Resources in Spanish to better understand The Middle Ages: Poetry

The Middle Ages can be an engaging topic to talk about with our high school students. Although there is not a specific unit about the Middle Ages in the Social Studies curriculum, students have learned about the Renaissance in grade 8 and explored nationalism and the foundations of some European nations in grade 11. By high school, students also become acquainted with Shakespearean plays such as Romeo and Juliet, set in medieval Italy and they also get to know some Middle Age English classics. Along with cultural and historical elements students will be able to learn about the origin of Spanish language and literature,.

I will be discussing some related resources and literary works that can be used with our students to get a deeper insight of the Middle Ages. I have four poems for your consideration:

• A poem by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, from the school Mester de Clerecía
• A jarcha, kharja in English - a short poem written in the Islamic kingdoms in Spain
• A villancico or a lyric poem related to the troubadour tradition
• A romance, a narrative poem related to the tradition of the epic poems

If there is a writer from the Middle Ages in Spain I keep on reading and revisiting, this is Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. The first half of the 14th century when he lived was extremely complex and Spanish society was changing rapidly. I find every aspect of Ruiz's life interesting, especially since little is known about him though many new facts are being discovered. 

 

El Arcipreste just wrote one book called El Libro de Buen Amor. The book is a heterogeneous collection of stories in verse, each of them telling a comical  tale with a moral. The stories are the pseudo-biographical romantic adventures of the writer, a priest. At the time the policy of  celibacy for priests was initially implemented in Spain. The Spanish kingdoms, in particular Castille, had been isolated from the rest of Christianity because of the Muslim invasion and not all the policies dictated by the Vatican were enforced.

The book is humorous, witty, and often critical of the different institutions. There are many interesting sections that we could use with our students, for example, the encounters of el Arcipreste with the mountain women, las serranas. My suggestion would be to use the poem Lo que puede el dinero, where the author criticizes in an almost cynical way about the negative influence of money in the society including the Catholic Church. 

Jarcha means "final" in Arabic. They are the final refrain to a larger poem written in Arabic, the muwashshah. Most of the jarchas were written in classical or Andalusi Arabic, the variety spoken in the Islamic kingdoms in southern Spain. About 70 of them were written in the Mozarabic language spoken by the Christian minority at the time in the same region of southern Spain . The language is mainly Romanic with many Arabic and Jewish elements. The jarchas were written in Arabic characters, which makes them unique in the European tradition. The jarchas are the oldest poems written in a Romanic language in Europe because most were written in the 10th or 11th centuries.

 

Most of the jarchas are recited by females and they speak of love, especially unrequited love or impossible love. Some of the protagonists are married women (probably in arranged marriages), who are unhappy and pine for their true love. In the Language Arts blog of IES Casas Nuevas high school in Spain, we can find a very  good selection of Middle Age Spanish poems. There are four jarchas in this selection and number 4 is a beautiful sample to work with our students.


 

If we want to give our students a deeper insight about the jarchas and the time and area where they were produced, this short clip is very informative.

The jarchas are undoubtedly related to the popular poems of the rest of Spain.  They were the traditional songs sung by everyone and they are also related to the troubadours style from southern France. They are short, with a simple in structure and most of the times portray an impossible relation between two young lovers. There are more examples in this website. Poems number 3 or 30 can be a good example to work with our students.

The last suggestion is to work with a "romance". Romances are narrative poems, of variable length, which became very popular in Spain in the 14th century. They were sung or recited by professional juglares, a kind of popular troubadours. Their themes are war, chivalry, impossible or unrequited love. Many are based on historical events although some are not very historically accurate.
 

La voz de los romances is a collaborative project by a group of schools in Cordoba, Spain. Their goal is to build awareness about the value of reading aloud and oral tradition. Schools select romances and students recite them. The mp3 files are available online along with the poems organized by styles. We can use this website to select the romances we want to work with. Two suggestions:

• Romance del Prisonero is a short romance with just 16 verses. It is a monologue by a prisoner who tells how he feels about his lack of freedom in spring when everything is in bloom. 
• The second romance is La doncella guerrera. In a period when human rights, especially the rights of women, were not considered a priority, several romances portray women that disguise as men in search of their own destiny. This is one example of them.

These are my suggestions to work with our students in a bilingual or IB program. They can help our students to better understand the Middle Ages in Spain and the origins of Spanish. These works of art can also be related to what they read in ELA and to some of the topics they work with in Social Studies. I´ll speak about medieval prose in my next entry.

New school year

Tomorrow, August 28th, teachers officially go back to work. I am pretty sure that we are all back refreshed and full of energy to face the new school year ahead. My plan is to continue working on the blog and have at least a post per week. You are well aware that sometimes things get complicated and I am pretty sure that some weeks there won't be any new posts. It is what we call in Spanish "los imponderables". I count on your understanding.

 

I will try to identify useful resources, introduce and analyze new pedagogical approaches to language teaching and try to catch up with technology that can enhance our daily practice. All this without forgetting the cultural component, a key part of language teaching.

 

I would love to hear your comments and suggestions and I hope you enjoy the blog and find it useful and inspiring.

Summer vacation (after the flood)

It has been a hard school year for me. I have been doing a job that is quite different from what I had in mind in 2012 but every cloud has its silver lining, todo tiene su lado bueno. I have learned a lot, even enjoying different challenges along the way.

For everybody who has kept up with the news, the flood waters in Calgary have finally receded! I hope everyone is safe and can go back home as soon as possible! I understand how it feels because we are still evacuated ourselves! Anyway, I am going on holiday in a few days and will be visiting my family and friends in Spain. I plan to charge  my batteries so I won´t post new entries until most likely the end of August.

I´ll take my homework with me though. These are some topics I want to spend time reflecting about so new ideas and new energy can be posted in the new school year. I would like to:

• spend some time redesigning the blog´s layout.
• explore the expansion of my blog and ideas through social media, something I have been delaying for some time.
• catch up with some literary novelties. There are three books I look forward to having the time to read because they can be a good resource for my Spanish classes: Yo soy el cero by Luis Balbuena, Las nueve cifras y el cambiante cero by Bernardo Recamán and La estrategia del parásito by César Mallorquí. I am sure new titles will pile up on my desk soon.
• catch up with some articles on bilingual education and CLIL. I have neglected this part in the blog in the last months and I want to make sure that the blog is a good tool to learn more about bilingual education and CLIL.
• watch some films in Spanish I missed in the last two years. I am particularly interested in some of the last Mexican films such as: Heli, La jaula de oro and Nosotros los nobles.

The original plan is to have new materials and ideas to start the school year with plenty to write about in the blog.

I look forward to your visits, comments, and support and wish everyone a wonderful, restful summer! See you in August!

Approaches to bilingual education in European countries

The blog mantained by Pilar Torres is a great source of information about second language acquisition, bilingual programs, CLI, cooperative projects and much more. Her posts have been featured on my blog before and it won't be the last!

The Centro de Profesores in Cordoba, Spain, where Pilar is an advisor, has recently organized a Study Visit called "The ABC of Plurilingualism in Andalusia". The Study Visits programme, for education and vocational training specialists and decision makers, "is an initiative of the European Commision's Directorate-General for Education and Culture. Its objective is to support policy development and cooperation at European level in lifelong learning, notably in the context of the Lisbon process and the education and training agenda 2020 (E&T2020), as well as the Bologna and Copenhagen processes and their successors." (Source: Directorate-General for Education and Culture's website)

 

Experts involved in bilingual programs from 11 European countries took part in the Study Visit and learnt first hand about the bilingual programs in Andalusia, Spain. They also introduced the language and bilingual programs in their respective countries. Twelve presentations are available online that portray different realities and ways of implementing bilingual programs. Ireland's experiences are particularly interesting, efforts are aimed at increasing the knowledge and daily use of their native language, Gaelic Irish, in the battle against the dominance of English. Another interesting case is Hungary and their goal to preserve Hungarian minority cultures in such as Romania or Slovakia.  The twelve presentations show a different scenario but with in many cases similar challenges ahead.

A report by Pilar Torres about the rationale behind bilingual programs and their implementation in Andalusia is available in the same post. I have mentioned in previous posts that the approach to bilingual programs in that Spanish province is very thorough. I highly recommend you to read the whole report to fully understand the work that they've done in the last 20 years. Some of the strong points of the bilingual programs in Andalusia are the following:

• The existence of a log term program that goes from kindergarten to the last year of secondary education.
• It is a program open to all students and there are not prerequisites to start the program.
• The concept of multilingualism : students are encouraged to take another language outside the two working languages in the bilingual program. This concept of multilingualism is even more obvious with the launching of bilingual programs in not so popular languages in Spain such as Chinese or Portuguese.
• Collaboration with other countries is encouraged so students can get a dual diploma at the end of the some of the bilingual programs (French and soon Chinese).
• The use of language assistants as key resource for students and teachers.
• The compromise of initial and continuous training for the teachers working in the bilingual programs.
• The establishment of an international teacher network to create quality resources available online.
• The placement of a bilingual program coordinator in every school.
• Schools normally use a CLIL approach when implementing bilingual programs.

The program's strengths are obvious but there are also challenges ahead such as how to integrate students with learning disabilities in a bilingual program, or how to create attainable, rigorous benchmarks for all the students. And we should not forget the effects of the crisis in programs like the language assistants or the in-service programs for teachers.

All the participants in the Study Visit agreed to present closing remarks with proposal and ideas to better face the challenges for the future. We can certainly learn a lot from their challenges because we face many similar ones too. We should continue to build the foundation of this kind of international collaboration to improve the quality of our bilingual programs.

A publicity campaign for the Spanish class: Football!

I have just read an article in the Spanish newspaper, El Pais, about a publicity company and the campaigns they have been creating for the football team Atlético de Madrid. In the article we find some interesting points about the rationale behind the commercials that the creators mention:

• Publicity has to be part of entertaining
• The football team does not pay to show the commercials on TV or in the Internet, they are shown through social networking websites and they become very popular.
• The campaign speaks about a way of understanding life and about feelings. Supporting this team means something else, to be part of a group who share the same sentiments. But these sentiments are often not happy ones as the commercials often depict supporters suffering at their team's defeats.
• The creators would only advertise for the team they love.

1. Papá, ¿por qué somos del Atleti?, 2005. Supporting a team means to transmit this passion to our children. Even if they don´t understand the reasons at first. When the team was not doing so well, its fans were still with it.

2. Me mata, me da la vida, 2006. We can change jobs, careers, give up smoking and, even giving a pass to a glass of wine. Yet, we can never abandon our football team. This is lasting love.

3. Commercial in Europe. After many years struggling in the Spanish league, even in the second division, Atlético de Madrid gets a position that allows them to play European championships. At that time, 2008-9, a unit of Spanish blue helmets was posted in Kosovo. Naturally, you not only transmit your passion for your football team to your children and everyone you meet, even new friends who know about fate and bad luck much more than any football team (below).

4. Spot Inmigrante, 2008. The commercials have proven very popular because the writers use material that viewers can relate to and reflect the social situations of the times. When immigrants came to Spain, they were encouraged to become fans of this football team, a team that welcomes everyone and to share the same great passion and pride that makes the team. It is very interesting how the life of these immigrants is portrayed.  

5. Commercial Crisis, 2012. And the crisis again. But supporting this team will give you strength to cope with everything. You not only support the team, you share its principles and spirit.

This campaign series is a good tool that documents the changes in Spain over the last few years as one new commercial is filmed each year. They are also good at showing what being part of a football team means in some cultures. Its meaning goes further than sport. These commercials are also linguistically very interesting to work in a class, especially commercial numbers 2 and 4. And there is always the possibility of trying to find more, this is just a selection of commercials.