Intercultural Understanding

If I had £1 for every time a student has said to me, "Why doesn't everyone speak English?", I would currently be in the Caribbean soaking up the tropical rays and sipping cocktails on board my private yacht, and not in cold, rainy Washington. 

It's a question they often ask in exasperation or to deliberately disrupt the lesson, and so my reply has often been similarly exasperated, along the lines of "It's not something that's quick to explain so if you come back at 3.30 I'll tell you all about it for half an hour."  And that usually does the trick.  Some students have been genuinely curious, and I have given them my quick "Because of history, geography, politics and religion" explanation.

In retrospect, it's a question that we should take seriously and do our best to answer in depth.  Because you cannot completely understand or appreciate a language without knowing something about the country or countries where it is spoken.  The two are inextricably linked.  For example, the Spanish phrase "hacer puente" does not always mean "to bridge" in its strictest sense.  Scratch the surface and you find out about a tradition for taking days off that you'll wish you had, and then dig a little deeper and you discover how many holidays Spanish children get compared to British children. 

What is Intercultural Understanding?  Here are two definitions:

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  “Intercultural Understanding is the ability and willingness to see things from a different cultural perspective..... It is respecting different ideas and lifestyles and recognising that your culture is not superior to others.”
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  “Appreciating the richness and diversity of other cultures.....Recognising that there are different ways of seeing the world and developing an international outlook.”

For me, Intercultural Understanding addresses and disproves the stereotypical views that Britons so often have about people from other countries, proves that our way is not necessarily the only way or the best way, and allows students access the rich and vibrant culture of the target-language country or countries through their language studies.

The photograph at the top is one of a series that I took to make a CrazyTalk video for a training session I was giving.  The little figure is one of a set of "World People" that can be purchased from the Early Learning Centre (and who you may recognise from Gorseville!)  I use them often to explain about stereotyping.  Is this what French people look like?  What do they really look like?  And interestingly, go a step further and examine why we have this stereotypical image of French people.  The BBC's "Coast" programme explains very well about the Onion Johnnies, who would have been the first and only contact that many British people had with the French.

I am a big fan of the Intercultural Understanding strand of the KS2 Framework, and am pleased that it is part of the KS3 Framework as well.  I've done my best to include Intercultural Understanding in my KS2 Spanish lessons over the last year, and I have to say that it has been harder than I anticipated.  It seems a bit false somehow, especially when you only see the children once a week, to depart from the "thread" of your lessons and stick something intercultural in.  What I have done so far, formally in any case, has been looking at the Spanish-speaking world (thanks World Cup!) and highlighting certain fiestas such as San José, San Fermín and la Fiesta Nacional de España.

After some useful tweets and research over the last couple of weeks, I have come to the conclusion that Intercultural Understanding, in my setting at least, would best be covered little and often, as a "drip-drip-drip" approach, rather than as one-off occasional lessons.

I was reading Danny Nicholson's blogpost "Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch", where he suggests displaying a photograph on the board at the beginning of the lesson to stimulate questions.  In the MFL lesson this could be a photograph of a fiesta, place, child or house from the target language country, or something a bit different like a Google Doodle.  Fiona Joyce tweeted the Google Doodle link and I could see its potential for intercultural work, as Google Doodles are something with which our young people are very familiar.  Here's one to start you off:

It's from August 27th 2008.  Which Spanish fiesta does it represent?

In September, one of the first things I will be teaching my second-year-of-Spanish pupils is the months of the year.  I am starting to make the flashcards, and have decided to put images of fiestas on each month's card, such as Reyes for January, San Valentín for February, San José for March and so on.  This will give learning what is essentially twelve words a bit more depth and purpose.

I thought I would share with you some of my favourite Intercultural Understanding links.

FRENCH

Equipment that children need to buy for La Rentrée:  What do our children buy to return to school in September?

Videos showing playground games

Collection of playground games from all over the world

24 heures de la vie d'un enfant: Study the daily routines of children from all over the world

Ton scooter est japonais: Poem reminding us that many of the things we use in our daily life come from other countries.  An easy model for students to replicate.

SPANISH

Playground games from El Huevo de Chocolate

More playground games

European Playground Games, including Choco-choco-la-la, which my KS1s and daughter love

Calendar of Spanish fiestas

Semana Santa: origen de las procesiones

Spanish customs and culture

Map puzzles: of each continent and more.  Perfect for perfecting your South American geography!

Colours in Cultures: In the West we wear black to mourn.  In South America the traditional colour is purple.


I would be interested to hear about how you teach Intercultural Understanding, and any good resources that you have come across. 

You can also read a blogpost I wrote about Intercultural Understanding for José Picardo's Box of Tricks blog.

Gaudi's Mosaics

In June I blogged about a sequence of lessons called "Mi bandera".  With my KS2 classes I have just finished the next part of this unit dealing with shapes and colours.

Last summer I went on a mini-break to Barcelona, and was struck by all the different examples of "shapes making shapes" in the city.  Lots of square panels making up the front of a building, seven circular panels of glass arranged to make a big circular window, and, of course Gaudi's mosaics.  I took lots of photos and started to formulate an idea.

The difficult thing proved to be fitting it in at such a time that it didn't seem contrived in our sequence of learning.  It did, however, fit perfectly after the flag lessons.

We started off looking at a map of the world to find Spain (and had some useful discussions about how come the countries in South America speak Spanish when they are so far from Spain), and then we looked at a map of Spain to find Barcelona.  This in turn led to some interesting discussions about the regions of Spain, Cataluña in particular, and we compared and contrasted the numbers 1-10 in Catalan, Spanish and French.

We then focussed on Barcelona specifically, and looked at the examples of shapes making shapes.  We talked about Gaudi, his buildings and his mosaics.  We then looked at these mosaics from Parc Güell:

We found out that Gaudi used unusual materials in these mosaics, like glass bottles, dinner plates and china dolls.  We set about creating mosaic suns of our own, using unusual shapes to echo Gaudi's unusual materials.  I made an example to show the children, photographing it at various stages of its creation so show them how to build up their mosaic.

If you would like to see some of the children's finished mosaics, there is a video montage on my school blog.

So why did I do this?

Mainly:

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  Cross-curricular art
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  Intercultural understanding (Spanish-speaking world, Spain, Barcelona)

But also:

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  I wanted them to write about the mosaic afterwards, using the same format as we used to describe the flags.  I wanted them to use the dictionary to find the words for the shapes they had used and to make these nouns plural as necessary, and to agree the colours as necessary.  It was bringing together a lot of the different threads of our work since January.

What would I do differently next time?

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  Start it earlier in the year - we haven't been able to progress to the writing stage due to it being the end of term!
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  It's interesting that the best artists aren't necessarily the best mosaic makers.  I'd set up a Smartboard activity or a group cut'n'stick activity to practise jigsaw-ing shapes into another shape, to enable more of the children to produce a more authentic-looking mosaic.
• 
  
  Find stickier gummed paper!  And get more of it, as we ran out of certain colours very quickly.

All in all, I am very happy with the results, particularly with how well Y3 responded to it (it's them you can see working in the photos on the video).  It made my day yesterday to follow one of my Y3s out of school and to watch him excitedly show his dad the mosaic he had made and explain how and why he had made it.  It's given me the courage to find more ways of "thinking outside the box" and to endeavour to teach Spanish in its broader context a lot more.

#MFLSAT

This is a Tagxedo of my Twitter feed for the last 24 hours or so

I'm imagining a conversation with my dad:

Dad: What is #MFLSAT ?

Me: It's a hashtag, something you add to your tweet in Twitter to group your tweet with all the other tweets about the same thing.

Dad: Yes, but what is #MFLSAT ?

Me: It stands for "MFL Show and Tell". We've had two now. The first one was in Coventry in November 2009, and the second one was yesterday in Nottingham. It's where lots of like-minded MFL teachers give up their Saturday to meet together and share good practice and engage in professional dialogue. Some people give presentations about things they've done in the classroom. It's also an opportunity to meet in real life the people with whom you correspond virtually most of the time, via Twitter and other fora.

Dad: Well why didn't you just say that in the first place ?

Yes, yesterday I went to Nottingham High School with 46 other teachers from England, Scotland, Wales and Australia (yes really - it was great to see Fiona Rose there). After coffee and chocolate croissants - which were most welcome after the 3 hour drive - there were 7 presentations on subjects as diverse as recording from Skype and the French vowel Haka.

We were really fortunate that all the presentations were filmed and streamed live on the internet by @eyebeams, so you can watch them all here. Thanks to a tip-off from Lisa Stevens, I've been able to embed the video of my presentation below. I talked about my RecorderPen, about which I had already written a blogpost:




After a very nice lunch in the high school dining hall (gadget of the day - the conveyor belt where you put your tray afterwards!) we had some round-the-table discussions about, amongst other things, VLEs, Language Labs, using ICT to enhance speaking work, e-safety and international links.

The day was sponsored by the high school, Links into Languages, Naace and Scholastic. The first MFLSAT cost us each £10, and was a more low-key affair. I had been concerned before yesterday that this event would be too "corporate" and that it would change the feel of the MFLSAT. But I needn't have worried. The sponsorship enhanced our comfort and the catering, but little else changed, for which I am grateful.

So what did I learn, and what am I going to try ?

• You can export selections of an Audacity file as .wav My podcasts will be a lot quicker to do now I won't be cutting mp3s up into bits and saving them all as individual .wav files. (I know, Dom, I was a plonker not to know this before!)
• Get KS2s to do writing on mini-whiteboards, then photograph them for assessment evidence. Cuts down on paper for them and me, mistakes are easier to correct, and I always have my camera with me anyway.
• I MUST have a go with Prezi and play a bit with Sliderocket.
• Have a go with Xtranormal to make starters and listening activities for KS2 and maybe KS1.
• I love singing, the children love singing, so I must make an effort to do it more. And of course, the Spanish vowel Haka.

Do you fancy getting involved in something like this ? In these days of rarely cover and dwindling funds, teachers have to take the initiative as far as their CPD is concerned. Twitter is one way of finding out what opportunities are out there. You might also be interested in these:

Primary Languages Meet (#PLMeet) in Doncaster on Monday 27th September 2010

MFL Flashmeeting 8 - Monday 27th September 20.30-22.30, link to follow

And for you Mackems out there, there's the Sunderland TeachMeet on Thursday 14th October 2010.

Hope to see you there!

Working with partner schools overseas

When I first started working with partner schools overseas, in 1997, communicating with partners and exchanging project work involved faxes, telephones, files, CDs, video tapes, books, pieces of art and craft work.... and many expensive trips to the Post Office to post it all. It took time for it all to reach the partners, and just as long for them to send theirs to us. Everything took a long time. Over the years, however, thanks to all the new technology that is out there, this communication and sharing of work has become much easier, quicker and cheaper. There are many web tools that we can use now to collaborate with our partners.

Two of the tools that have really taken off in the MFL world are Storybird and Storyjumper. Brian Stobie, the international officer for County Durham, discovered Storybird recently and could immediately see its use for partnership work. He asked me to give a presentation about Storybird and Storyjumper at the Atlas (RNIL) conference today. I agreed to speak for 10 minutes, just to give delegates a taster and to whet their appetites to find out more. I decided to present Storybird and Storyjumper as a story. I hope you like it.


Here is a Storybird that I wrote in collaboration with Dominic McGladdery.  I wanted Fiona Joyce, queen of the MFL Storybird Wiki, to be involved as well, but at the moment you can only collaborate with one other person.
What do you like to do ? by d_mcg, CSeccombe on Storybird

Storybird and Storyjumper aren't of course the only programs that can be used in this way.  You could also try Voki, Wallwisher, Voicethread, Xtranormal and GoAnimate, to name but a few.  And you could set up a blog or wiki for the partnership so that you have some shared webspace via which to share your work.  Anything that motivates you and your students to sustain your partnership and make it meaningful can only be a good thing.

One year on......

I published my first blog post here on 28th June 2009. Over the last week or so I've been thinking about the things I have learned over the last year, and I thought I would share them with you here. These are not only things that I have learned about, but also things that I have used either in the classroom or elsewhere in my work this year.

• Storybird and Storyjumper:  First of all, two tools which almost need no introduction, such has been their success amongst the language teachers in my PLN and beyond.  All of the Storybirds that I have created appear on the fantastic MFL Storybird Wiki, the brainchild of Fiona Joyce, and you can see my Storyjumpers on this very blog (look at the tabs at the top).  I have found the programs invaluable for presenting appropriate text-level work to my KS2 pupils, but they haven't been able to try it out for themselves for ICT reasons, if you know what I mean....  
    
• Mini-books:  I discovered mini-books quite by accident while looking for something else.  I knew that it was something that I wanted to try, but determined to find the right occasion.  My KS2 pupils created mini-books containing their own stories based on a mini-book that we read together called "¿Qué veo?"  You can see the results here.  Mini-books are small and so the children know that they don't have to write very much.  They enjoy illustrating their work as well.  And their size also makes them ideal for the children to take home to show to their families.
• Wordle and Tagxedo: I wrote a post in April comparing all the different word cloud generators that are out there at the moment. Of all the ones I mentioned on that occasion, I use Wordle and Tagxedo the most. I find them particularly useful for displaying objectives at the beginning of a presentation (I paste in all my notes from the presentation and fortunately the words that come out biggest are the ones I want!) and also for helping pupils to see which are the important words amongst all the ones we are studying - the high-frequency core words come out biggest. Here is a Wordle of my Delicious tags (see below) and a Tagxedo of my World Cup resources page:


• Podcasting and Audacity: I've been using Audacity for a few years, but, as I discovered after a course with Joe Dale in December, only on a basic level. Joe really opened my eyes to the possibilities offered by Audacity for producing professional-sounding podcasts. I produced some secondary-level podcasts with our language assistants and then started podcasting in earnest when I undertook on behalf of the LA to provide a series of upskilling podcasts for non-specialist primary teachers of French. The technology side of it is straightforward for me now, and it's the scripting that takes the time. While I'm talking about podcasts, I'll recommend JamStudio for creating your own loops, and for making guitar accompaniments for your songs if, like me, you don't play the guitar.
• The RecorderPen: This was my purchase from the Gadget Show Live. I wrote a blog post after I had played with it for the first time and before I had used it in class. This term I have been incorporating Y1's theme of "Seaside" into their Spanish lessons. I wanted to show them how to describe things using colours. I picked four masculine sea creatures, made A5 flashcards of them, added recorded stickers and laminated the whole thing. I also made, recorded and laminated cards for 6 colours. When we were working in our groups of about 10, I said something like "un tiburón amarillo", and the children took it in turns to make the cards say the same thing by using the RecorderPen to make them speak the right words in the right order. They found it fascinating and were very interested to know how it works. Their class teacher was interested to see it and is thinking about buying a set for the class to use elsewhere in their curriculum.
• Wallwisher: Wallwisher has turned out to be very popular with my KS2 pupils. I think they like it particularly because they can see their contribution and other peoples'. It has encouraged them to engage with Spanish in their own time and, therefore, to explore the rest of the blog (see below) while they are there. One of our walls shows our collection of Spanish food nouns, something we haven't studied in class since before May half term, but which they are still adding to regularly. Our latest wall is about flags - please feel free to contribute.

• Calligrams: I've mentioned Calligrams a fair bit this year. Just see for yourself. I think I like them so much because they are a combination of words and doodles. I have also tried them out, and plan to do more in the future. What I am most chuffed about is that they have captured other peoples' imaginations too, and they are trying them with their classes. There is a place for low-tech, or, in this case, no-tech.

• Blogging: Before I started teaching in my current school, I had seen examples of effective school blogs. It was something I was very interested in setting up for the children at my school, especially as I am only there for a day and a half a week. I wanted Spanish to have a presence in the school even when I wasn't there, to publish and celebrate the good work that the children were doing, and give the children activities that they could access at home to help them with their Spanish. Fortunately, the Head agreed, and thus http://www.spanishstpauls.blogspot.com/ was born. The children love it, and are always telling me about what they have accessed on it at home. The school governors are impressed, as are some of the parents to whom I've spoken. It's also proving useful at the moment during this time of Y6-Y7 transition - the secondary teachers can see exactly what the Y6s have been doing without my having to send them loads of bits of paper.
• Google Reader: When I first started to use Twitter I was seeing a lot of links to people's blogposts. And many of them were interesting reads. Problem was that if I didn't follow the tweeted link there and then, I probably missed it. Following tips from Joe Dale and Graham Davies I started to subscribe to the blogs using Google Reader. I have the Google Reader widget displayed alongside the Gmail widget on my iGoogle, ready for my viewing and reading pleasure each morning.
• Delicious: I blogged about Delicious last August when I first discovered its usefulness for storing and tagging all the useful websites that I came across. I now have over 1000 links on my Delicious. I think now that I have it, I bookmark more sites than I used to paste into my Word document, but, more importantly, I actually use them.
• Slideshare: In my new role I do a fair bit of training, and in my continuing role on the international education side I give quite a few presentations. I used to upload some of the presentations to the website or offer to email them to interested parties. But as my presentation style is becoming more and more minimalist - more pictures, less text - the presentations were becoming less and less useful by themselves. I had followed links to other people's Slideshare presentations and was intrigued to see that some had the audio commentary attached and linked into the presentation. This seemed like an ideal way to go, especially as these slidecasts can be embedded in blogs. I've used it to share my presentations, but also to put songs onto my school blog as YouTube embeds and Podbean mp3s don't work at school. You can view all my Slideshare presentations here. Well, almost all - there are 3 that for some reason don't appear on this list but which you can see here.
• SurveyMonkey: In October last year I set about auditing Primary Languages in Sunderland. We only have 85 primary schools, but it was still an onerous task. Headteachers are busy people, and it was unrealistic to expect them all to respond to and post a paper survey. The audit needed to be short and quick and easy to complete. I had completed some surveys for the British Council which used SurveyMonkey and decided that it would be a good way of gathering the information I needed. I emailed all the HTs the link to the seven questions which it would take them about two minutes to complete. And then watched the responses flood in. Well, trickle in actually. But that's another story. SurveyMonkey proved to be easy to use and certainly preferable to having to collate and manipulate dozens of pieces of paper.
  
  My KS2s had whole-heartedly embraced Wallwisher and so I thought I would capitalise on this enthusiasm to carry out a survey via the blog. I set up a SurveyMonkey about likes and dislikes of the foods that we had been learning. There haven't been too many responses though. Partly, I think, because there were too many questions, and partly because they couldn't see their contribution straightaway on the blog. I think it's something to try again at a later date, in class maybe where the results can be seen immediately.
• Pop-ups in Dreamweaver: MFL Sunderland was 6 years old at the end of April. When I started it I was a complete website novice. Everything you see on the website and its sister sites now is something that I have learned along the way. When I was creating the interactive map for the World Cup over the Easter holidays, I knew how I wanted it to look, but didn't know how to do it. I didn't even know what the thing I wanted to do was called! Much googling and researching and experimenting and HTMLing later I achieved the effect I was after - the information for each country popped up as a little separate window which didn't obscure the main continent page. This may be small potatoes to some people, but for me it was a sense of achievement equalled only by the discovery of roll-over buttons several years ago!

And finally..... why the picture at the top ? Well, as language teachers we are all different, with different styles and with different tools at our disposal. But we are all progressing and moving forward together towards a common goal.  These are my tools at the moment.  Doubtless I will have some new ones this time next year!