Transcription
Ah, to you, let's think a little about how we can enhance orality and communicative competence in the little ones, because for me, thinking only in terms of orality really creates a conceptual, theoretical problem for me, if I'm not capable of talking about orality without talking about reading, without talking about writing, without talking about mediation and accent, it's a bit of a nod to this idea of new literacies. We're going to talk about a new orality. We're going to try to see some ideas. You'll see, I really, really, really like this metaphor that I've also put in something like "primitive Castilian." I like the metaphor of educational landscapes. Educational landscapes, and to describe what these educational landscapes are, they resort to John Dewey, the great American pedagogue, who reminds us that we're not just talking about school, but that we're talking about places where people gather. This idea of "catering play sing," places where people gather to live a life worth living. This is a very beautiful definition of school, since school is a place where people gather to live a life worth living. That's an educational landscape, this concept. But with the term "learning landscape," it's being used exhaustively in the field of professional development. They are "learning landscapes." It's curious that in the field of professional development for companies, for industry, and so on, they use this metaphor that doesn't come from our world, "learning landscapes." Well, I'd like to connect this with the idea of a school's linguistic project. Today we're going to talk a bit about the school's linguistic project. I wouldn't say "skimming over it," but rather keeping it as a reference. Many of the things we're going to discuss today are actually constitutive of a school's linguistic project that aims at orality as a value. A school is a concentration of resources and possibilities, human resources, material resources, that generate learning possibilities. A school's linguistic project is nothing more than the organization of those resources to generate those possibilities. Well, as you can see on the table, I've brought some things with the intention that you touch them, see them, and so on. The first thing I've brought is this special issue that has just come out in the magazine "Cuadernos de Pedagogía" on the school's linguistic project. Well, visualizing our school as a space of possibilities seems refreshing to me. Your school is an attractive communicative space, a landscape. We see examples, three questions. Do we have adequate spaces for leisure, meeting, and work, in which minimal communication rules operate? Are there spaces dedicated to leisure outside the playground? Are there meeting spaces where students can find their group to develop a project? Are there study spaces where there are strict communication rules, and are there silence rooms where communication rules are not needed? Allow me to step away from my own presentation to show you an institute here in the region, in case you want to take advantage of it and visit it, which I frankly would. Is anyone from Vigo here, or do you know it? This institute. Now they tell me, "Yes, yes, I am the director." You'll see, the "10 República Oriental de Vigo." When one accesses the institute, the first thing one finds is the word "Agora." Agora. When one accesses the institute, the first thing one finds is a communication space, some sofas, some armchairs with magazines, scientific dissemination magazines that you can sit there and read. Then one moves on to a small corridor where you find some chessboards, where you find some board games, and then it opens up forming a T, where you again find spaces to sit and chat. And I think that already prepares, creates a learning landscape, a learning space, an educational landscape linked to orality. So, the first element of our school's linguistic project: the spaces are configured for communication, and for oral communication. Secondly, we have a map of genres. In the school, the discursive genre is usually mentioned, but to make myself interesting, after the "discursive genre" thing, to see if the genres are... A discursive genre map is nothing more than asking ourselves what are the discursive genres we work with in class. The big linguistic concept that we teachers of all subjects encounter is not the word "verb," not the word "noun," nor is it the subjunctive. It's the discursive genres. Each of us teachers, whatever our subject, are members of a community of practice. The science teacher, the nature science teacher, is a biologist and belongs to that community of practice, and is therefore a privileged guide to bring the boys and girls into that community of practice, which is also a linguistic community, by introducing the specialized lexicon of biology and the typical structures of a text from that community of practice, and the discursive genres proper to that area. Well, having a genre map is simply asking ourselves: what discursive genres are we going to organize, what are we going to listen to, what are we going to read, what are we going to write? That is, agreeing on whether we are going to use planned or unplanned oral discursive genres, whether we are going to use mono-managed or multi-managed communication in the school language or language of instruction, or the students' mother tongues, or in additional languages or foreign languages in the curriculum. By the way, this belongs to an article in this monograph in which my friend Santi Fábregas and Pilar Torres have thought about the school's linguistic project from the perspective of orality and present multiple cases of primary and secondary educational centers that focus their linguistic project on orality, on orality in at least three planes: orality for learning management. I'm about to say orality for learning to learn. "Learning to learn" is a word that has fallen into disuse as a competence, and romanticism. None of the three mean anything. There is an orality linked to the subjects, this idea of entering into communities of practice and their discourses and their discursive genres. There is an orality in the subjects, and there is an orality as a subject. More and more educational centers are beginning to treat orality as a subject, as an elective. This, put into practice, means working with discursive genres like the assembly, probably the greatest educational tool used in early childhood education, and fortunately, many colleagues in primary and secondary school are realizing the potential of the assembly for learning. That moment of student reception when you greet them as individuals, as human beings who have an identity, you make them visible, you ask them about their lives, and from there you connect with the learning from the previous day, and you start to link that learning with their lives, and you start to introduce the learning, you start to introduce the content, the activities that will happen that day, and everything is spoken from the cordiality of a seemingly informal moment. Or genres like the exposition and the debate, the work on public speaking techniques, in this idea of orality as a subject, or recording podcasts. Just yesterday, a colleague from Seville, who works in Sardinia at the university, told me about an experience of recording podcasts with mobile phones with students of Spanish as a foreign language, in the street, approaching people in the street with their mobile phones and subjecting them to a small, a small live interview, recording it and broadcasting podcasts on the fly.