World Wide Project of Peace & Hope “1000 Papercrane Challenge”
by Ninfa Laurenzo ECC
“Put a desire in your heart and let it fly with a paper crane.
It will come true when you count 1000 paper cranes”
The Japanese legend
This is the project for the StarT Project Contest in Finland, Europe. Crossing fingers!
With the Peace Project we intend to involve the parents so they develop consciousness of the values and take part in the formation and education of their children by participating in activities that will take part as family events. These events and projects will involve developing tolerance, solidarity and respect for other’s values. These qualities are the pillar for living in a just and peaceful society that extends from the school to community and from community to our society as a whole.
What is #1000papercrane project about?
Our Peace Project at Ninfa Laurenzo Early Childhood Center (Houston, TX, USA) was initiated with the desire to promote values of peace, respect, tolerance and love. These values represent the base of a free and just society and are the actions that come from the citizens. Our Education Center is located in a community that is made up of citizens from different nationalities, as are many of the communities in the United States. Generally the community is characterized as having a peaceful environment, yet on occasions there are situations lived which are not very positive or peaceful. The current climate worldwide has many instances which are taking us away from a Peaceful World. Educational Institutions are charged with the responsibility to teach values of peace and respect, thus supporting the initial teachings that come from the home so that we can live in a civilized, peaceful community. We are seeing the need to strengthen our teachings and plant the seed in the future generations beginning with the youngest ages.
Our School Context
Ninfa Laurenzo Early Childhood Center is a school where the curriculum includes variety of techniques for the development of emotions, feelings and behavior. All the teachers have been trained by Houston Independent School District with the program Conscious Discipline, which includes techniques and strategies for teachers to use to help children focus on negative emotions and practice self-control with the use of breathing and breathing. In addition we include other strategies such as mindfulness, yoga, Tai-Chi… Due to family circumstances and cultural behaviors there are some students that demonstrate aggressive behavior towards the teacher and peers when their ideas are not respected or tolerated. These students have poor capacity to manage their emotions in a positive manner.
Our story
Our journey began when we found that there was a need to promote values of peace, respect, tolerance and love. We mentioned before that these values represent the base of a free and just society and are the actions that come from the citizens. Our school is located in a very diverse community, like Houston and our entire country, United States of America. Our Education Center is located in a community that is made up of citizens from different nationalities, as are many of the communities in the United States. Our community suffers from several situations that are not very positive nor peaceful, plus the current climate worldwide is not an example of a peaceful world. This is why our school is really concerned and we have take responsibility to teach our students values of peace and respect, promoting a peaceful community.
We have implemented several initiatives the last two years that have impacted profoundly the lives of our students. Last year we implemented yoga classes in the classrooms which resulted in the reduction of office referrals and the overall improvement of students behavior. During the year school we also included in our daily schedule a guided meditation with the students, which combined with yoga resulted in better behavior and students more relaxed throughout the day. This year we lost our school counselor due to budget cuts, which was a great loss to our center due to the excellent rapport that our counselor had with our parents who needed helped. Combined our yoga, guided meditation and other mindfulness activities helped us address our loss of our counselor and encouraged us to keep looking for more ideas that can help us to improve and promote coexistence, tolerance and peace. This project help us broaden our current initiatives and we became more encouraged to transition our commitment from our classrooms and our center to our community, and the whole world.
When we study and learn, we pay attention to something in particular, we focus on it. Then, the two parts of our brain start to work, both individually and together too. What do we feel? How do we learn? And why we forget things? This article will give you some answers. Let's try some questions I found here: "Do you remember your first day of school? What did it feel like when you were separated from your parents? Did you like your teacher? Did you make friends? The process of creating a new memory and bringing it back to mind years later is a complicated and abstract thing, yet we all do it every day. How does memory work?"
- Feeling: It is a psychic phenomenon originated by the excitation of a sensory organ, excitation which in turn is produced by a stimulus, and by virtue of which certain qualities of the objects of the external world are known, such as colors, sounds, smells, tastes... or certain states of the organism itself.
The senses are receptors where the body gathers information from the outside world (colors, sounds,...) and inside the body (state of the viscera, body movements, pain, ...) Sensory receptors are located in different parts of the body:
- On the surface of the organism. They are the five classic senses.
- Within the organism; In the respiratory, digestive, urogenital and, generally, in the viscera. Thanks to them we get feelings of hunger, thirst, well-being, etc.
- In muscles, tendons, joints. They control muscle responses.
The stimuli are forms of energy that affect the senses (retina, tympanum ...) but in themselves are psychologically silent: neither the vibrations of the air are sonorous nor the electromagnetic waves have any color. Sound or color arise when nerve impulses triggered by stimulation of the tympanum or retina reach the corresponding zones of the cerebral cortex.
Not all stimuli that reach the senses are capable of provoking sensations. For example, the human eye perceives only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The same thing happens with certain very low sounds or with certain olfactory properties.
- Perception: The Human Being does not take the information that comes from the outside world in the form of pure sensations: our knowledge of reality does not consist of a cluster of colors, sounds, tastes, etc. We grasp reality as something structured, as objects endowed with meaning. Perception consists in a structured integration of the sensory data, in virtue of which the stimulating energy manifests itself as the world.
The basic psychological unit of sensible knowledge is not sensation, but perception. It is a sensocognitivo process and is conditioned by learning, past expectations and cognitive schemata, as well as other subjective factors such as motivations, interests, etc; Or social, such as language, culture.
The laws of perception
It was Gestal psychologists who mostly studied these laws, especially those related to visual perceptions. This school defends that the form imposes like a figure structured according to certain laws.The most important are the following:
a) Ratio figure-background
He states that what we perceive is a figure that is cut out on a background. The figure has its own characteristics such as: shape and defined outlines; Greater structuring; Closer to the subject than the background; Closed and with a surface smaller than the bottom.
The fund, as opposed to the figure, lacks precise contours; Is uniform; More distant, wraps the figure and its surface is smaller. A curious circumstance is the so-called fund-figure reversibility. The best-known example is the Rubin Cup. In this drawing, either we perceive two faces in dark cut out on a white background, or a white cup on a dark background.
b) Stimulation grouping laws
Our perceptions tend, on the one hand, that the form is organized in such a way that the perceived figure is as simple as possible; On the other hand, we tend to perceive the figure as clearly as possible.The so-called good figure or good form is imposed. Some of these laws are:
Law of Proximity: to such stimuli, we tend to perceive those who are grouped closer together.
Law of Continuity: we tend to group stimuli that have a continuity of form.
Law of Similarity: together we tend to perceive stimuli that have similarities to each other.
Nothing we perceive remains constant: the wavelengths change according to the variations of luminosity; The size of the objects varies according to our position; Shape is modified by perspective, etc.However, our brain is able to perceive the same color, the same size or the same shape. This phenomenon is known as perceptual constancy.
If our perception of objects varied at the same time as the stimuli that come from them, it would be impossible to recognize things, since they would be in perpetual change. The perceptive constancy is, therefore, vital for our adaptation to the environment.
Perception is not a process that is determined solely by the physiological mechanisms of the senses and the brain. Many other elements of educational and cultural origin are involved.
a) Influences of language and culture
The linguistic ability to elaborate abstractions modifies the perception of the world. The adult symbolically processes sensory information: the things that surround him and the situations in which he is immersed are perceived as being carriers of abstract qualities. For example, a sports car is interpreted as something more than a pure object: you see success, power, money,... Thanks to language, the world ceases to be a world limited to objects and physical events to become a meaningful world, meaning meaningful.
But it is not only the language that modifies perception, but also the opposite: the greater perceptive fineness of some peoples towards essential aspects of the environment in which they live, lead them to a better linguistic specialization. Thus, for example, in the Arabic languages there are more than 400 words to designate the camel.
b) Other influences: motivations, attitudes, interests ...
Interests or motivations influence perception. Thus, a person who loves the opera will capture an infinity of musical and scenic details in one performance, in front of another that bores him. A student who is not motivated in the explanation of the teacher will tend to capture diffusely what is said in class, while another student who is interested in the subject will not lose detail. If someone is hungry he will more easily perceive an advertisement of food than another who is satisfied, etc.
Another factor that influences is the previous attitude that we have before certain stimuli. Allport and Kramer conducted an experiment to determine the influence of social prejudices on perception.They selected a group where there were people with racial prejudice and people without prejudice. Subsequently, they screened slides of white men and each member of the group was asked to identify individuals of Jewish origin. The result showed that prejudiced individuals more easily identified Jewish faces.
- Attention: it is a selective process of perception. When we walk down a street the amount of stimuli that impact our senses is practically unlimited; However, at every moment our brain is only conscious of a limited number of these stimuli. If we are playing cards or chess we will concentrate on the game and we will miss other stimuli that come from where we are. Any student has thousands of subjective experiences about what it means to attend or not to attend in class to the teacher's explanations.
An interesting phenomenon is perceptual defense. This is a property by which favorable or pleasant stimuli are identified more quickly than unfavorable or unpleasant ones. In other words, subjects especially cater to stimuli motivating significance, while their attention is not triggered, or takes longer to do when they get unpleasant stimuli.
Many factors influence the attention. Some affect the stimuli themselves (size, color, luminosity, movement, repetition), while others are internal factors of the subject itself (motives, interests, tastes, moral or aesthetic values). Advertising psychology often uses techniques to increase the public's attention for commercial purposes. Among the procedures used are the following: originality (telling amazing stories, posing absurd situations, etc.), spectacularity (special effects, mixing shapes and colors, figures executing impossible movements, staging majestic), word games or Jokes that border what is morally forbidden, sexual claims or incitement, etc.
- Memory: The importance of memory is vital. Without it, learning would be useless; It would be impossible for us to survive in a changing world and we would not have the sense of personal identity. In it also some of the highest human functions are established: thought, language, the ability to foresee and plan the future, etc.
Memory is the ability of our brains to store and retrieve information. It is constituted by innumerable components, which are distributed along neural networks that act within numerous structures of the brain. There are many different memories: olfactory, visual, logical, analytical, associative, etc.
Psychologists often divide memory into three systems:
a) Sensory memory
Sensory memory registers sensations and allows us to explore the characteristics of the information that reaches us. It is maintained for a very brief period (just one second). Two things can happen next: either it is transferred to short-term memory or it disappears.
The traditional example used to illustrate this type of memory is the vision of a feature film. We perceive sequences in motion, although in reality the film is composed of fixed photographs separated by brief intervals of darkness. The sensation of movement is obtained thanks to the sensory memory retaining the vision of each image until the appearance of the next one.
Specialists believe that there is a special type of sensory memory for each of the five senses. This is how we talk about visual and auditory memory.
b) Short-term memory
Some of the information captured by the sensory memory passes into short-term memory. It processes the data that is consciously used to respond to the problems of our immediate present.
The relationship between the STM and the LTM is directional: part of the STM goes to the LTM to be stored there indefinitely; At the same time, when we need to retrieve information from the past, it is transferred in the opposite direction to be able to use the memories and learnings in our immediate present.
The STM has a very limited storage capacity: about seven items or units of non-significant information such as letters or numbers. In addition the maximum retention period is also very short: between 15 and 30 seconds. So, for example, when they ask us to memorize a phone number, after a few seconds the number is out of memory, as long as we do not mentally repeat it in order to store it in the LTM.
c) Long term memory
It preserves perceptions, feelings and actions of the past. Its storage capacity is virtually unlimited. However, this stored information is not always accessible; Sometimes we are not able to remember, but that does not mean that information has been erased, but the keys to its recovery have not been correctly executed.
Neuropsychologists do not yet know how to accurately retrieve the information from the LTM, although they do know that its updating depends on how it has been codified (depth and organization) and that the keys we use to remember them coincide with the codes in which it was codified .
The LTM is divided into:
- Episodic memory: It consists of events or episodes that have happened to us. For example: the color of a dress, the song heard at a party, the way the teacher explained History at school, etc.
- Semantic memory: Memory is the abstract. R ational covers the knowledge of the world and language. It allows us to make reasoning, relate concepts, know the meanings of words or grammatical rules, etc.
...and how we forget things...
There are different theories that try to explain the causes of forgetfulness
a) Disuse theory: if the stored information is not used it tends to fade and disappear.
b) Interference theory: l new learning will impact negatively on the old ones , so that new information tends to erase one held previously.
c) Motivational and emotional theories: we forget those events or learning that we find unpleasant or have negative emotional connotations.
For further information we recommend this article by National Geographic.
My students need to live new ways of learning with innovation and technology. My students need a Learning alivetm Plus Suite (PC/MAC).
Today I've started a new fundraising with Donorschoose.org: Please, donors, you can double your donations up to $50 by adding the promo code LIFTOFFat checkout for the next 7 days. (up to April 5th, 2017 we can reach the project with the half of the total price)
Technology and digital learning are key elements for 21st Century students. It is also very important for them to learn how to use the technology with responsibility and with a real purpose.
These devices will make a difference in helping my students learn because it will provide them with easier access to learn as home extension activities.
They can practice reading, writing and counting at home with their parents. Parent involvement in their children's early exposure to learning is an integral component of success in future grades. Your generous donation to our project will improve our Pre-K program. This will impact not only our students but their families as well because parents have another opportunity to bond with their children through a shared love of learning and other educative activities. Our students enjoy attending our school and we strive to help them feel empowered at an early age. Educative technology and a shared love of learning open many doors to discovery and success!
My Project
Augmented Reality is a new technology tool that enriches reality with other experiences. In addition, the use of A.R. can help our students develop their motivation for learning since it encourages their exploring skills. Using technology in classroom also helps them develop their 21st Century skills and they learn how to use technology in a responsible way.
This is one of the best tech-tools that a 21st century classroom and students can have.
Augmented Reality is innovation in classroom since it implies movement when learning. This technology pushes them to learn and discover new things in the classroom, so they can feel motivated and families can be happy.
This video will show you one example of what A.R. can do:
This is one article where you can read about Augmented Reality in Education-
7 Creative Ways to Improve Student Engagement: Augrealitypedia
More information about Augmented Reality and Education (wikipedia)
App iWow,[114] a mobile device-based augmented reality enhanced world globe.
In educational settings, AR has been used to complement a standard curriculum. Text, graphics, video and audio were superimposed into a student’s real time environment. Textbooks, flashcards and other educational reading material contained embedded “markers” or triggers that, when scanned by an AR device, produced supplementary information to the student rendered in a multimedia format.[115][116][117]
As AR evolved students could participate interactively. Computer generated simulations of historical events, exploring and learning details of each significant area of the event site could come alive.[118] On higher education, there are some applications that can be used. Construct3D, a Studierstube system, allowed students to learn mechanical engineering concepts, math or geometry.[119] Chemistry AR apps allowed students to visualize and interact with the spatial structure of a molecule using a marker object held in a hand.[120] Anatomy students could visualize different systems of the human body in three dimensions.[121]
Augmented reality technology enhanced remote collaboration, allowing students and instructors in different locales to interact by sharing a common virtual learning environment populated by virtual objects and learning materials.[122]
Primary school children learn easily from interactive experiences. For instance, astronomical constellations and the movements of objects in the solar system were orient in 3D and overlaid in the direction the device was held and expanded with supplemental video information. Paper-based science book illustrations could seem to come alive as video without requiring the child to navigate to web-based materials.
While some educational apps are available for AR in 2016, it is not broadly used. Apps that leverage augmented reality to aid learning, included SkyView for studying astronomy,[123] and AR Circuits for building simple electric circuits.[124]
Mr. Usero / Japan EXPO Project-Based learning offers many possibilities and opportunities of learning in a meaningful way, since it is based on real questions and connections have to be created to answer them. In addition, this projects can be connected to other countries or other realities far from the closest one, enriching our perspective of the world and promoting respect to other cultures. Briefly, this kind of projects can build bridges to other cultures, or at least, open windows to them.
This post shows you our global project about Japan, an amazing country. Adapted to the Pre-K level, we worked lots of activities and we learned a lot. The following links will offer you all the information and samples of those activities.
This link, as part of our PD training with VIFlearning, is focused on origami. Being focused on the international education, the students will be familiar with Japan, in which they will be able to identify Japan in a map, know about Japan and its geography (volcano, islands,...), and the students will do origami.
We took into account the activate prior knowledge that was the use of paper. Usually, they use paper to write, draw and paint, but there are other uses: origami (3D shapes)
They wanted to know about origami, so we facilitated them materials and resources to investigate about origami and analyze it. After reading a book about origami and watching a short video about it, they have a paper in front of them to be shaped as origami.
Standards Alignment
Literacy PK Guideline:
*III.D.2. Uses information learned from books by describing, relating, categorizing, or comparing and contrasting.
*III.D.3. Asks and answers appropriate questions about the book. Highly Effective Objective: I will gain an understanding of the Japanese culture through reading various informational books.
Social Studies PK Guidelines:
VII.A.1. Child identifies similarities and differences in characteristics of people.
Highly Effective Objective: I will use photographs and pictures to illustrate and elicit ideas about how people are alike and different to develop an appreciation for people from a different culture.
My Reflection
By knowing and getting closer to other cultures and by experiencing by themselves they can learn better and respect them besides of being awared of other cultural expressions that are different from their own ones.
The use of ICT is important in this case, because they can see children like them doing similar things and different ones in other cultures and they can learn how to do things from other point of view. Apart from that, ICT and Internet can be very useful to share their work and their learning.
Web/Print Resources
CULTURA, CURIOSIDADES Y BLOGS
Kirainet. Un geek en Japón - http://www.kirainet.com/
Esta mañana, como la gran mayoría de las mañanas de los fines de semana, investigo y leo sobre temas nuevos e innovadores en educación. Hoy tengo que compartir esta entrada, ya que lo he podido comprobar con mi propia experiencia, todo se pega, como la purpurina.
Contagiar cosas nuevas parece fácil, pero en realidad hay muchos factores que en ocasiones la dificultan como por ejemplo el miedo al cambio, desconocimiento, trabas administrativas, las familias,... pero cuando se les ofrece la oportunidad de probarlo, todo empieza a brillar.
Desde aquí agradezco a Manu Velasco toda su contribución al ámbito educativo y recomiendo las lecturas de todas sus entradas, no tiene desperdicio alguno.
This post is a justification and reflection upon the project we are currently doing at the school where I work, Ninfa Laurenzo ECC. My project is about the profession of comic creators because my students decided to do it. I am glad to guide them in a project like that since for years I have been the coordinator of reading programs for children and families at different schools and libraries in the region of Seville, Spain.
Having a comic or a story as a vehicle for learning is not new; indeed, it is one of the most used procedures at schools and education all over the world. The literary texts that the students listen with attention raise their message with extra and enriching information: socio-cultural conditions that will allow listeners to know about events, information and signals. And by understanding the story, remembering it and expressing it according to their feelings and experiences, primary students will personally participate in the reconstruction of the literary message, value it and interpret its contents making them theirs even if they are in the new language.
The advantage of popular literature is that the content that children access has the peculiarity that they exist in almost every culture in the world. All histories share an underlying basis and a relatively invariant structure, despite some differences. Obviously, they have some aspects or parts in common, like an introduction or presentation of the characters and the setting; a plot, in which the action is developed; an end with a final outcome of events. Another important thing in common is the fact that children feel sympathy for characters according to their features; they predict the action of the wicked witch, for instance, and are sure that the prince will save the princess after conquering a thousand dangers and obstacles.
They can also anticipate moments or episodes in the story, like the climax around which the action is organized. As they expand their knowledge and the volume of stories they hear, they manage to structure the stories according to a repeatable internal pattern, those discussed above. They also delimit the different characters and roles they play in the story. And finally, they participate in creating the story, using their language or the new, with a motivated attitude, a meaningful behavior and a learning process as effective as pleasant.
In this early stage of education, working with language and literature with comics and storytelling is benefitial since they can start to understan how a language works, as a system of signs that structures and formalizes experience and reality. Language and literature are elements of culture that complement each other, hence the contents of this area should enable the acquisition and mastery of the language, as well as knowledge of the various literary manifestations for their formative value as a universal heritage. This shows the interest in initiating the student in children's literature. In line with what has been pointed out above, recent studies show how the student acquires better the knowledge of a language if it is taught as a subject studied and not as a subject of study.
Telling a story to someone who wants to listen to it, entertaining themselves by learning about the art of telling an anecdote or a joke: all are entertainments, but also interpretations or representations of real life. They can be models of behavior beyond history and that is why they tend to have a teaching, because we project them, somehow, with our reality, no matter how far we look at it. The existence of archetypes shows a need to organize within history so that the pedagogical contribution goes from simpler to more detailed and complex. The models used have formed and will form a common base and memory for the society that listens to them and many of the models of behavior or interpretations of reality will undoubtedly form part of a know how to act or know how to solve.
When working with stories, the content of the lessons becomes more important than the language itself and this means that it is easier to relate the lessons to the experience and self-interest of the students. In addition, as we have already pointed out, such work helps the learning process as students can associate words with functions, structures and situations with a particular story or "reality". It is clear that the association contributes to have a good memory and improve their thinking levels as well as motivation for learningl; and learning a language in a given context helps understanding and memory.
The storytelling, on the other hand, allows to deepen in the issues that arise with depth and rigor and develops reactions and feelings in the students that, otherwise, can not demonstrate with so much clarity in a textbook. The teacher's work, in this type of approach, provides a personal touch to the lessons, since it is the educator who knows the pace of classroom learning and of the students - and their needs - in particular, when they need more vocabulary or require communicative experiences.
A partir de ahora publicaremos en este blog nuevos contenidos sobre AICLE, sera como un portfolio o diario del curso que estamos realizando: "Uso de recursos educativos abiertos para el aprendizaje integrado de contenidos y lenguas extranjeras AICLE", este artículo corresponde a la primera actividad, de presentación para el curso.
Este es mi tercer curso con "Aprende Intef" del gobierno de España, anteriormente ya realice los cursos de "ABP - Aprendizaje Basado en Proyectos" y "Digital Storytelling" donde aparte de aprender nuevas formas e innovadoras de la actividad docente, aprendí a usar una gran cantidad de herramientas y recursos digitales, tan importante para las destrezas y competencias de la educación en el siglo XXI.
Aparte de estos cursos he realizado muchos más con diferentes instituciones tanto presencial como a distancia y online. De hecho, actualmente estoy realizando los estudios de Máster Universitario en Enseñanza de la Lengua y la Cultura Hispánicas para Profesores de Primaria y Secundaria por la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), donde también tenemos una asignatura de AICLE. Anteriormente, estuve realizando cursos para mejorar las tecnicas de ensenanza en las lenguas extranjeras, especialmente ingles y espanol.
De este curso espero seguir aprendiendo nuevas técnicas que mejore mi labor docente y sobre todo técnicas que ayuden a mis estudiantes a mejorar su aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras. Además, en estos cursos he aprendido de otros grandes profesionales y con algunos de ellos sigo manteniendo el contacto, espero lo mismo en este curso: networking.
We know that motivation is a great part of our learning process. This video sums up how motivation affects our efforts and results when learning.
In the following document you can read about motivation and other aspects, authors and theories that contribute in Foreing/Second Language Acquisition/Learning.
First of all, we would like to start by defining the concept of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning - coined in Europe in the early nineties (Coyle et al (2010)), and those concepts and key aspects around this approach. Many of which will need to be considered when designing activities for the CLIL classroom that will not help our students develop and improve their communicative and foreign language skills, but their learning process.
Why CLIL?
The 21st Century educational landscape has undergone important innovations in the last decades, one of them is the introduction of technologies in the classroom and the other notable change is related to the teaching of languages being part of a connected and globalized world, it should be one objective that everyone in the world can talk other languages in addition to the mother tongue. This method started in Europe, due to the great language and cultural diversity of the country members of the European Union.
These two aspects, the introduction of ICT and the learning of languages are well reflected in the White Paper on Education and Training: Teaching and Learning - Towards the Learning Society published in 1995 by the Commission of the European Community and in later publications1 where Action Plans to promote language learning and the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) are established. Both points are among the priorities for the member states in the document published in 2012 Rethinking Education: Investing in skills for better socio-economic outcomes where the priorities are "To increase the supply of transversal skills that increase employability, such as Entrepreneurship, digital skills and languages "and" Intensify the use of ICT-assisted learning and access to high quality OER "(p.17).
I would like to highlight this excerpt from the “White Paper on Education and Training”:
“Building skills for the 21st century
Transversal and basic skills
Efforts need to be concentrated on developing transversal skills… Modern, knowledge-based economies require people with higher and more relevant skills. CEDEFOP forecasts predict that the proportion of jobs in the EU requiring tertiary level qualifications will increase from 29% in 2010 to 34% in 2020, while the proportion of low skilled jobs will fall in the same period from 23% to 18%. Transversal skills such as the ability to think critically, take initiative, problem solve and work collaboratively will prepare individuals for today's varied and unpredictable career paths. …particularly entrepreneurial skills…”
This is not happening only in Europe, but worldwide. And I would like to add something more than preparing future workers or employees as it is said, since from my point of view the socio-emotional aspects of students are empty in this document, and nowadays many researchers have proved the importance of those aspects. Learning is a beautiful part of our lives, since it opens our eyes to new landscapes and windows that go beyond our native communities. Learning lets us go beyond, above all, foreign language acquisition and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) since the current conditions of living are globalized and it is our duty to prepare good citizens equipped with a lot of skills and tools to live in this globalized world. Opportunities can be given in any point of the world and we should be ready to get them, regardless the nationality or other bureaucratic issues. I am talking from my own experience: a Spanish teacher who has educational experience in many countries besides of my home country, Spain. Nowadays I’m teaching in Houston, Texas (USA).
Multilingual programs
In this context, a great number of bilingual programs have been implemented over the last decade, many of which use the AICLE approach in Spanish: Integración de Contenidos y Lengua Extranjera; EMILE in French: Enseignement De Matières Par Integration D'une Langue Étrangère or CLIL in English: Content Language Integrated Learning. This method can be used with any language in the world.
D. Coyle et al. (2010) distinguish two main reasons for the interest in CLIL within a country or region. One of them is a proactive reason, as a way to promote the learning of a language for political, economic and social reasons. This is the case of the French immersion programs of Canada, as a way of supporting bilingualism, or the CLIL programs that promotes the policy of the European Union to strengthen relations and mobility between the countries of the same. The European Union has essentially become a territory without borders, where all citizens have the right to live, study or work where they wish; However, not knowing languages still represents an invisible barrier to free movement that needs to be eliminated and bilingual programs are one of the most effective measures.
From a pedagogical point of view there are many reasons why bilingual and CLIL programs are recommended:
First, they offer advantages for students' cognitive development (Bialystock, 2009).
They bring significant gains in the target language (L2) as evidenced by numerous studies on language immersion in Canada and CLIL in Europe.
They favor the collaboration of teachers with each other and with the administration of the center since much of the community will be involved in learning the language and content.
He observes how in the following video Hugo Baetens, referring in bilingualism and CLIL of the Vrij Universiteit Brussel (VUB) alludes to the expressed in the previous point.
This is one of my first activities to plan a CLIL unit with sports:
