“This chapter will make visible students’ experiences at home- private struggles that students too often carry alone, unspoken and unknown in the school-house”(page 13)
When I have to stand in my long commute train, I tell my self that reading a book is too complicated, so I just use this excuse to think and check social media. In my case, that means Facebook. It’s an excuse to have a quick update on news from home, usually family and politics oriented (I compensate the anger of the second with the joy of the first). This morning an article shared by a former colleague really stood out, because of its connection to the idea of the first chapter from the book “It’s not About Grit”, titled “Unlivable Conditions”. The article was a great translation of the speech given by Chimmamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Fráncfort Book Fair, published under the title “El silencio es un lujo que no podemos darnos” (Silence is a luxury we cannot afford). Continue reading Shout out to Chimmamanda Ngozi Adichie
All posts by Diana Zea
Video-Columns: Satirical Journalism
I studied journalism. Life showed me the path into teaching, but I’ve always found a way to flirt with it. Incorporating it into teaching, has felt appropriate in many cases, but in the project I will attempt to explain in this post, it felt more than appropriate, it felt right!
This project titled Video-Columnas (Opinion Columns on Video), was carried out with 8th grade students from a school in Bogota, Colombia for the Spanish Language and Literature, native speakers of Spanish. It was replicated in the English Language and Literature class of 10th grade, for Students who were ELLs in a Transitioning or Expanding level (High intermediate or advanced) with similar outcomes. For New York City urban schools, and other similar contexts, I’d love to see it in action in Heritage Speakers classes, or in International High schools. Continue reading Video-Columns: Satirical Journalism
A little of everything (unlike tracking)
“Tracks can create a self-fulfilling prophesy of behavior in students and play an important role in defining the type of person they believe themselves to be” (Ansalone, 2009) (Ansalone 2010) Page 12.
This has been one of the texts that I found easier to read as an ELL, but one of the hardest to reflect upon. So I’m just going to make varied comments related to the quote I chose and some other references:
1. I kept waiting for the reference to gender base tracking, because this is the one I’m most familiar with. At a particular school in Colombia, they used to separate boys and girls during Math, Humanities and Language Arts classes, as soon as they started puberty or were close to it. So the equivalent of Middle and High school at that school was a gender tracking examples. No other gender was considered. Teachers used to swear that it worked, because it lowered the hormonal effect and their classes were great. They also had male teachers for the boys and Female teachers for the girls. Any thoughts? Continue reading A little of everything (unlike tracking)
Get on Board(ing) Schools
“Developing such safe spaces requires intentional community-building activities, strategies and protocols, to facilitate inclusive conversation where everyone is heard and respected, and where educators can also make ourselves vulnerable” (Goodman, 2018)(p.6)
A South African girl came to Colombia for an exchange experience of four months with the program Round Square. Her and her classmates from their boarding school, found so many novelties about the school they came to, the city, the country, the language but particularly the lifestyle of these Colombian students, from an upper class, whose parents were absent most of the time, who went to too many parties, too many days a week, who did what they wanted and had maids all around them to pick up after their mess. She told me that she was on boarding school, because her family went bankrupt and it was simply cheaper for them to pay for a magnificent boarding school than to have her live at home, moving back and forth every day.
She thought that the kids at that Colombian school should try her boarding school, to get a sense of service even if it was only self-service. Continue reading Get on Board(ing) Schools
Refer to the reference
“The development of emotional autonomy begins with individuation from parent and ends with the achievement of a sense of identity” (Collins & Steinberg, 2008)
This idea of individuation from parents, along with the achievement of independence or isolation from any generation, younger and specially older, during adolescence, has always gotten me to think that the process for achieving something new, something original, something distant from the references they have, still validates de references themselves. The harder a teenager tries to be as different as possible from their parents, the more that reference of who the parents are becomes a part of the argument. How hard is it for this transforming being to find the isolation that guides its identity search, when surrounded with pre-though molds, manners, ways, models? How do parents of future adolescents in countries like Colombia deal with the behavioral and emotional autonomy, when safety is such an issue and overprotection becomes an instinct of survival?