BUILDING COMMUNITY
Kurt, Marimar, and Ake welcomed us into our Habla community of learners by inviting us to
celebrate our own and each other’s presences, and to value from the beginning of our time
together the many languages of our learning. By moving between varied and shifting
encounters between each other, between settings (such as inside/outside) and between
configurations (solo, partners, small groups, large groups, sitting, standing, moving), we built a
powerful sense of community and inclusion. Play and kinesthetic interaction are essential and
often undervalued elements in building a learning community, and Kurt guided us through a
series of transformational, interactive games and encounters.
ENTERING TEXT
Students who are daunted by new text often feel overwhelmed by unfamiliar material that they
feel powerless to engage. Being able to “make friends”with even a part of a new text, even
single phrases or individual vocabulary words , can do wonders in reversing learners’
reservations and granting them a sense of agency. Working in duos, trios, and groups, we
created body sculptures representing phrases from our core text. Then, Marimar led us in
experiencing our text vocally by guiding us through call-and-response and interactive out-loud
readings.
COMPREHENDING TEXT
We read back through our core text, and wrote down 6 essential words that spoke to each of
us, shared our lists with 2 of our colleagues, and thereby established a rhythm of individual
work followed by dialogue and reflection with a small group of others. Kurt then introduced us
to “cordels” – poems and songs sold in street markets and by street vendors in Brazil that are
hung from strings to display them. We looked at pages from our text displayed on a cordel,
identified phrases that spoke to us, and then formed small groups to compare our findings. We
then created performances using minimal staging by embodying our shared phrases, freely
remixing the language by repeating, rearranging, and deleting words, and by varying how often
the words are spoken by individual members, by pairs, or by an entire small group.