Spanish Immersion

With this topic, my main question was what are educators/schools/teachers doing to help immerse students in culture? As I'm not an EDU major, while I was doing my observation assignment I came across a great video called Amazing Classrooms: Spanish Immersion. (Watch here!) This was the perfect companion to both my question for this blog and also for my observation.

The Spanish Language Immersion School runs with the help of teachers, educators, and parents. It takes in students who use English as their dominant language, from pre-K to grade 5, and has them leave after 5th grade fluent in Spanish, and immersed in the Spanish culture.

Many different teaching methods are used here. Teachers focus on small groups of kids, and use worksheets and verbal answers and speaking to enhance their understanding and pronunciation of the Spanish language. On top of that, they include separate cultural activities like salsa dancing and other cool things.

I think that this kind of culture immersion is fantastic. There's an entire school focused on doing what we learned about this week: teaching kids cultures different than their own. And by doing this, kids leave multi-cultural and able to understand to a whole new level about how to appreciate everyone's different cultures. I think it's a great way to do what everyone should do at least a little bit in every classroom.

Do you teach a curriculum you know is a lie even though this is how you learned it?

The story and history of Christopher Columbus is a major debate that can be used to answer this question. As kids, we learned a lot about the supposed "man who discovered America". We learned that he was the first one on this land, that he was a friendly heroic man, and that he was SO great that we even had a day off from school to celebrate all he had done for our country. So, of course, as we got older and began learning more about Columbus's REAL history...it's not a shock that most of us began resenting him and what he'd really done. Stolen land already inhabited by the Natives? Killing them? This doesn't seem to friendly or heroic to me anymore.

In Discovering Columbus, a teacher goes into teaching his students about the truth behind Columbus, and uses a very hands-on approach to help them understand it. He goes and takes a student's purse, telling them that it's his because he's the one holding it. This gets the students up and talking about how it's not his, and that they clearly watched him take it from the student. And from here, he goes into the question of why exactly we say that Columbus discovered America. I really liked his approach on the true story. Showing the student's first hand the difference between actually discovering something and simply taking something and claiming it yours. This is a great way to show what really happened without completely getting gorey and depressing.

This definitely made me realize how you can go about telling the true story to students. If I were to teach, I would definitely use something like this to tell the story.

In No Reason to Celebrate Invasion, we get a first hand look at a Native American who feels we should not be celebrating something that ended up destroying the lives of her ancestors. She goes on to knock down the fact that maybe some of the things they got from Europe as a result of this invasion were helpful, but would be given up in a second to have prevented the massacre of her people. It's very interesting to get a first hand look into the mind of someone who may not have been alive at the time, but is still feeling the effects of it in her life today.

If I were to be an educator, this would definitely pose a dilemma. We learn about the discovery of America fairly young, and that could be a reason teachers generally don't divulge into genocide and theft of land. It seems like a better option to go with the sunshine & flowers route, therefore dodging the horrified looks on the faces of innocent children. But at the same time, do you lie to them? It's a tough situation. But I would definitely try and tell the truth while giving them a first hand look on how things really went.