Janinka Greenwood :
University of Canterbury
(From previous issue)
The story is about Joe who lives in a big noisy city and one day sees a strange boy sitting on the steps next door. Despite Joe’s attempts to make friends with him, the boy remains silent. Joe’s mother tells him the family are asylum seekers, and Joe’s not recognising the new word assumes they are silence seekers. He completely understands that one could well look for silence in such a noisy place and he takes the boy around the city to find a silence. They don’t succeed. The next day the boy has gone again.
Usually I begin with a reading of the visual images on the first picture page which is packed with vehicles, machines, buildings sites and even a plane coming in over the busy street, and ask students to speculate about the city and the noises in it, and wt: build a collective vocabulary chart with evocative words describing the noises and the machines that make them.
Then I introduce a game of chase to introduce new key vocabulary and feed forward to the themes of the story. The game is an adaptation of a widely used hunter /hunted game. In the original game, the hunter and hunted are blindfolded and placed in the middle of a circle formed by the rest of the class who click their fingers when either of the blindfolded pair comes near them. We create our circle with the city noises After the first rounds of the game, I ask the students about the central roles. The hunter has been named right at the start and it was clear who he is looking for. But what about the other) What is he seeking? ‘Safety’ may be offered by a student, and ‘escape:’. Perhaps ‘sanctuary’, We search for more synonyms and finally ‘asylum’ is also tabled, perhaps by me. Then we play another chase game anchoring the word ‘asylum’.
Then we read the first few pages and I ask someone to offer to be silent boy. He sits on a chair in the front of the classroom, and I ask the class to help re-create the boy on the steps. I accept suggestions about how he needs to change his body posture and where his eyes should look. We develop questions we want to ask him and speculations about his background. The boy stays silent, so we create possibilities but no certain answers. Sometimes I ask the students if they would like to meet someone from his family who might answer some of their questions. If they suggest the mother or the father I often ask a student volunteer to play the role, but I myself take the role of grandmother who is nervous about putting the family back in danger and through that I can manipulate how the mother or father gives information and when they should stop answering questions.
Then I read the part of the story where Joe takes the boy through the city looking for a silence. At each of the sites they visit the hoped for silence was destroyed by machines and busy people, some of them potentially threatening. We then create a simple enactment of the journey with a trust walk in which Joe carefully leads the wordless boy through the swirling bodies of the rest of the class who, recreating the noises of the story, move in threateningly’ close to the pair without actually’ touching them. I let several of the group have a turn as one of the pair.
I then ask the class to speed write about their experience in a diary as if they were either Joe or the other boy. The key to speed writing is to give a very brief time frame, perhaps only two minutes, and to warn students that they do not have time to think too much or stop to correct punctuation or spelling. In this way focus is moved from the technicalities of language to the feelings and thoughts students want to express, At the end of two minutes those who are willing read their diaries, And I usually find, when we have built enough tension in the story to create student engagement, that after some initial hesitations all are willing. I am repeatedly surprised by much has been written in the allocated time.
An illustrative of what might occur in the speed written diary entries can be found from the group of immigrant children who in other classes tended to rely on teachers’ directions and use minimal words in reply. Extracts from two of that group are offered below.
The first extract tells the story from the point of view of the unnamed silent boy:
Today, I met a boy. I was sitting on the stair and thinking about my home town. He was speaking strange language. Actually, I can’t understand. That boy look like stupid. Anyway he took me in many places after he says something. I don’t really understand … He was a bit strange … At first he took me to the washing room but it was noisy and boy took me to another place. It was noisy too. Then he took all the places. But everywhere was noisy. My legs are sore. After he gave me sandwich with saying some word. This city was scary.
There are problems with the technicalities of vocabulary and grammar (this was speed writing after all), but there is fluency, cohesion, and a good recall of the story. The phrase washing room, where the story mentioned a laundry, attests to comprehension as well as recall. Most noteworthy, since the book is written entirely from Joe’s point of view and tells us nothing about the background of the other boy, is the wav the writer imaginatively captures the feelings of the unnamed boy: he was thinking about his home town; he found Joe’s language and appearance strange; his legs ached; he was scared.
The learning objectives of language development and increasing functional literacy are being met, and so too are wider objectives of imaginative engagement and the development of empathy.
In the second extract the writer reorts two roles:
Boy
I was scared
I feel I’m in danger.
I was thank to Joe.
I’m sorry because he finding hard for me. I’m felt I’m stupid …
I miss my parents.
Joe
I was sorry to that boy.
If I was he maybe I will scared …
I hope he find safety place with me.
I felt he scared, or want to crying.
I was thanks for following me.
Again there are the obvious signs of syntax that needs further development (and this kind of exercise can give a teacher indications of what vocabulary or grammar to focus on in future lessons). Again there are indications of imaginative empathy, as well as understanding of the narrative. The decision to write in both the complementary roles, and the ability to remain within the constraint of each role, is particularly exciting, as the concept of what it meant to take role had been somewhat hard to introduce in the first encounter with the group ..
The work continues, taking slightly different forms according to the interests and the learning needs of each class. We might go back in time to when the silent boy’s family were leaving their home. Students will offer suggestions about what might have happened to make the family leave. There might be stories of war or revolution, of witnessing a crime, of belonging to a persecuted minority group, of uncovering evidence of corruption. Students may suggest that not all the family has left, perhaps an older brother is still in the army or a clerical worker in the office where the corruption occurred. They too become interested in and skilled at planting seeds for future dramatic possibilities.
I might then ask the students to think about the time when word has come that soldiers are on the way to arrest the parents. What can be done? When I introduced this episode with the class of immigrant Korean children their passion for computer games asserted itself, and a series of superhero and martial art moves were offered as solutions to the crisis. Here was an obvious need for critical reflection: ungrounded creativity was not going to take us any further in our learning objectives. I decided it might be most effective to tackle this without destroying the students’ enjoyment of their suggestions and without interrupting the flow of the story they were co-creating. I acknowledged the family’s desperate hopes that lay behind such dreams and narrated the group back into the less magical reality of the escape. The students followed my lead and offered mare practical propositions. Then taking the role of the mother I suggested that each member of the family could pack one very small bag with their most treasured possessions. Again the students’ own technological actualities gained supremacy: they packed mobiles, hair dryers, iPads and video players. I allowed a few minutes of packing, and then called on Abdullah to take the role of father. He chided the family for its materialism, reminding them it might be a long time before they again had the use of electricity and threatened to leave everything. This is an illustration of the strategy of teacher-in-role where the teacher takes a role in the imaginative work and uses the role to shape the direction of the work, perhaps introducing a new problem or bringing activities back into focus. Abdullah; use of teacher-in-role allowed him to re-direct the work of the class without breaking their engagement in making the story unfold. It also meant that his criticism was the criticism of the father of the family for the children within the story and not the criticism of a teacher who tells his students that they are doing their work wrong. It can be a very effective classroom management strategy. In this case the use of teacher-in-role as father prompted the students back into their roles and back to the context of desperate and hurried departures, and one by one each of the group found some significant item they wanted to bring with them to help them remember home.
The hook ends with the disappearance of the silent boy and his family. I like to take the creative work further and explore what happens next. In the case with the Korean children we decided that the silent boy started at a new school. The students became advisors to the school with suggestions about what elements of English language he needed to learn first, and advice about grammar forms he would find difficult.
While the explicit aim of the work with this class was to increase the students’ confidence in using English language and to further develop their oral proficiency, the language work entailed a number of aspects of critical literacy. The work actively engaged the, students in reading for meaning. They explored sub-text and they considered different interpretations of the underlying story. They asked questions and refined their questioning to probe for information. They wrote, and spoke, in role for a range of. purposes. They explored feelings and motivations behind events. They lined up their own experiences and interests with those suggested by the story and, with some prompting, identified differences in perspectives, contexts and values.
From report by the principal of the school, all the students in this group had come to New Zealand because of their parents’ choice and came from backgrounds that were economically secure enough to support that choice. The concept of changing countries because of danger and of struggling for survival was outside their personal framework and some of their initial offers in the work emphasised the gap between their world and that of the story. They worked on bridging the difference, and, by doing so, engaged in a process of challenging the values and expectations that they had tended to take for granted, This allowed them to add a little to the social and cultural capital they had so far acquired through life experience and begin to encompass other people’s life experiences.
The final stage of the work, taking the role of advisors to the boy’s new school, allowed them to reflect critically on their own process of language learning, and to play with the notion that they can be agents in their own learning.
This kind of work encourages students to question and explore, to look beyond existing information, to find and clarify meaning, and to utilise the skills and interests of the group. It could be said that these are the kinds of critical competencies that build a basis for a kind of citizenship that is engaged and participatory. In addition the processes of this kind of learning are essentially collaborative, inclusive and proactive, and so develop attitudes and skills that help to enable students to be collaborative and democratic. And in this practice the development of a sense of agency and appreciation of the value of collaboration with others, does not only occur at the intellectual level, but also through engagement that is emotional, physical and social.
(To be continued)
University of Canterbury
(From previous issue)
The story is about Joe who lives in a big noisy city and one day sees a strange boy sitting on the steps next door. Despite Joe’s attempts to make friends with him, the boy remains silent. Joe’s mother tells him the family are asylum seekers, and Joe’s not recognising the new word assumes they are silence seekers. He completely understands that one could well look for silence in such a noisy place and he takes the boy around the city to find a silence. They don’t succeed. The next day the boy has gone again.
Usually I begin with a reading of the visual images on the first picture page which is packed with vehicles, machines, buildings sites and even a plane coming in over the busy street, and ask students to speculate about the city and the noises in it, and wt: build a collective vocabulary chart with evocative words describing the noises and the machines that make them.
Then I introduce a game of chase to introduce new key vocabulary and feed forward to the themes of the story. The game is an adaptation of a widely used hunter /hunted game. In the original game, the hunter and hunted are blindfolded and placed in the middle of a circle formed by the rest of the class who click their fingers when either of the blindfolded pair comes near them. We create our circle with the city noises After the first rounds of the game, I ask the students about the central roles. The hunter has been named right at the start and it was clear who he is looking for. But what about the other) What is he seeking? ‘Safety’ may be offered by a student, and ‘escape:’. Perhaps ‘sanctuary’, We search for more synonyms and finally ‘asylum’ is also tabled, perhaps by me. Then we play another chase game anchoring the word ‘asylum’.
Then we read the first few pages and I ask someone to offer to be silent boy. He sits on a chair in the front of the classroom, and I ask the class to help re-create the boy on the steps. I accept suggestions about how he needs to change his body posture and where his eyes should look. We develop questions we want to ask him and speculations about his background. The boy stays silent, so we create possibilities but no certain answers. Sometimes I ask the students if they would like to meet someone from his family who might answer some of their questions. If they suggest the mother or the father I often ask a student volunteer to play the role, but I myself take the role of grandmother who is nervous about putting the family back in danger and through that I can manipulate how the mother or father gives information and when they should stop answering questions.
Then I read the part of the story where Joe takes the boy through the city looking for a silence. At each of the sites they visit the hoped for silence was destroyed by machines and busy people, some of them potentially threatening. We then create a simple enactment of the journey with a trust walk in which Joe carefully leads the wordless boy through the swirling bodies of the rest of the class who, recreating the noises of the story, move in threateningly’ close to the pair without actually’ touching them. I let several of the group have a turn as one of the pair.
I then ask the class to speed write about their experience in a diary as if they were either Joe or the other boy. The key to speed writing is to give a very brief time frame, perhaps only two minutes, and to warn students that they do not have time to think too much or stop to correct punctuation or spelling. In this way focus is moved from the technicalities of language to the feelings and thoughts students want to express, At the end of two minutes those who are willing read their diaries, And I usually find, when we have built enough tension in the story to create student engagement, that after some initial hesitations all are willing. I am repeatedly surprised by much has been written in the allocated time.
An illustrative of what might occur in the speed written diary entries can be found from the group of immigrant children who in other classes tended to rely on teachers’ directions and use minimal words in reply. Extracts from two of that group are offered below.
The first extract tells the story from the point of view of the unnamed silent boy:
Today, I met a boy. I was sitting on the stair and thinking about my home town. He was speaking strange language. Actually, I can’t understand. That boy look like stupid. Anyway he took me in many places after he says something. I don’t really understand … He was a bit strange … At first he took me to the washing room but it was noisy and boy took me to another place. It was noisy too. Then he took all the places. But everywhere was noisy. My legs are sore. After he gave me sandwich with saying some word. This city was scary.
There are problems with the technicalities of vocabulary and grammar (this was speed writing after all), but there is fluency, cohesion, and a good recall of the story. The phrase washing room, where the story mentioned a laundry, attests to comprehension as well as recall. Most noteworthy, since the book is written entirely from Joe’s point of view and tells us nothing about the background of the other boy, is the wav the writer imaginatively captures the feelings of the unnamed boy: he was thinking about his home town; he found Joe’s language and appearance strange; his legs ached; he was scared.
The learning objectives of language development and increasing functional literacy are being met, and so too are wider objectives of imaginative engagement and the development of empathy.
In the second extract the writer reorts two roles:
Boy
I was scared
I feel I’m in danger.
I was thank to Joe.
I’m sorry because he finding hard for me. I’m felt I’m stupid …
I miss my parents.
Joe
I was sorry to that boy.
If I was he maybe I will scared …
I hope he find safety place with me.
I felt he scared, or want to crying.
I was thanks for following me.
Again there are the obvious signs of syntax that needs further development (and this kind of exercise can give a teacher indications of what vocabulary or grammar to focus on in future lessons). Again there are indications of imaginative empathy, as well as understanding of the narrative. The decision to write in both the complementary roles, and the ability to remain within the constraint of each role, is particularly exciting, as the concept of what it meant to take role had been somewhat hard to introduce in the first encounter with the group ..
The work continues, taking slightly different forms according to the interests and the learning needs of each class. We might go back in time to when the silent boy’s family were leaving their home. Students will offer suggestions about what might have happened to make the family leave. There might be stories of war or revolution, of witnessing a crime, of belonging to a persecuted minority group, of uncovering evidence of corruption. Students may suggest that not all the family has left, perhaps an older brother is still in the army or a clerical worker in the office where the corruption occurred. They too become interested in and skilled at planting seeds for future dramatic possibilities.
I might then ask the students to think about the time when word has come that soldiers are on the way to arrest the parents. What can be done? When I introduced this episode with the class of immigrant Korean children their passion for computer games asserted itself, and a series of superhero and martial art moves were offered as solutions to the crisis. Here was an obvious need for critical reflection: ungrounded creativity was not going to take us any further in our learning objectives. I decided it might be most effective to tackle this without destroying the students’ enjoyment of their suggestions and without interrupting the flow of the story they were co-creating. I acknowledged the family’s desperate hopes that lay behind such dreams and narrated the group back into the less magical reality of the escape. The students followed my lead and offered mare practical propositions. Then taking the role of the mother I suggested that each member of the family could pack one very small bag with their most treasured possessions. Again the students’ own technological actualities gained supremacy: they packed mobiles, hair dryers, iPads and video players. I allowed a few minutes of packing, and then called on Abdullah to take the role of father. He chided the family for its materialism, reminding them it might be a long time before they again had the use of electricity and threatened to leave everything. This is an illustration of the strategy of teacher-in-role where the teacher takes a role in the imaginative work and uses the role to shape the direction of the work, perhaps introducing a new problem or bringing activities back into focus. Abdullah; use of teacher-in-role allowed him to re-direct the work of the class without breaking their engagement in making the story unfold. It also meant that his criticism was the criticism of the father of the family for the children within the story and not the criticism of a teacher who tells his students that they are doing their work wrong. It can be a very effective classroom management strategy. In this case the use of teacher-in-role as father prompted the students back into their roles and back to the context of desperate and hurried departures, and one by one each of the group found some significant item they wanted to bring with them to help them remember home.
The hook ends with the disappearance of the silent boy and his family. I like to take the creative work further and explore what happens next. In the case with the Korean children we decided that the silent boy started at a new school. The students became advisors to the school with suggestions about what elements of English language he needed to learn first, and advice about grammar forms he would find difficult.
While the explicit aim of the work with this class was to increase the students’ confidence in using English language and to further develop their oral proficiency, the language work entailed a number of aspects of critical literacy. The work actively engaged the, students in reading for meaning. They explored sub-text and they considered different interpretations of the underlying story. They asked questions and refined their questioning to probe for information. They wrote, and spoke, in role for a range of. purposes. They explored feelings and motivations behind events. They lined up their own experiences and interests with those suggested by the story and, with some prompting, identified differences in perspectives, contexts and values.
From report by the principal of the school, all the students in this group had come to New Zealand because of their parents’ choice and came from backgrounds that were economically secure enough to support that choice. The concept of changing countries because of danger and of struggling for survival was outside their personal framework and some of their initial offers in the work emphasised the gap between their world and that of the story. They worked on bridging the difference, and, by doing so, engaged in a process of challenging the values and expectations that they had tended to take for granted, This allowed them to add a little to the social and cultural capital they had so far acquired through life experience and begin to encompass other people’s life experiences.
The final stage of the work, taking the role of advisors to the boy’s new school, allowed them to reflect critically on their own process of language learning, and to play with the notion that they can be agents in their own learning.
This kind of work encourages students to question and explore, to look beyond existing information, to find and clarify meaning, and to utilise the skills and interests of the group. It could be said that these are the kinds of critical competencies that build a basis for a kind of citizenship that is engaged and participatory. In addition the processes of this kind of learning are essentially collaborative, inclusive and proactive, and so develop attitudes and skills that help to enable students to be collaborative and democratic. And in this practice the development of a sense of agency and appreciation of the value of collaboration with others, does not only occur at the intellectual level, but also through engagement that is emotional, physical and social.
(To be continued)
