Last semester, I was lucky enough to observe the final project of Bonnie G. and Lindsay C.'s Speech 151/Spanish 252
Twofer learning community, "Exprésate--With Feeling."
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| The male student group |
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| The female student group |
The project, a performance collage called the Bilingual Reader's Theatre, required that students--four female students in one group and four male students in another--explore elements of Hispanic culture and create text based performances around their findings.
The Reader's Theatre project required that the students perform 25% of each performance collage in Spanish. The students had been practicing integrating more and more Spanish into speeches all semester long. One practice session came mid-semester when students performed for a group of three year olds from MCC's own
Children's Learning Center: fun
and educational!
For this final project, the groups decided to use the gender split of the class to their advantage, so the female student group explored issues of domestic violence, and the male student group explored issues of machismo. The groups named their sources, which included writers as varied as
Oscar Hijuelos and
John Leguizamo, during the presentation. They used props, choreographed pantomime, and translations that overlapped with original recitations of Spanish. The idea--whether it was the negativity of stereotypes or the empowerment of women--was always clear, regardless of the audience's fluency in the language (specifically this audience member, whose six years of French about seventeen years ago didn't quite prepare her for this...).
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| Illustrating machismo in Spanish culture |
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| Pantomiming poetry lyrics |
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| Illustrating domestic violence in Spanish Culture |
What was the
most obvious, though, was the
success of the Speech and Spanish learning community. The students were able to get up in front of a dozen friends and strangers (some wielding cameras) and perform snippets of the prose, drama, and poetry they had researched and vetted to express (
¡exprésate!) the ideas they'd been learning for sixteen weeks. Were they nervous? Absolutely. But they were also terrific.
Now that we've seen two ways our MCC instructors have used performance in their classrooms, how would
you use skits or other types of performance
in your classroom? Would you ask students to do a relatively quick illustration of a single concept, like with
S.V.'s Sociology of Deviance skits? Or would you have them illustrate a semester's worth of content, as Bonnie and Lindsay did? Either way, this kind of interactive group activity can be a terrific classroom tool!
