Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

[Tanya Slavin]

Ben, thank you so much for the links. I'm definitely going to suggest this
documentary to the workshop participants.
Tanya


2014-03-01 14:20 GMT-05:00 Ben Levine <watchingplace at gmail.com>:

> Hi Tanya - We made the documentary *Language of America* (
> languageofamerica.com) with just this use in mind. We show the film (
> it's 80 minutes divided into 12 minute chapters) or parts of it and use it
> to trigger an emotional response which then let's students own their family
> and tribal experience and identity.  We facilitate the discussion which is
> to say give the responder the support they need whether it be encouragement
> or connecting their experience to an other's or even balancing conflicting
> responses, basically creating a safe space where the fragmented pieces of
> experience can come together. There's more on the web site and also more
> about our work at speaking place.org.
> Please be in touch if you wish more information.
> Ben Levine and Julia Schulz
>
> On Feb 28, 2014, at 8:24 PM, Tanya Slavin <tanya.slavin at UTORONTO.CA>
> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> [I just sent this message to another mailing list, but I figured I'd send
> it here as well, apologies if you're getting it twice!]
>
> We're having a local workshop on indigenous language teaching at the
> University of Toronto, an event organized for school and university
> language teachers to share ideas on some of the challenges specific to
> native language teaching in an urban setting. One of the topics that we
> hope to address in some way (perhaps as a roundtable discussion) is the
> question of how to deal with emotional consequences of historical trauma in
> the language classroom. One of the biggest obstacles for aboriginal
> students wishing to regain their language is the painful history of their
> relationship with it (e.g. their parents were forbidden to speak the
> language, they may have grown up discouraged speaking their language or
> feeling that their language was somehow inferior). All that baggage
> influences negatively their success in the classroom: they either reach a
> certain plateau or can hardly progress at all, or are unable to start
> speaking the language. As a result, the drop-out rate of native students in
> a university language classroom is much higher than that of non-native
> students wishing to learn a native language. I witnessed it myself when I
> was teaching Ojibwe in a university setting, and I'm seeing it now teaching
> it in a community setting. The question is how to deal with that and help
> these students succeed (also keeping in mind that they don't necessarily
> have the support of their community in an urban setting). Is it a good idea
> to actually raise this issue in the classroom, in order not to ignore the
> elephant in the room, so to speak? Would having separate classes for native
> and non-native students help the issue?
> So I wanted to ask if anybody had any ideas about this they would be
> willing to share, or experiences they had, or any stories they have about
> students that were dealing with this obstacle. If that's ok, I'd love to
> share your ideas and experiences at the workshop (obviously, giving
> everybody credit for them), which would also hopefully generate a
> productive discussion. I would appreciate any ideas you might have, and
> thank you in advance!
>
> Tanya
>
>
>


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