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HOW TO PRESENT INTERESTING BUT FOCUSED LANGUAGE MATERIAL The traditional text books which are based on the functional division of language is the cause of boredom. Young minds are not stupid nor only interested in pop groups, holidays, boy-girl romance and a smattering of "environment problems" and "problems with parents". text books which include sections on "civilta’ usually consists of bits and pieces on such subjects as "Christmas pudding" or "the Queen’s Corgies". However if we deal with more serious and interconnected matter we run the risk of losing adolescents' interest. This is a particularly modern complaint about the thinness of connection of adolescents to the real world. One solution is to view their lack of interest as due to them never being given a system of rationality. That is to say, a system of interconnectiong concepts that actually make it possible to reason about the world as opposed to dismiss it as just part of the hostile adult world. Most of them do not work, get easy money from parents and are not given responsabilities that might make them responsable. A typically blaming letter was this letter from a mother in "La Repubblica" newspaper in November 2000. The letter was headed, "Aito, mio figlio e' un cretino".
This lack of a compass wherewith to orientate themselves; a set of values and understanding is an interconnecting fault of the parents, school, the media, and the values and way of life of society as a whole. It is a symptom of what we could call its schizophrenia. The higher culture wrings its hands at the effects of the populist mass consumer society, but the higher culture is too feeble to do anything about the situation. That the children have no clear idea of the world they live in is partly he result of inconclusive schooling. This cd rom project and its web of concepts and newspaper articles represents a perhaps forlorn attempt to rectify what is past cure. Such a grid of conceptual understanding is after all what schooling should be giving the students. MY CD ROM PROJECT
The first format was to create what I called "Human life" charts. These were a collection of the kind of experience that one could be sure they had personal experience of: eg. Troubles with neighbours, competition with siblings, bullying at school, divorce, decisions about the future etc. However, this form of collected life experience seemed too limiting since, rather like the dull "functions" of text books, it tended to reflect only what they knew already whereas what I felt was their real need was to develop a structure of concepts that really could deal with the more complex and unpleasant parts of existence. eg. The modern almost magical transformations of money in the new 24 hour global economy, modern agriculture and food, our treatment of animals or the problem of evil and cruelty (above all that perpetrated by men against children and women). Technology. mental illness. and so on. Because we didn't like the content of most text books we made our own grammar which was to serve as basis from which to freely use other material. I wrote short plays which illustrated a grammar point and collected newspaper articles that could e used as source material for discussions, compositions, presentations, story telling. A subsequent stage was to colate these articles according to a conceptual framework that might save what the mother called the "little Maria Antoinettes" from their ignorance. We would try and show the connections of their reality. That of course is what schools should do. The question is, where do you start from – not just which arguments but from what points of their existing "world view" such that new material might stick – like burrs. I decided to organise the material around a 3 spiral idea. This gave a posssibility of interlinking and then at a simple level offered a set of categories that made it easier to catalogue the articles (now about 500)
THE CONE OF HISTORY Imagine human history like an enormous cone. In the mists of past time the cone is small. The cone grows wider and on the top is situated modern times. Imagine that from even further back than early man, there are 3 spirals within this cone of time. Always the central inner spiral represents our archaic self laid down by millions of years of evolution. The middle spiral is the more or less chaotic experience and responses of the individual caught between the archaic DNA inheritance and that which the outer spiral represents: that is all the patrimony of our socially inherited past; its inventions and institutions. A continual tension which we pay for across our body/ being. ("11 millioni di italiani soffrono dalla depressione" – 2 days ago report) On this outer spiral you could plot the key moments of history, invention and social change ( eg invention of tools /Agriculture / cities / navigation etc).There are 24 main categories in these 3 spirals and within these 24 there are about 240 additional concepts . You can think of these additional concepts (about 10 per main category) as clustered like Russian dolls inside the main categories. 3 spirals -24 large categories - large categories sub divided into more ordinary terms -ordinary terms subdivided into daily terms. The third level of categories are more concrete and particular and refer to matters that are more common to daily experience. (eg. "trouble with neighbours"). These categories are the ones to use for making short plays. Usually text books that deal with questions of civilisation are too bitty and nothing hangs together; there’s no unifying backbone. Subjects at school are separate and give little general UNDERstanding. It’s casual and that’s probably why few students can write essays / think – except by native genius. It seems that the possibilites of hypertext if not exaggerated into pointless jumpimg about, could articulate and navigate the user across this conceptual framework of the 3 spirals.
We have to offer material that has been overlaid with an a priori net of linking concepts so as to give the adolescents a leg up. Interesting reading matter without this gateway of guiding concepts would only baffle the students' minds still further.
"BUT BUT" there is a quite valid objection to this ambitious attempt to answer the mother's distress at her son seeming to be a cretin. Prior to modern societies and the invention of schools, children "learnt" by being embedded in the world to which they belonged and would continue to live. Learning occurred naturally in different contexts – as it still does with children who are too young for school. How they do LEARN and we con't stop them! Yet that is almost what school does with its high irrelevance and abstracation. So the problem with my project is still that general to schools, and which in the chink of light in the 60’s was realised by such as Ivan Illych in a book called "Deschooling society". perhaps school is the wrong way to do it. Maybe now, as the pupils become more and more impatient, the whole schooling thing will have to change. The privileged aspect of that is no doubt the new Bush’s school voucher system. This "cd rom" project can be criticised for being just more "schooling": more of the abstract avalanch they suffer from at school.
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CATEGORIES OF THE 3 SPIRALS
Each of these are in some way interconnected
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THE 3 COLUMNS (THE SPIRALS) CONNECT LATERALLY. SO IN THE FIRST HORIZONTAL STRIP COSMOS AND MATTER ARE CULTURALLY PERCEIVED AS ASTRONOMY ETC (COLUMN 3) WHILE ON THE INDIVIDUAL LEVLEL RESPONSES ARE OFTEN WHAR ARE CALLED "RELIGIOUS".(COLUMN 2) |
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"Imagination" needs a factual rather than a vaguely "creative" push. Before adolescents will learn we have to turn them on! NOTE on the term imaginative. The tasks and the "ideas kits" of this section help activate the grammar / language in an open ended way. Now this term "open ended" is perhaps more specific than the rather vague and misused term "imaginative". An open ended task requires a more active participation than traditional exercises whose purpose is to obtain a "right" answer. Imaginative or creative work is an important addition to traditional exercises because the pupil is more autonomously active; exercise can easily become rote learning with all the instability of such passive learning: "They can do the exercises but then they can’t speak or write freely"!! However creative tasks are easier to wish for than create! Therefore a very important element of this book are the human life charts that a teacher can use to stimulate the imaginative (=intelligent?) participation of the student. They allow the teacher to activate that precious teaching aid: the pupils own experience and in so doing make much more likely a truly "communicative" form of language teaching than is often the case in text books that are supposedly "communicative". The open ended and creative form of writing and speaking tasks/activities are: writing of plays, reports, poems, extemporising, .summaries, explanations, descriptions of place or opinion, preparing debates, use of newspaper reports (cronaca nera) general knowledge or competitive "performances" (marked by the class) Language teaching can get bogged down in dull realistic functional material that fills a lot of text books and is anyway a rather pale shadow of that reality that it is supposed to reflect. You should think of these charts as just beginnings. |
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