Brief description of the project: 5 day training comprised of two sessions with teachers and students of OCT Primary School in Shenzhen, China.  Participants created aesthetic prompts from two different classical texts, for both Grades 3-4 and 5-6, aligned with Common Core Standards. 

GOALS ACHIEVED

The Agenda included introductions and warm ups within a restorative circle.  Students then were invited to create book covers while they listened to the reading of the text.  Students asked a question about the text.  Students were then invited to share their questions and choose one question to answer.  In this way students learned a variety of perspectives from their peers.  Students also created figurative sculptures, painted characters, made a vocabulary collage and reflected in their journals–all based on characters and scenes from the reading.  Students debriefed by answering the question, “What Did We Do?”

By the end of the training, students displayed confidence in abilities to critically think through the text, in terms of character development, to increase their vocabulary and to extend learning by the activities and going on tangents!

Every student left with various aesthetic representations that displayed a critical understand of the text.  Texts, Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish and Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo, were explored. Students worked together in groups and independently, practicing listening, reflection and comprehension.

During the first semester of this year, 10 Teachers from the Escuela Normal Superior de Quibdó have been applying the Pre-Texts methodology in their classes, capturing the strength of a better reading comprehension, developing as well strategies to transform sociocultural aspects of political and socio-cultural relevance in the classroom.

Through the follow-up process, knowledge as an experience have been exalted by teachers, making the tracing of the methodology implementation as rich as the main Pre-Texts workshops inside the classroom. In this particular case, we have found how important Pre-Texts is to recognize the local manners related to apprenticeship, giving the major importance to the oral practices in chocoana culture, understanding it, not only as a tool inside the workshops, but also as an important way of making a trace of those processes. Although technological resources are an issue in this community, teachers have faced the situation by making extremely precise and extensive oral reports, in order to keep the Pre-Texts follow-up group aware of the process.

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