‘Clean Eyes... New Voices... Better Chances’
‘The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so’ wrote Mark Twain. With our society becoming increasingly multicultural, ignorance and prejudice need to give way to respect and understanding. As Carme Lamarca Roca argues, what better place to begin than at school?
During the past few years we have welcomed foreign students to our school from places as far afield as South America, China, Romania, Moldova, Morocco and Ghana. The need to work towards raising levels of cultural awareness and respect has therefore become a pressing issue in order to help our existing students truly integrate and to set the stage for the future. The result is a three-part project called Clean Eyes... New Voices... Better Chances.
A cross-curricular project
The project has been implemented both inside and outside of the school timetable and encompasses many areas of the curriculum. The physics and chemistry departments set up activities focusing on the importance of clean water and the PE department organized football matches mixing teachers, students and local immigrants. But as there are many African people in our community who are proficient or native English speakers, the benefits to our English curriculum have been enormous. As well as their cultural input and their life experiences, they provide a rich, authentic English language source.
The Catalan goverment’s ‘Experimental Foreign Language Programme’ has enabled us to create a new optional two-hour weekly subject (called ‘Multicultural English’) for our 2nd year Batxillerat students over the next three years. This allows our final-year students to gain maximum benefit from the project, although the various talks and events within the project are open to all students from 2nd ESO upwards and to all overseas students who are new to the school. Some have even given talks about their countries and their experiences to their new ESO and Batxillerat classmates (who marvel at their level of English!).
Reaching out into the community
We also decided to involve people in our community who have suffered the effects of prejudice and political exile and invite them to the school as ‘guest teachers’ to speak about their experiences. These included Boniface Amaefule, a Nigerian political refugee who had been condemned to death for participating in a peaceful human rights demonstration (but absolved thanks to a sustained citizen campaign), three political refugees from Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, and a Cuban photographer.
Clean Eyes...
The introductory part focuses on bringing students closer to other cultures to promote the idea of cultural equality. This is done through many events including seminars, discussions and films. To complement the contributions from ‘guest teachers’, our own members of staff give talks on topics such as the history of human rights and multiculturalism in Spain. This year we broke the ice with a role play about Rosa Parks. The chairs were organized as bus seats and the whole class became a bus. We told them that the story they were about to act out changed history and then did the story as a TPR activity. Their task was to guess when and where it happened.
New Voices...
This centres around interaction with newcomers. Students are encouraged to research aspects about the guest teacher’s country such as the geography, history, literature, culture, religion and food, either via the Internet or through one of the NGOs with which we’ve made contact. Plenty of reading is involved as students broaden their knowledge of other cultures.
Better Chances
The final part is the most pro-active and is all about coming to conclusions and creating proposals as to how to improve the present situation. A debate is planned entitled ‘Immigration and crisis’ involving local representatives of African associations and NGOs such as Amnesty International. This will give our students a genuine platform to express their ideas.
Language benefits
All of the activities have been designed to maximize language practice and exploit the four main skills. Students were asked to prepare questions for our guest speakers, and pair and group work were used in both of these preparatory activities and the discussions which took place after the talks in order to provide intensive speaking practice. The focus was on fluency so students were encouraged to experiment with language to express themselves. Reading and writing skills were practised in the research stages and they also did some follow-up written work after each talk they attended, writing about whichever aspect made the most impression on them.
The project carries its own rewards, but even so, it’s always nice to receive recognition. In April last year we were proud to receive the Federico Mayor Zaragoza prize (an annual award presented by the Càtedra Unesco de la Universitat Rovira i Virgili de Tortosa for contributions to cultural diversity) for our project. But the biggest prize is of far greater value. Our students open new windows to the world outside the school and so they become aware of how important it is to master English, especially the oral part, to be able to relate to people from all over the world.
Carmen Lamarca Roca teaches at IES Pau Vila, Sabadell.
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