When Art Be The language
We were studying human settlement. He had used a certain some particular colors for jungle, villages and urban spaces. One could easily figure out which settlement he liked the most. I still asked, "which of three you like the most and why?" He said, "the village". He had spent maximum time drawing that part and had used some very vibrant colors there, while painting the urban space almost grey. We then watched a YouTube video on Human Settlements. I paused at the point where they showed a an image of rural versus urban (2:56 in the video) and asked, "observe this image and tell me, which one do you like better? Why?"
He went on to describe how the city is shown to be rich and prosperous while the village is shown with huts (that doesn’t look good). At this point, I asked him, “how is it different from your experience of the rural and urban?”
“Not all villages are like this. My village is very nice. I feel very peaceful there.”
“What did you just notice about the way we communicate what we want?”
“What do you mean?” he clarified.
“Ok. let me ask this way. When you were drawing your piece, what would an audience know about you versus what would they know about the maker of this video?”
“That this person doesn't like village much and I like?”
“How do you say that?”
“Because he has shown the village as bad. Villages are not that bad. There are poor people but then they don’t need all the money. I like to live in the village. It’s so peaceful. I like the city also. I have friends here. But I like the village more.”
We then went onto discuss how our own likes and dislikes (biases?) affect the way we communicate about certain things. It was so amazing to talk about so many diverse things - objectivity and communication, human settlements, their pros and cons and our experiences round these - through this one theme.
Thanks to art, it opened this kid up so much. Had I made him to write about it, he would have gone to sleep! He almost dislikes writing. I can understand that. Children learn language at different pace. His case is worsened by this age of manufactured aspiration to learn English (so that he can apparently live a better life) by a Fellowship-based program his school was part of (and they left the school for reasons unknown after two years of teaching him). Now he can’t speak/write in Marathi, his mother tongue, properly. Neither he is very expressive in English. Hindi, he uses only as language for peer group conversations. This kids is at loss of words. And that’s when art comes to our rescue. And videos. I think we need to break the entanglement of learning with language. While it’s important to learn language (speaking about it in academic sense), I think it’s not fair to limit a child’s chances just because his/her language competencies are developing at a pace other than the rest.
-------------------------------------------
To read other Classroom Stories, visit following links:
Classroom Stories V: The Other Side
1 comment:
Very good one Rohit! I completely agree.
Post a Comment