A Curriculum Based on Images
The Star Sequence
There is an interchange between the pilot/narrator and the Little Prince in Chapter 2 of Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. When he first meets the Little Prince, the pilot says:
Narrator: Mais…qu’est-ce que tu fais là?/What are you doing there?
Narrator: Et il me répéta alors, tout doucement, comme une chose très sérieuse/And he repeated to me, quite softly, as if it were a very serious thing…
Petit Prince: S’il vous plaît…dessine-moi un mouton/Please…draw me a sheep…
The Little Prince asked the pilot to draw him something! That incredible relationship – the stuff of legend in the literary tradition of France – didn’t start out with words. It started out with a child wanting a drawing from an adult.
Children are interested in images, especially ones that they have created. We can therefore greatly enhance the power of comprehensible input in our classrooms when we ask our students to work from drawings of characters that they make up.
When we spin such characters into stories, the usually closed gates of student engagement open wide. The students, fully immersed in the zany details and interesting peculiarities of the characters they have created, forget that they are in a class in which they are supposed to be “learning” and they lock only onto the messages being conveyed about the drawing.
Doesn’t that sound good? We all know that the only thing we have to do to be effective at language teaching is to create ways of really engaging our students in the target language. That’s the trick.
Laura Avila
I’d like to share an anecdote from a colleague, a master teacher of Spanish in Maine, Laura Avila. Laura had just returned to her classroom after a long absence. We all know what a tall order it is to restore a classroom to order after a lengthy absence.
Here is her report:
Hi Ben, I was out from school for over a month. When I got back, the clamor was loud and strong from all:
“We’re doing a character today, right?” They expected nothing less. That’s exactly what we did. No need to plan on my part, no targeting anything. Everyone fit into their job. The questioning levels were the guides. The posted rules calmed us all in our enthusiasm.
We created together, shared our love and had a good time. I rode their energy and their love. We rode it together. I was very tired at the end of the day, but felt some soothing in this sad time for me. Such is the power of The Invisibles.
Thank you, Ben!
Laura
Laura went back to work after a month off and everything she had been doing before her absence just snapped into place like magic. But it wasn’t magic: it was the application of the program described in this book.