Mexico with Middle Schoolers: Teaching Language in Context, by Nan Pickens

Mexico with Middle Schoolers

Last March, I had the pleasure of accompanying 17 of my eighth grade students to Oaxaca for a week.  This was an especially rewarding trip for me because we had spent the year studying Mexican history in our Spanish class, and actually being in the country allowed the kids to make amazing connections to our curriculum. The week of service at a local orphanage and tourism in the beautiful colonial town gave the kids many opportunities to speak the language, but also to immerse in the rich history and culture of the area.

I have been exploring the use of history as a way to teach language in context, and I find compelling history lessons a great way to get middle school kids expressing themselves in Spanish.  Our eighth grade course is the approximate equivalent of a level 2 language class, and our goal is to master the preterite and imperfect tenses by the end of the year. 

Mexican history is particularly rich in compelling stories and figures.  Over the course of the year we study the founding of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, the legend of Popocatépetl and Itzaccíhuatl,  Quetzalcoatl, Cuauhtemoc, Doña Marina and Cortés, independence and revolution, and Frida and Diego. We use the student novel Viviana y su Gran Aventura Mexicana as a launching point for our history units. A through line of our course is the mestizo culture of Mexico, which they really come to understand through the study of these historical units.

As we visited pre-Columbian ruins, colonial buildings, and contemporary cultural centers of Oaxaca, the students saw many references to the heroes and legends we studied.  One aspect that particularly resonated with the kids was the frequent reference by our guides to the spiritual conquest, in addition to the territorial conquest, of the native Mexican people by the Spanish.  While we had not used this terminology in class, this was something the students had some familiarity with.  In one particular lesson, we spent an entire class period closely studying Diego Rivera’s mural, "La Llegada de Cortés." This elaborate mural depicts in painful detail the horrors of the spiritual conquest, as the Spanish ruthlessly converted the natives to Catholicism. (Earlier in the year we use a thinking routine to study Rivera's "Tenochtitlan," another elaborate mural from the same series, but this one depicting the glories of the pre-Columbian Aztec civilization.)  They had become all too familiar with the atrocities of the conquest, and they even understood its implications on the more modern history of Mexico.

Probably the biggest take-away for the students on the trip was the magnitude of Benito Juarez’s legacy in Mexico.  Juarez, a poor indigenous orphan from the sierra of Oaxaca, went on to be governor of the state and later the first indigenous president of Mexico.  He fought for the rights of the poor and oppressed in the country.  Juarez is a huge hero, particularly in his home state of Oaxaca, and we just happened to be there on his birthday, a festive national holiday. Juarez's story, even studied in rather basic language, is extremely compelling to students, and they had remembered every detail from our unit in class.  Because we had studied Mexican history chronologically, they were also able to see Juarez in the context of Mexico's struggle for independence from European influence.  Of course they left Oaxaca with a much deeper understanding of this national hero's importance a century and a half after his death. 

Mexico has a rich and fascinating history, one that I have found extremely well suited for the middle school language class.  By making Mexico the theme of our course, students learn to use the past tenses through the study of culturally pertinent content, and they are able to make meaningful interdisciplinary connections.  Additionally, they gain a deeper understanding of and appreciation for our neighbors to the south.

The Danger of a Single Story, by Shields Sundberg

When I teach the Great Lakes region in my 20th centuryAfrica course, I break the material down into four different units.  First, we study pre-colonial Rwanda, focusing on the ways tolerance and story-telling shaped the Banyarwandan society.  Then, we examine colonialism in Congo and Rwanda, looking at the paths forged by direct rule and Belgian greed in the region.  Lastly, we look at post-colonial DRC and then post-colonial Rwanda.  At the end of each of these four units, the students complete an assessment.  The assessment for the last unit has always been the most difficult to design. While I want students to demonstrate comprehension of the complex forces at work in Rwanda from the Apocalypse Revolution of 1959 to the efforts to rebuild after the 1994 genocide, it is important, too, that students understand the deeply human stories Rwandans have to tell of their own history in the 20th century.

Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie's Tedtalk has helped reframe the way many people think about Africa, and thus I thought it possible her talk might help me design an assessment that would provide an opportunity to synthesize events (content) while also tapping into the realities of pain, dignity, justice, and forgiveness.

If you have not seen it, please check it out here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story

Moving as I have found the talk, I had not used it in my 20th centuryAfrica class until this past academic year (2013-2014).  While Adichie describes her childhood in Nigeria, the message she shares struck me as an ideal one for writing about Rwanda.  She explains that "[the] single story of Africa ultimately comes [...] from Western literature" but she also explores how her own sense of a childhood domestic servant who worked for the family was shaped by another "single story."  The genocide was ultimately possible because Hutu power managed to create and make appealing a (very dangerous) single story.  I did not want my students to write the narrative in a linear, singular way, thereby possibly committing their own understanding to a singular way of writing and synthesizing the genocide (and its impact).

Thus, instead of having my students write a traditional essay about the genocide, I asked them to tell me the story of the genocide (they had, by this point, already written essays about the other three units and thus were not dealing solely with the genocide itself).  In the story, they needed to avoid "the danger of a single story" and instead tell it from multiple perspectives.  Students found the assignment very challenging, and they had many (fair) questions about how to proceed:  do we describe one event from multiple perspectives?  do we start with one perspective and then switch to another?  how far back in time do we begin?  Do we need to inhabit the voice of actors, and if so, do we give equal weight to Hutus and Tutsis, French and UN actors?

So, we broke it down.  How would one tell the story through the lens of General Bagosora? or a host on Radio Mille Collines?  And what of a Hutu woman married to a Tutsi man?  What might Kagame's story have been, before and then after he crossed the rubicon and stepped into a position of leadership? How do we lend humanity to these multiple voices without attempting to inhabit them?

The answer, it seemed to me, was to read and research.  Thus, the project grew.  After doing all of the work I had already assigned, they were now seeking specific voices--the voices of the Rwandans. Testimony from the Gacaca Courts proved invaluable.  As the work grew, so did their understanding. As I fretted over what to cut from the course in order to make room for this, a few students took the lead and began to explain to others how the assignment eventually "clicks."  Students started writing their stories jointly.  That was unexpected and seemed like another hurdle:  how do I grade this?

In the end, the students wrote beautiful stories, and almost all of them "got it."  What did they get? They seemed to realize how hard it is to refract the multiple voices of a deeply complicated event (they were therefore "doing history")  as well as how desperately important it is to guard against "the danger of a single story," perhaps most especially so when it comes to Africa generally and the Rwandan genocide specifically.    Rwandans do not want their story to be one of genocide; they want to tell their own stories, and we ought to listen as we teach about the history the world has named and even, to some extent claimed, of genocide.