Cleide Oliveira is a teacher from near the Xingu river in Brazil. Learning English at an early age after babysitting for a foreign family, Cleide started teaching when she was just 15. At 18, she won a trip to Cambridge to learn more about teaching. In this article she talks about her experience and how she has been implementing activities she learnt in Cambridge at her school in Brazil.
In many cases, pedagogical concepts are universal. However, practical application and development of activities need (very much!) to take into account the context of the classes and students’ locality.
I have been an English teacher for 10 years in the Amazon region, in Altamira, a city in the north of Brazil in the state of Pará. At the age of 19, I won a cultural contest to go to Cambridge in the United Kingdom. It was the first time I left Pará, the first time I left Brazil and the first time I got on a plane. That was when my journey as a teacher changed!
I went to another country, completely different from mine, and it opened my eyes to the many possibilities around me, to things I couldn’t even imagine. I had the opportunity to know another reality, another culture, another world, and all this learning was liberating.
At that time, I was in the first term of my graduation course in Languages (Portuguese/English), and as I had taught for some time, all I had was my classroom experience and what I had learned in the real world, in my daily life as a teacher at an NGO in Altamira. Although I had no theoretical knowledge, until that moment, I knew the challenges of teaching in such a limited context.
So, when I started the course, I focused on classroom dynamics and creativity. I learned a number of ways to practice the four skills (speaking, listening, writing and reading) in a practical and effective way, incorporating the use of new technologies and websites. When I returned to Brazil, to the reality of many Brazilian teachers, I was in doubt. How could I apply everything I had learned in a context with few (or no) resources? At that time, the school had no electronic devices, interactive whiteboard, computer, Internet access or projector, and classrooms had at least 30 students. The challenge was enormous, but my desire to teach was enormous too!
Adapting theory to the context of lessons
I started using what I had at hand. As we did not have access to the Internet, I asked students to record their own videos using an old camera I had at home, and then I showed this video material on a TV. Students were very excited to watch each other, and with that I was able to teach them vocabulary, conversation and grammar through the content created by themselves.
Regarding the teaching material, I used to adapt the tourist sights that appeared in the books to the reality of the children. Instead of talking about the Statue of Liberty, I would take newspaper and magazine clippings of tourist sights from our city, presenting our region before other places.
Looking at the surrounding physical space is also very important. As my students and I grew up in the Amazon Rainforest area, nature is part of our daily life, so I always take them outside the school during my classes. Outside the school, I can teach colors and work with different shades of green, for example. As these are unique colors, I asked them to create new names for tones that are not named in English, always associating these new names with something they already know, for example, “Guava Green”, from our guava trees, or even “Hills Green”, from the hills of the region.
Another thing I like very much is to ask them to do activities that use their body a lot. Since my classes had many students, it was almost impossible to form groups, so I created a more dynamic activity. For each question asked, students needed to quickly group into pairs, or groups of three or four. Those left were the next to ask questions and the activity went on, always with a lot of fun. All these came from what I learned in college and in my trip to Cambridge, which showed me that teachers can be facilitators and students can build their own knowledge by themselves.
How to overcome the challenges of each region
We know that often the greatest challenge for teachers is the lack of resources, especially textbooks that value the peculiarity of each region. In this case, adapting content requires time and a lot of work, so planning is critical. When we prepare the material before class, we make the project easier and become more confident to meet the students.
It is a way of exercising our creativity and also our pedagogical practice. After all, how do you get students to interact with each other to build knowledge? How can teachers be facilitators of knowledge acquisition and create a student-centered class?
Using authentic material to facilitate students’ learning, bringing content closer to their reality, is something that has always enchanted me. We can use the environment where students are, everything around us is a learning tool. Whether in the classroom, or outdoors, in a cabin or anywhere else, everything can be used to bring the content being taught closer to the students’ reality.
How to adapt the content in practice?
In such a big country as Brazil, what are the main tips for turning content into something that is part of the students’ day-to-day life? The answer is not so simple, but here are three tips that have always helped me a lot:
- Observe: try to find out what is appealing for your students, like playing ball, shuttlecock, fishing, singing, dancing, cooking etc.;
- Know: what do they do on a daily basis? What is the social context in which they are in? Are they fishermen, farmers, traders? Know who they are to find out how to approach them;
- Incorporate: use everything that is part of their lives to build knowledge using that social background. Use everything that makes the most sense and has meaning to them according to the subjects you are going to teach.
Using a more global approach with our students is not wrong at all. But when we start from the reality of the students, from what is most meaningful to them, we practice our own empathy and create a much truer bond with the students and with our teaching.