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.
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