This is the second half of a 2-part post about my experience with year 7 students in Selby. I worked in collaboration with nybep to deliver workshops on the following themes – Self-Awareness through Breath-Control and Learning New Languages (the fun way). I have yet to come up with a decent title for either workshop. If you have any suggestions please do leave a comment.
The idea for the language workshop came about after some reflection on my status as a linguistic mongrel. Growing up in India, which has around 26 official languages, it is next to impossible to remain a monoglot. As a child I lived in cities across the length and breadth of the country. Therefore, I was taught – Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and Sanskrit alongside English. Having spent eight years in Delhi I was exposed to Urdu and Punjabi. I picked up a bit of Japanese as I travelled there for work, and recently I have been tinkering with Dutch. I would like to emphasize that I am fluent only in English and Hindi, for the rest my skill-level varies from beginner/intermediate to just a few words.
There is a lot more that goes into speaking a new language than the ability to memorize words, swot grammar and regurgitate stock phrases. I think intuition, confidence and self-awareness play a very important role. The workshop was designed around these soft values. The students had been studying German and French (of which I know next to nothing) for a few months and I hoped that by the end of the session they would be sufficiently enthused to teach me a bit of both.
The workshop was divided into four sections – Making New Sounds; Looking for Similarities; Gestures and Emotions and Reading Japanese. We began with the easy, accessible stuff and then moved on to unfamiliar territory. Although a number of different languages were used, progress was pegged to speaking/reading Japanese in order to have some structure. The Reading Japanese section was a challenge – I introduced some logical rules about Kanji and asked students to read a sentence written in some fairly difficult characters.
To be honest I was quite nervous as the kids could focus on my lack of fluency and not take the session seriously. So I did a fair bit of practice beforehand with some native speakers. I also had another wee trick up my sleeve. This is something I used as an ice-breaker during my breath workshops in Japan. I wrote my name down in three scripts – Abhay, アバィ and अभय to illustrate how different my name sounds in different parts of the world. For the workshop we tried pronouncing names from various countries, tried a few tongue twisters and there was a sing-along to the 46 phonetic sounds of the Japanese language (あいうえお… etc.).
I am happy to report that the students were thoroughly excited and participated enthusiastically. After the Looking for Similarities bit, they started translating some of the things I was saying into German, which is what I had hoped for. In a way the workshop was already a success.
Then we came to the Reading Japanese challenge. I began by introducing the following characters: 日 (sun), 木 (tree), 本 (root/origin), 女 (woman), 子 (child), 言 (speak), 五 (five) and 口 (mouth). After explaining their meaning and how they have been derived, we looked at some combinations. For example, Japan is written as 日本. When correlated with the meaning of the individual characters it makes sense why Japan is called the land of the rising sun.
I like Japanese
We then moved onto making more kanji by combining the above. Starting with a simple example, 女 (woman) +子 (child) =好 (like) I asked students to guess what happens when many mouths say the same things, 五+口+言=?? You get the character for language 語 which is combination of all of the above (Obviously a wee bit of artistic license has been used to arrive at the above). And so piece by piece we assembled the sentence = 私は日本語が好きです。The kids had no trouble guessing what it meant. The atmosphere in the room was electric. Some students were keen to try their hand at writing Japanese, so we talked about stroke order and so on.
Given how successful the workshop was, I have been asked to consider delivering a few more. One of the teachers commented that there are very few male language teachers. There are a number of additional benefits, these range from employability to increasing tolerance of others. I won’t go into too much detail as this post has become fairly lengthy. I would like to end by saying that as usual, I cannot wait to work with another batch of students, hopefully in the very near future.
24
Jan 10
Packaging breath
Delivering a breath-awareness workshop in Japan
When I began my research with the intention of creating a ‘unique’ digital instrument, I had little idea that four years later I would end up delivering breath-awareness workshops to children at primary schools in Japan. Perhaps I will delve into the details of this journey in another post, at the moment I would like to draw your attention to a puzzle I am trying to solve – How can I introduce my work to mainstream education practitioners in the UK? There is definitely a context for it, the SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) initiative.
Breath-awareness sounds strange, especially when juxtaposed with the relentless demands placed on school teachers to meet an ever increasing number of targets. It seems silly to suggest that they encourage their students to become aware of their breathing and develop effective control over it. But then again, such activities can have a positive impact on students’ behavior, emotional control and academic performance (again, some of the key objectives of SEAL). I am not making this up as I go along, there are a host of scientific studies that have demonstrated these claims and I will be happy to point you in the right direction should you be interested.
So how does one present breath-awareness to mainstream education?
When I decided to focus on breath-awareness in my research, I knew that the most important challenge would be to dissociate it with some of the, lets say… rather esoteric associations. This is because many so called holistic therapies attribute a fantastic array of benefits to breath-control and awareness. They aren’t necessarily rooted in science fiction, its just that these benefits have been extrapolated and exaggerated to such an extent that they alienate most rational, clear-thinking people. Furthermore, many breath-control methods use vague and elaborate instructions, so there is no objective way to gauge the application of their exercises or systematically evaluate their benefits . Clearly, there is no room to introduce breath-awareness in this way within secular educational establishments in this manner.
Although it was a tedious exercise (given the sheer volume of literature available on breath-control) it was relatively easy to separate the rational approaches from the irrational and come up with a list of complimentary therapies which formed the base of my research. Along the way I drew some surprising conclusions. For instance, although the Alexander Technique and Pranayama would appear to be disparate techniques (in their teaching and practice), their fundamental principals are rooted in similar concepts such as self-awareness. No doubt this would deeply trouble F.M. Alexander who strongly denied any links between the two.
To cut a long story short, I identified a series of exercises used in Alexander Technique and Pranayama, and correlated their basic principals with those of Respiratory Physiotherapy Rehabilitation. This created a rational framework for my research. The next step was to bolster this framework by eliminating as many variables as possible.
[end of part 1]