Sunday, April 27, 2008

Re: teaching korean esl students korean folk tales in english

I met with Hank today and explored the idea of teaching korean esl
students korean folk tales in english - that they can share with they
return home.

Some korean esl students don't know korean folk tales - just as some
english speaking french immsersion students don't know english folk
tales.

Some korean esl students don't have an enjoyable experience of
speaking
english - their experience has been restricted to the classroom.

Here are some of the ideas that I want to play with:

- where is home? how do stories make us at home? where is our
ancestral
village?

- immigration and freedom - conceived in southern california - my
parents escaped the united states during the vietnam war before i was
born - and came to canada to be free

- how the effects of the global exploitation of oil change koreans and
canadians

- how the effects of the korean-canadian exploitation of the tar sands
may change koreans and canadians

- how global warming, rising sea levels, loss of farm land, increasing
pollution levels, and increasing population may change koreans and
canadians

- how the decline of american empire may change koreans and canadians

- what is multicultural vs cultural segregation?

- how are korea town and down town multicultural?

- where do we experience each others cultures?

- folk tales are survivors of past empire collapses - acting
perhaps as
a salve, an antidote, or a sweetener

- using korean folk tales is a way for korean esl to share their
culture
with english speakers

- using korean folk tales to and uncompressing the meaning in the
stories

- retelling the stories from a contemporary perspective
example - rumplestiltskin turning tar-sand into oil - or straw into
oil

- finding some place for these stories in korean norae-bang, video-
bang,
and pc-bang where people go to enjoy themselves

- finding a few coaches rehearse coaching groups through question and
answer style story telling - aka "gossip"
example - did you hear what happened rumplestiltskin?

- finding a few esl schools that will tell students about the program

- several stories are selected and read to a group of esl students

- use information of civilization / empire collapse, global warming to
decompress the stories because we share the planet
example: bill rees (vancouver) (enviromental footprint), jared diamond
(collapse), ronald wright (vancouver) (short history of progress), and
elizabeth kolbert (fieldnotes from a catastrophe) are presented
or we watch some movies:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4271982381147720351
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-8460217464978001719&hl=en-CA

http://www.learner.org/vod/asx/seattle/Out_of_the_Past_08.asx


- students join the group of the story they want to tell

- the story is explored, decompressed and rehearsed for retelling
during
a day workshop from 9am to 5pm, then there is a break, and then
each of
the 6 groups presents their story for 10 minutes

- if this works well, my dream is to work in other asian languages as
well as french

- claim the chat and the phone as space for art by using web based
interactive geographically distributed story telling performances via
instant messaging such as MSN Messenger or SMS phone text messaging

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