LANGUAGE TRIP 1st BATXILLERAT (1): OUR FIRST DAY IN IRELAND

We arrived this morning at 12 at Dublin airport with the students of 1st of Batxillerat. We had a very interesting walking tour of Dublin with our friendly guide Denny. He told us lots of different stories about some of the most important icons of the capital city, like the story of Molly Malone, the superstition behind the belltower of Trinity College, the meaning of Ha' Penny Bridge, the importance of the historical character O'Connell and many more.

In the afternoon, we left for Galway, where our host families were expecting us.

Books and Authentic Material

We have talked in class about the advantages and disadvantages of the course book, in contrast with the "realia", the authentic material.

The course book can be a useful material to practice some grammar or lexic aspects on the last step of the language focus. But to start talking and building sense around the language, the authentic material is more motivating.

In addition, the course book is the same for all students, so, as they have the same information, there are no information gaps to fill, and no information to share.

Authentic material could be a set of material objects, pictures, videos, or ...  also books! We can talk about real books in the real world. We talked about James Joyce because Stuart showed us a book of James Joyce. He told us that he was dead, and we started to talk in the past tense.

Real books of real authors in real libraries 

There where I live, the Trinity College, is surrounded by books, real books. There are so many, that they don't seem real. Isn't the old library like a magical and fictive place?

How many books may be there?



Who wrote them?



When were they written?

What are they about?



Who did the magical work of sorting, ordering and puting them in those infinite shelves?

Did the students read some of them?




In which books were they more interested?




What did they learn about them?







One of those students might be the philosopher George Berkeley (1687-1753), who was a student and scholar of Trinity College and one of its senior academicsis widely regarded as Ireland's greatest philosopher and among the world's top philosophers. His most influential philosophical thesis, "Immaterialism," has, since the eighteenth century, attracted considerable attention in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics.
The main influences on his early work are generally regarded to be John Locke and Nicolas Malebranche, and in later life he was influenced by writers in the Platonist tradition. He had considerable influence on the works of many important philosopers including David Hume and John Stuart Mill.


There is a library next to the old one, that is named after him: the Berkeley libary.

It is in this one where now the students read and study in the present tense, in the present continuous, in a very different way as Berkeley and his colleges did, about very different subjects, but, I'm sure, with the same emotional and theorethical problems and questions.

A last question: Why did  Arnaldo Pomodoro make this sculpture called 'Sphere with Sphere' (1982) to illustrate the entracnce of the library?

A walk in Glendalough, learning in the real world

Today I went to Glendalough with Ana, a friend of the course. We took a bus from Dublin express to Glendalough (in Gaelic, the valley with two lakes). Allthaugh it rained almost all the time, we could take a nice walk around the lakes. The place is really wonderful.

Tower in Glendalough

The Romanic Cathedral

The Lower Lake

The Poulanas Waterfalls

The Upper Lake

Three pictures to think about

The post in the Upper lake reminds me of a collaborative work, like those that we make in class, but in the real world.

The exposition in the house of the natural park reminds me of the importance of the context, behind the simple words, to make comprehension possible.

 

Walking to the South

We are not all the time doing CLIL in Dublin. The city and its environment offers us a lot of free time opportunities.

Houth
Yesterday afternoon, we went to the South, in the town of Houth. From there, we could do a 6 km. walk beside the cliffs to the lighthouse, and return to the town, where you can rest after the walk with Fish and Chips and a paint of Guiness. This piece of coast ist known for the seals that live there.

The town Houth

The lighthouse of Houth

Our route, the yellow one

With two friends, also students in the CES

From Greystones to Bray
Also in the South of Dublin, in the coast, today we have taken a walk along the cliffs between Greystones and Bray.

Greystones

The path between Greystones and Bray

Arriving in Bray

On the way back to Dublin, by train, we got off in Sandycove, where we could visit the Tower of James Joyce. There is a little museum about this irish writer, because he lived there for 6 days, and the first chapter of one his novels, Ulysses, takes place in that tower. 

Sandycove

Reconstruction of the room where Joyce lived

Understanding information, understanding Ireland

On the first day we were in Dublin, the Yellow Shirts of the CES School offered a tour trough the main visit places in Dublin. One of them was the statue of O'Connell, in the O'Connell street.

He has been a very important person in the history of Ireland. And I took a very bad photo of him.

I would like to know more about him. Today, I have discovered some things about him  with my collegues in the class.

Reconstructing history

Samantha, the teacher, has projected some images from the history of Ireland, in order to warm up our knowledges (in my case, very few) about the history of Ireland. Then, she hanged different parts of the history of Ireland all around the class, divided in small texts. He has told us to work in groups of three, and has given us the first part of one of the chapters of the history of Ireland. Each group has had to search the following paragraphs, to decide the order of the entire text, and to take notes about it, in order to be able to retell the story.

Then, he has numbered each person of the group (1, 2, 3), and all the 1's, the 2's and the 3's has formed three different groups, in which each person knows a different part of the story of Ireland, and tells it to de rest of the members of the group.

This exercise combines two types of reading: skimm-reading and scann-reading. To put the paragraphs together, a skin reading is enough, but to be able to take notes and retell the story with the owns, you have to scann the text, to pay attention to the details, the names, the dates, etc.

The running dictation

With Stuart, we have practiced a tipe of exercise named Dictogloss. Instead of the teacher, there is one student in each group who has to read sentences from a text and retell them to a second member of the group, who retells them further to a third, and this to the fourth, who writes the sentences. It's funny to compare the result with the original text.

This activity combines perfectly the different learner types: linguistic, logical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

Understanding Ireland

In the afternoon, we visited the prison of Kilmainham in Dublin, where unfortunately happened some parts of the history of this nice people, the irish people. Many Irish revolutionaries, including the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, were imprisoned and executed in the prison by the British, and in 1923 by the Irish Free State, during the Irish Civil War.

It was constructed in the form of a panopticum, as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived. He thought that human beings don't know what is good or bad, but they do know what is pleasant and what is painful. So both are the instruments to educate and control the humans.

 About the prisons in general, we could ask some more questions that would make us think, speak, and maybe understand some things about human beings...

First steps into the project

I am in Dublin with other teachers from other countries, in order to improve my English and to learn new methodologies to use in class. My objective is to be able to teach Philosophy in English in certain levels in my High-school.

I'm at the CES School Dublin, following the course Training for Teachers (CLIL), and my teachers are Stuart and Samantha. This is Stuart in action:

These are my classmates:

They are all teachers coming from different countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Chec Republic and Spain. Most of the time, we have to take the role of a student, just to feel how a student feels doing some activities.

The main point of these methodology (CLIL) is based on learning in context, so that the context gives more sense to the language and improves its learning process.

One of the most important instruments to get this point is to let the students the main role of the class, and to promote an active learning, for example, in using different skills and habilities in an exercise. We draw, speak, listen, collaborate, and move around the class very often.

Each day we work with a different skill, as you can see on the timetable of the course:

During the following posts I will try to explain more aspects of the course and, of curse, of Ireland and Dublin.