, the fit felt natural.  Half of my mom’s family is French and with Québec not that far away, schools in the area at that time all taught French to students as a ‘second’ language.  I took French all through grade school until the AP exam when I feel out of love with the language.  Suddenly, I had teachers who just cared about correctness and memorisation rather than taking us to see the Impressionist exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts or teaching us how to make crepes.  The joy was killed.

So at university, I took Spanish for a year.  It was fun, but I wasn’t quite in love with it the same way.  And then there were all those other courses on the syllabus and I wanted to double major…so…no language B study for a couple of years.  But then, Latin the last year.  I had wanted to take Latin as a first-year but my advisor said it was a dead language.  What was the point?  I found the grammatical structures a fun puzzle and our tiny class of five a fun classical oasis.  

After college, I went straight into my MAT to earn a teaching degree.  I hadn’t studied abroad like so many US students mostly because of sport with the plan to somehow do it later.  My MAT programme allowed you to do your student teaching abroad, but you had to find the school.  It was much of the reason I had chosen the program.  

I had decided I wanted to give French a go again.  After writing to many schools in Switzerland and France, I finally got a positive response from the Lycée International American Section director, just outside of Paris.  Paris!  What a dream.  They wouldn’t pay me, of course, but I could work with several of their teachers and live with one of the school’s families in exchange for some babysitting and tutoring.  

That year was bliss.  But I could digress for ages about my love affair with Paris…back to the language!  I had to take intensive French courses again as part of my visa.  It was also a great way to meet people from other places.  I had very good, slow, correct French, I was told time and again.  But it was slow.  Part of culture is how you speak, and the French, at least the Parisians, don’t like to speak slowly.  I was given the advice to just spit it out and not worry about my mistakes.  So I did that, time and again, until I felt comfortable in French.  I felt like a different part of my personality came out in French.  

Fast forward three years: I had moved back to the states and then to Italy.  My French proved very useful in learning Italian and the locals were even more encouraging about just trying the language out.  Within a few months, I was comfortably having conversations.  Sadly, a lot of that is lost now after more than a decade without much exposure, but I think I could reclaim it in a month or so if given the opportunity.  

Similarly, when I moved to Hong Kong, I took Mandarin Chinese lessons.  But though I loved it, I found it difficult to practice the language in a place that is mostly Cantonese and English.  Cantonese was trickier to learn and ‘not as useful’ once you move away.  I never knew how long I would stay…if I had known it would be eight years, I probably would have learned right away.  In any case, learning some Chinese helped me to at least understand what it’s about and is something I would go back to as well with a longer stay in the mainland or again in Hong Kong.  

I kept up the French, though, with long, frequent stays in France, lots of films, and a long-term French beau along the way.  Now, I have friends with whom I speak French in Vienna, I read in French when I can, and I have that dream of living there….

But most of my life is still lived in English.  I’ve learned some German living in Vienna.  I took a class and did some self study.  But there’s always that time factor, and I decided to have a baby and do some writing instead.  Maybe I’ll go back to it.  Let’s see how things shape up in a year or two.  The little I’ve learned is certainly helpful and shows a sort of respect in trying, I think.  When I travel I also like to learn a few phrases for this reason.  We who speak English are privileged to have the ‘international language’ at our fingertips.  But we are only denying ourselves if we limit the other languages we can learn.  

Now I also have a baby boy who is learning language every day.  We speak American and British English at home.  We try not to swear around him.  I sometimes speak with him in French.  He will attend a mostly German speaking nursery school soon.  It makes more me aware of how and why we learn these languages.

That’s my language story in brief.  I’m sure you can find links with geography, emotions, work, and more to understand even more where it all comes from.  I have students with much more dynamic backgrounds.  Some speak three languages at home with their parents, a different one at school (English), take a foreign language, and speak in some kind of multilingual slang with their friends. When students go through their language journeys, their stories, they find ways to use language for learning.  They acquire agency.  In asking teachers to also go through the process, they can connect with the student’s learning as they make reflections on their own journeys, connected also to emotion, place, people…the list goes on. These associations help us understand the way we use languages as well as our motivations or fears connected to language.  

One of my students studying three language A at school (English, German, Italian) for a trilingual diploma (wow!) conducted her Extended Essay research on the topic of multilingualism and cognition.  She narrowed it to bilingualism since little research has been done beyond this, even though, as she noted, many people speak more than two languages.  She always felt her languages were a hindrance, which really shocked me.  Most of the recent research I had read showed the cognitive power of having more than one language.  This is why so many people try to get their kids in immersion programs if there is only one language at home.  She was aware of this, but sometimes felt like words escaped her or she couldn’t understand something she read.  She realised that even though she reads a lot, the time is divided among these three languages. Her vocabulary development could be limited in that way.  Research supported this, but this was the only area she found to be a hindrance.  The way she uses language can be more creative and the development of her brain allows for code switching that goes beyond language and into experiences.

Are any of you doing research in this area?  I would be interested to hear about any current work with multilingual speakers and happy to post a link to your published work on my blog.  

You can incorporate many field trips or extension trips for your students to enrich the conceptual learning experience.  I know it is a legal hassle, but it is worth it!  Day and local trips, even those after school hours, will afford you the least problems of legality, money, and cutting into other course meeting time.  One easy way to access this reality is through local writers and specifically newsrooms.

No matter where you live, you will be able to find a local newsroom.  Though it is a busy place, many reporters or editors will be eager to share their experiences with local youth.  You might already know a journalist or media representative in your area.  If not, reach out to fellow teachers or contact the agencies directly.  Consider the language of the medium if your language of instructions is different from that of the local language.  You might either find agencies operating in English (if that is your course language) or consider a multilingual learning experience that is more focused on the concept of news media rather than the actual written text.

Once you find your willing body, plan your event(s).  You probably have a lot of ideas about how to best utilise this experience.  I think it’s important to have some sort of focus related to your curriculum in addition to a general tour and Q&A that might get kids excited about this profession.  Here are five focus ideas that work, and I would love to hear about more you try out with your students:

1. Biases

The journalist or media professional can help your students consider the ways media can be biased or not.  What do different text types tell us inherently about biases?  If we call these ‘perspectives’ do they become more acceptable?  Some, of course, are meant to be unbiased while others are allowed certain biases.  How might a journalistic author also include different opinions in the text?  Together, you might analyse different articles or types of media or discuss a difficult situation when a reporter has strong feelings about a topic they have to cover.  Politics are a great place to start here!  Papers typically endorse candidates at times of election but are meant to cover all candidates in an unbiased fashion.  You can look at how the media might accomplish this task…or fail.

2. Image content

There is no doubt that we are now in an increasingly image rich society.  Together, consider how images (still or moving) impact the way we digest news.  These might be portraits, photos or videos of events, cartoons, images of natural phenomenon, and more.  How do journalists and other media find the images they use?  How do they ensure it is not doctored?  How does cutting parts of images change the way we view it? What is the impact of images vs. words in today’s media?  The professional might have strong opinions about the way images are used online.  You might also consider citizen journalists here and the way their content can be picked up by media corporations.  How do our phones act as witnesses to events?  Is it a good thing to have so much witness available?  What might be the downsides?  

3.  The biz!

Consider the angle of the media as a business.  If you have many business students, this will be especially interesting.  Consider how news sells.  What headlines create the most hits?  How do agencies decide on their content and where to place it?  What do images have to do with sales or hits? All of this can lead to discussions of text types: how is the news written most effectively and how does the layout on the page enhance the readership?  Students might then create their own news reports that “sell”; they can annotate or orally explain the way their articles are able to make money.  They might also consider ethical debates about printing what sells vs. what is important.  The journalist will no doubt have some examples of this conundrum.  

4. Where does information come from?

This is a great TOK connection if we consider where our knowledge and version of the truth comes from.  There have always been different versions of reality represented through media, but now there is open discourse about the validity or censorship or ‘fakeness’ of it.  Journalists can help your students to find out where exactly they find their information.  They can together consider the relative values of information from witnesses, police reports, government documents, Twitter feeds, and more.  How do they comb through this information to arrive at their published material?  How do images add to this information?  What are they careful of?  Your students might look at a particular emerging story with them to understand this idea more fully.

5. Whom can you trust?

The ideas above lead right into this question: when we digest our news, how do we know if we can trust it?  Consider the language of “post-truth” and “fake news”: what to do these imply about our media today?  Also consider censorship and its role in the media.  How does the move of news from print to online both allow for more truth and fact checking as well as more opportunity for ‘fakeness’?  The journalist might present students with a story covered in two entirely different ways and attempt to analyse where the truth lies.  Or, they might be given tools to attempt to read truthful accounts everyday.  No doubt your contact will have some ideas here!

Additionally, you may choose to have follow up sessions in house if the journalist is interested in doing more.  Your students might work on creating a type of media themselves that the professional can follow up on.  S/he won’t necessarily make and comment on work specifically, but could lead a discussion of how to go through the editing process or consider the impact of the language they have chosen (and its potential biases).  It is more effective with the media professional, but you will also learn more skills to help your students when it is just you in the classroom.  

Kathleen

London, April 2019