Chapter 12: Contextualizing..... my thoughts?

“…Framing curriculum around essential questions as opposed to content, makes connective, thought-provoking and recurring inquiries more appropriately central to the learning experience…It is very difficult to go back to creating disconnected activities or covering facts without a broader context when using UbD…”

I have been thinking about terms such as big idea, getting the picture and contextualized learning. Ideally, that all is supposed to happen if you plan your lessons well enough, right? I think we all agree that this way of teaching is much more appropriated and ´provide students with new opportunities to develop high order cognitive skills like critical thinking or problem-solving procedures. And What I liked about this book and this chapter is that by considering such important elements for lesson planning, not only students but also teachers can get the most out of it. The Brightside I see from all of these ideas is that they help both students and teacher think outside the box since they are compelled to try and respond to more challenging tasks: teachers are challenged to think about meaningful essential questions and how to frame curriculum around them and students are able to experience new ways of understanding and to really show what they have learned by transfer experiences, not by isolated tests.  The great thing about this whole UbD proposal is that is represents a challenge to both teachers and students to work around.

However, I keep wondering whether is it really plausible to actually contextualized foreign language learning – no matter how good your curriculum and essential questions are- if students are not able to experience what it means to actually learn a language and all the elements that involves? For me, learning a language goes hand in hand with learning about a culture and the people it belongs to. Like how contextualized our curriculum can be if our students are not meant to interact with the target language culture or native speakers? Can we really talk about “contextualizing” learning or are we trying to make our lessons a little less behaviorist-like?

Can a language be learned just by an awesome curriculum design? Although I have to recognize that UbD has a significant amount of great ideas I did not think of, I am a firm believer that in the case of language learning, one must be as close to the culture as possible… Does that make me a super bad teacher? I do not know.  Do I believe that the target language to be learned is meant to be spoken only by native speakers? No. Do I believe you need to come closer to the culture to grip the essence of the language? Yes.

And finally…Can we really contextualize the learning of something that involves not only expression, idioms, grammar and phonetics but also a way of life in a curriculum?