NPP 22: Imagination, Interculturality and Identity

 

I have a feeling that this is something that I have only just started to think about. So these are very much first thoughts. We didn't set out on this project to assme that Creativity, Culture, and Identity were automatically "good things". On their own terms they are of course lovely. But in terms of their impact on the nitty gritty learning of the language, we were prepared to consider whether they were romantic notions at best and downright distracting at worst.

In my last post, I outlined a set of principles that are emerging in this National Priorities Project. As we use the Year 7 French Art Exhibition as a lens to sharpen our vision of our whole KS3 curriculum, these things seem to be important when it comes to the learning of the language itself. Here are the first three:

• Meaning is important from the start. Things that are meaningless are not learned.
• There are cognitive demands in asking pupils to use their language, interact, communicate. These need to be explicitly developed, not side-stepped.
• Creativity can produce errors, but it doesn't create the underlying misconception. Errors reveal pupils' developing understanding and allow us to engage with it.

But it's the fourth that has surprised me.

There may be language that doesn't seem to fit in with the carefully sequenced curriculum of grammar and vocabulary. This will be in "one off" things the pupils want to say. Where do we find these? We find them in the Year 7 French Art Exhibition where pupils are describing their individual art work. We find them in transactional role plays. We find them in classroom language. We find them when pupils want to express themselves when they write to a French partner school. We find them when pupils want to tell stories. How does this turn into a fourth principle?

It is linked to the first principle of creating meaning. But it goes further because of the specific way that pupils respond to these scenarios. Pupils can imagine themselves in France buying ice-cream, or clothes or asking directions. And this imagination is key. Imagining themselves as a French speaker. Taking on an identity.

I did not expect to start to feel this was important. From a vocabulary and grammar approach, I find role plays too phrase-book style, too far removed from the accumulation of high frequency vocabulary and a core of grammar. But when we met as a department to pick apart our KS3 curriculum, we felt they were important to pupils.

Perhaps it was when I looked at Translanguaging and found it surprisingly appealing that I started to change my mind.

But it's also there in classroom language and the pupils who love to step into a different world where we say, "Bonjour" and "Merci". And it's even there with the pupils who say "When will I ever need this?" They are expressing a need to be able to imagine themselves as someone who speaks French. And it comes out in the frustration of pupils who can talk at length giving opinions and reasons, but can't think when or why they would do it. A vocabulary and grammar approach tells the pupils not to worry, because the important thing is the intellectual understanding of creating accurate language. But maybe instead of telling pupils not to worry, we can take their question as a desire to find meaning and purpose, to find a way to imagine themselves speaking French.

So the fourth principle is

•  Creativity, Interculturality and Communication may lead to pupils learning incidental “one offs” which allow them to say things they want to say but which may not fit with the planned accumulation of a repertoire of language. But often these “one offs” are the things that allow pupils to imagine themselves as speakers of the language. It applies to transactional role plays, classroom language, self expression, creativity. These moments can give agency, purpose and intercultural identity in a way that grammar and vocabulary don’t.

This means we can change the narrative of when we do these things. For me personally it means changing the narrative around classroom language. From a words and grammar point of view it has always seemed similar to role plays. Phrasebook style routines that don't advance the conceptualisation of grammar or the accumulation of a repertoire that can be used for self expression. It can even seem alienating to pupils. Once we realise the importance of imagination and identity, we can flip the narrative and think of classroom language as welcoming pupils into a world where they are French speakers.

I know this is sounding romantic, but we didn't come at it from the position of "communication is good." We came at it from a point of view of looking at the cogs of the learning of the language, and Imagination/Identity seem to be more important than I imagined!