Dichos: Reconsidering Teresa Panza
How is our sense of the world, and ourselves, shaped by the folk wisdom we heard as children?
A workshop by Cynthia Weiss and Kurt Wooton
How is our sense of the world, and ourselves, shaped by the folk wisdom we heard as children?
A workshop by Cynthia Weiss and Kurt Wooton
This workshop could also be called “Cynthia’s Revenge”. Years and years ago a dismissive professor had told our Cynthia that her interest in Sancho Panza’s wife Teresa (a font of dichos: folk wisdom sayings) was an unworthy topic for intellectual analysis. Now, years later, this same Cynthia shared Teresa’s dichos as a worthy topic for an entire institute, with wonderful results. We enthusiastically shared folk wisdom sayings from our own childhoods, tapping into a deep vein of our personal and cultural identities. Cynthia was even lent a tiny volume of 500 Mexican folk sayings.
We created gestures to go with our sayings, shared our dichos and our gestures, and told each other the stories behind how these sayings expressed themselves within our family histories.
The book of Don Quixote contains many such folk sayings. We explored their meaning in revolving pairs, moving between partners out in the open air.
Next, Kurt guided us through contrasting this kind of “walking discourse” with more traditional approaches to analyzing text. Typically, readers are encouraged to markup a page by the circling and underling of words and phrases. We were next encouraged to markup the text in a completely different way – layering our artistic responses to the text onto the physical material of the printed page itself. Kurt shared some examples of artistic interactions with print text, and we set off on our own collaborations with the page. The results were extraordinary. We processed our experience using the Building Conversations thinking routine, a protocol for deep listening while working in trios.
Habla has a tradition of supporting participants in presenting their work to their peers, using the following presentation and reflection structure.
Here is an overview of the presentations from participants of the institute this year:
Leisa Quinones-Oramas
This was a project completed by Advanced Spanish 2 students at Meridian Academy in Boston. They explored the concepts of point of view and perspective while reading Los diarios de los viajes de Cristóbal Colón.
María José Ceh Pérez
Tommaso Iskra De Silvestri
Susan Ogilvie
A student created methodology for summarizing their learning, based on the book “How the Boy Harnessed the Wind”
Why does integrating art and literacy matter?
Charly Barbera
The history of the barrel drum, its role in Caribbean cultures and resistance movements.
Sean Flaherty-Echeverria and Satty Flaherty-Echeverria
This presentation will demonstrate some examples of how my students have used visual images and journaling to accompany reading academic texts in Spanish L2. There are also examples of how students recorded and organized observations from a study abroad experience in Brazil. We are interested in discussing with colleagues ways to assess this kind of work. Also we’d like to know how can we defend this type of activity from claims that it is “too childish” for college students.
Norma Villarreal, Gina Murray, and Christine Jee
The integration of the fine arts into the teaching of Spanish
What can we integrate from the “galeria invisible” practice with what we are exploring this year at Habla to serve a new group of students?
Michelle Bach-Coulibaly
Devising new theater for the stage from absolutely nothing.
How can we transmit ancient texts in performance in meaningful ways for contemporary audiences?
Mary Guerro
Does studying local history lead to a deeper understanding of other histories?
Donald King
Re-imagining the familiar structure of “the art institution” to better reflect the globally connected world in which we live.
María Tovar
Human change management.
Talia Castillo
Red de proyectos de arte educación y encuentro anual.
Citlali Lopez Maldonado and Diego Leal
Making the arts available to communities in Mexico City.
We discussed the challenge of how to measure what matters in education through learning about the work of a non-profit focused on early literacy outcomes. Through an Enriched Literacy approach The Learning Alliance is committed to cultivating creative, compassionate, literate citizens who will improve our world.
Kendra Dority
In an activity that emphasizes listening, responding, and synthesizing, and that is adapted from a professional development workshop for graduate student teaching assistants at UC Santa Cruz, I invite participants to explore and share what it means to create inclusive learning environments.
Ian Wiggins
Exploring innovative ways of doing critique.
Sharlene Garcia
My presentation explored how to hold on to my core values and practices as an elementary classroom teacher, and now that I am transitioning to becoming the school’s engineering teacher, I am looking to find ways of upholding flexibility, discovery and magic within the scope of engineering instruction.
Allison Moore
The “sentence of the day” is a routine in my upper level high school Spanish class in which students choose a sentence from our text and lead the class in an analysis/ discussion of the sentence. The presentation at Habla seeks ways to improve this routine while keeping the aspects that work: student-led, routine, text-centered.