FOR FURTHER REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P38-C2
2025-09-24
259
FOR FURTHER REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
A Collective Reading of Hong Kong, Canada. In Hong Kong, Canada, a fictional play I wrote about some of the tensions and dilemmas that arose at Northside, students and teachers begin to work through some of the difficulties that can accompany linguistic diversity at school. The play is included in Appendix A at the end.1 In a group setting, read or perform the play out loud. A small group of readers/actors can perform the play for the rest of the group or the entire group can be involved in the reading by doubling or tripling up on parts. For example, in one class that worked with the play, half of the group played roles from scenes 1 through 7 while the other half played roles from scenes 8 through 16. The advantage of this second approach was that the readers could compare their different interpretations of each character's words, actions, and feelings.
Emotional Responses to Hong Kong, Canada: Personal Reflection. Plays can represent everyday dilemmas and tensions in ways that allow performers and spectators to participate more fully in the emotional process of resolving conflicts. Performers and spectators are not merely observers of the dilemmas in the story, they become participants. It is possible to use the power of our emotional responses to a play to reflect on what we have taken away or learned from it. After the first reading or performance, individually respond to any of the following questions that appeal to you. What provoked a strong emotional response for you? What made you angry? What made you sad? What made you feel bad? What was satisfying? What was not? What confirmed something you believed about students, teachers and/or schools? How did that feel? What challenged something you believed about students, teachers and/or schools? How did that feel?
Issues and Dilemmas Raised in Hong Kong, Canada. Having reflected upon which scenes provoked strong responses to the play, list the issues and dilemmas facing each of the characters in the emotionally provocative scenes that have just been discussed. In large classes or workshops, participants have done this work in small groups. Compare the lists each person has created. This should provide the entire group with a rich analysis of the issues and dilemmas facing different students and teachers at multilingual schools like Northside. A number of these issues and dilemmas are discussed in detail.
Private and Public Spaces: Personal Reflection. Within the public space of her classroom, Mrs. Lo created a private space in which students could legitimately use languages other than English to enhance their understanding and learning of math. In his autobiography, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, writer Richard Rodriguez tells us that growing up, he had a different understanding of constituted public and private spaces. "Outside the house was public society; inside the house was private." Spanish was "the language of the home," associated with family intimacy and comfort. English was the language of public life.2 Rodriguez was not permitted to bring Spanish into the classroom while growing up and he writes that he is glad this was so. Unlike Mrs. Lo, who thinks it was important to create private spaces within the public space of her classroom and school, Rodriguez believes that his private and public identities had to be separated. His ability to recognize himself as an "American," to assimilate, to access opportunities and privileges, would have been jeopardized if the private language and culture of his home had been allowed to permeate the boundaries of school. Thinking about your own schooling experiences, what messages did you receive about the use of languages other than English in school? In what spaces, if any, was the use of languages other than English considered legitimate? Were these public spaces or private spaces that were off center stage of the classroom floor? Thinking about your own classroom, have you created any kinds of space for students to use languages other than English?
The Possibilities of Words Unspoken. In the play, Hong Kong, Canada, Sarah barely passed her first calculus quiz. In scene 3 she tells the audience that lots of the students from Hong Kong are getting 90% or more on their quizzes because they have already taken calculus in Hong Kong. In scene 7, both Sarah and Carol find themselves in the same empty classroom doing calculus homework. Sarah considers asking Carol for help, but in the end decides not to. Working in pairs, have one person reread Sarah's lines in scene 7 until her last line. Instead of saying Sarah's last line, have her approach Carol. With the second person playing Carol, spontaneously play out an exchange between Carol and Sarah. Share your experience of what happened with other pairs in your in group. This activity of interrupting and reinventing a theatrical scene has been developed and written about by educator Augusto Boal. For further reading on this kind of work, see Boal's book, Theatre of the Oppressed.
1 For a discussion of turning ethnographic data into a fictional play, see my methodological essay in Appendix B. For a discussion on using Readers' Theater for the purpose of qualitative data display, see Donmoyer and Yennie-Donmoyer (1995). For a discussion of the issue of stereotyping in performed ethnography, see Goldstein (2002).
2 See Rodriguez (1982, p. 16). I would like to acknowledge the unpublished master's research paper written by Heidi Levine on Richard Rodriguez' memoir, which has informed my own work with his writing.
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