El misterio de la biblioteca Mil.lènium o cómo promover relaciones colaborativas desde la participación del alumnado

Authors

Esperança Tarrés SerraSalto de línea Gemma Boix PinoSalto de línea Natàlia Nadal PedreroSalto de línea M.ª Assumpció García CornellàSalto de línea Escola La Farga. Salt, Girona, EspañaSalto de línea Salto de línea Ignasi Vila Mendiburu Salto de línea Universitat de Girona. Girona, España.

DOI

10.4438/1988-592X-RE-2012-359-198

Abstract

Critical pedagogy emphasizes school’s lack of neutrality toward social power relationships. Its aim is to change power relationships in the classroom by transforming coercive relationships (which mirror existing relations) into collaborative relationships, in order to promote student recognition and participation throughout all teaching and learning activities. From this perspective, the construction of students’ identity texts (understood as devices that students can appropriate to promote their cognitive development) is one of the goals of school activities. This paper shows how content and language are integrated in learning activities from kindergarten to sixth grade in an elementary school in Girona, Spain, in which nearly 97% of the students are of immigrant origin, and where the school’s aim is to promote linguistic proficiency in the school language (Catalan) and use of multimodal systems. The teaching unit includes different activities in which, over the course of the school year, a unique story is developed by all students of the school with the help of their teachers, two authors and three illustrators. Each class decides on the characters, the setting and the explicit course of the story’s action. The illustrators produce the pictures, and the authors enable the transition between the stories created by one age bracket and the next. The whole activity is based on active participation and the use of democratic decision-making procedures that include and prize the school’s linguistic and cultural diversity and the curricular contents. The results show how the identity texts the children build rely on the children’s fund of social and family knowledge and how activities such as this are a valuable resource for promoting the achievement of basic skills and the construction of democratic values.

Keywords

Critical pedagogy, participation, identity, reading, funds of knowledge.