English teaching/learning

intro - explain pbl format

Round One

In an English as a Second Language class for immigrant workers, Ramona is sitting in the back of the classroom, talking excitedly in Spanish with the person next to her. Standing at the front of the class, Matt is frustrated and curious.

• What's the problem? (this is not as simple as it may seem, to begin with it depends on whose standpoint you look at it from, for Ramona, the problem may be that there is no good chance to talk with the person next to her...)

Over time, the standard chants and slogans used on picket lines and in demonstrations, protests, and marches, become stale and cliche. The content gets lost and the music becomes sing-song. The chants have no impact. The whole experience becomes disempowering. (This has been true for so long that even complaining about it is stale and cliche!)

Here's the problem. Evaluating a course at the end, and/or at various points during the course, is essential to good teaching/learning practice. But, the tools I have used have sometimes felt dull and plodding, like busy work, especially when I try to get people to make the evaluation more specific and concrete.

The problem is worse when the participants are friendly and compliant. Then it really feels pro-forma.

A circle game adapted from "Se Murio Chicho" in Tecnicas Participativas Para La Education Social Vol 1. (The sentence is from a scene in the John Sayles film "Passion Fish" http://youtu.be/hkcIBvJU8Uk)

Good for: fun, expression, loosening up, paying attention to details.

Setup: people sitting in a circle

Number of people: at least three

Materials: none

Time: 30 mins.

Flow:

Some of the sources I have used.

Tecnicas Participativas Para la Educacion Popular, Laura Vargas Vargas et al., Alforja. The best handbook of techniques for popular educators also presents an argument for popular education as a dialectical method integrating theory and practice in the context of social and political movements.

Games for Actors and Non-Actors, Augusto Boal, Routledge, New York 1992. Great material -- a collection of games that explore a wide range of physical, emotional, social, and political motions and relationships.

Like my dad's workshop, this is a collection of tools and materials that I have used over the years. You will find learning activities and games and some reflections on their use but not a method or step by step guide to their use. Most are techniques I have used in my English for Activists and Tokyo Sanitation Workers English courses for Labor Now and classes for Pacific Asia Resource Center and other organizations, as well as undergraduate courses I have taught at Meiji University and Hosei University, in Tokyo.

The idea of this game is to help people develop their ability to make a range of expressions by magnifying and reducing motions and emotions made by others.

Good for: breaking down barriers to expression, observing degrees of expression, developing registers of speech and motion, learning culturally specific forms

Setup: empty space, standing in a circle

Number of people: three at least

Materials: none

Time: 30 mins or so

Flow:

Participants form a circle, standing, and count off.

This activity, based a children's song by Eric Herman and the Invisible Band, is a word game in which participants take one thing and describe it in terms of another (see also the surrealist game "L'un dans l'autre" (the one in the other) in A Book of Surrealist Games).