I had interesting and good experiences as an
educator, trainer and but also as a learner, that I would like to
share with you, they are so many and i have to much to say about each
one, that I really can't do it, so, I'll select a few that I maybe
can be usefull for your own contexts and do a hard sinteses. Dance
and literacy are rarely together, but as dance is one of my passions,
I try to develop activities on this field and I was lucky to work
with choreographers that used as base input poetry, stories and
writting activities.
Experiences as LEARNER:
Italian for Foreigners
I had a very good experience on Officina Creativa
Interculturalle as a student of Italian for foreigners mainly because
they were flexible, sensitive and understandive enough towards the
situation of being a foreigner. Our fears, needs, expectations,
dreams, particularities and isolation situation, where included as
part of the lesson and used as theme for learn italian language.
Independent of all ages, cultures, life situations, italian level, we
will always start and finish with a simple activity together, which
help us to connect with each other, that shared the some common
strugle.
The strongest point of this experience was the
hosting, the enviorment of open arms, listening, looking, mediator of
diferent cultures and gather promotion, and the creative, personal
and non formal education methodologies.
The weakest point of this experience was the
dificulty to adjust the diferent levels of italian, assure the
continuity of evolution between classes, lack of evaluation moments
for exchange feedbacks and the certificate of learning that is
recognized.
Story Telling Course
On this
course we were learning how to tell a story and all the process
behind it, that mades each story teller different from another and
the same story being told diferently as we put so much of our
sensitivity and non verbal language inside but underline. But while
we were learning we were listening each others stories repeatly and
surprisly I wanted to hear it more and more which made understand how
much we connect through these activities.
The
strongest point of this experience the quality of the teacher's
listening and feedback that made us improve and get more and more to
our own style of storytellers.
The
weakest point of this experience was that we could only choose the
tales we would work.
Dance in community workshop, and course
In this
workshop I learn how to connect to many different inputs with dance,
from video, stories, choreographies. One example: with the theme
weather, from a video of clouds movement drawing without look at the
paper, selecting from all those lines shapes, write a story about it,
tell it, and then dance it, while some of us do the music for it.
From the
children's book of Jutta Bauer's “Screaming mother”, we plan a
serie of multicultural dance classes, as the pieces of the penguin
went to different part of the world, and we will rescuing his body
parts focus the movement atention on those through the diverse local
traditional dances.
Research and Dance Composition workshop
From the
portuguese poetry of the book of Casimiro de Brito called “Where
the body Ends” I learned how to work books both text through
movement and dance composition in relation with the architeture of a
public space.
Multiculturality through Dance workshop
I
develop this workshop connecting the body expression with cultural
inputs like traditional musics, enviornment, objects, ideas, symbols,
history references from participants and common sense knowledge.
The
activity was part outdoors so we use as input the architeture and the
diversity of the space relating them with the world cultures.
The
strong point was the diversity of inputs as impulse to movement, as
it could suit the diversity of participants and the possibility to
present how to work the diferent aspects of body movement and
expression.
The weak
point was find the coherence between the complex diversity and reach
participants level of understanding.
Portuguese Culture Events
I
organized portuguese culture events about literature, music and some
particular places as city of porto. The idea is to present, to
promote, to enchant, to enthusiast people about it and mainly connect
them with a diferent, distant and foreign people and culture.
It was a
challenge to get people interested on a language that though very
close to italian it wasn't their own.
The
strong point of these events were using the interactive art
instalation and pathways methodology to present portuguese literature
work very well to get people more active on their knowledge
exploration and free to explore acording with their own interest.
The weak
point of this events was that participants were a bit lost because
there were not enough prepared guides and maybe not enough guide
lines for the amount of things to explore since that the interactive
and active experience is something that adults are not used to and
are not expecting on a
event.
Multicultural events
On these
events adults were gather to find a meeting of at least two cultures
about a theme that would be explored according with these cultures in
order to promote a bigger intercultural dialogue on the cultural
events and take advantage to involved local foreigners to teach us
about their culture.
It was
organized one about mythology (with Portugal, Germany, Greece and
Holland) and one about Food (with Greece, Portugal and Hungary).
The
strong point of these events were the surprising ability to enjoy the
process of the activities proposed and the pleasure to find a place
where they could connect with strangers through activities different
from daily and with culture as mediator.
The weak
point was that it was hard to involved them on the reflect process of
those activities as they associate event and non formal education
activities as a moment to enjoy the company of each other and have
fun as priority and as a secondary level learn something and even
less to be aware of it.
Workshop of book building “The Book that
it isn't”
In this
workshop adults, children and persons of all ages were invited to
create a book never seen before from waste materials. It had to had a
cover where the title, author, date, place and promotor (editor)
would be placed, and then its content with some way of organize the
pages with story content. The books where placed in the Library
together with normal book, with a poster explaining what were they
about and a basket with ideas for inviting readers to build at home
more of these books, for a month.
The
strong point of this activity was a great way to make understand what
is behind the process of a book, the creativity required to it's
building and the intime and afective connection created by build and
sign the book made as the author.
The
weekest point of this activity was the small community impact that it
had.
English for children through literacy and
play activity methodologies
One of
the most effective ways to learn to speak and understand a language
is the need and the enjoyment of use it.
On the
children's English classes I worked teaching english and literacy through songs, nursery rhymes sculptures, puppet theatre and theatre, dramatic expression, story
telling, outdoor traditional games (that included verbalizing english
sentences) were included. Besides that one of the biggest
focus of my work was the play activities recreating literacy contexts such as:
restaurants, supermarket, teddy bear hospitals, pretending travel
experience, travel agency, shopping centre and the shops street and
hotels. Finally we develop works about stories like art instalations and workshops of building their own books or of English vocabulary (to add to library school).
The
strong point of this classes were that the enjoyment of the kids, how
much they learn in paralel about multiculturality and how to play.
The weak
point of this project was that it was hard to explain all that was
required to understand to develop this activities in english,
specially because their if their capacity of attention would be
finish after the explanation then to play in english it was hard.