Hey y'all,
Hoping this finds everybody doing well, either on Spring Break or hanging in there as you approach some time off.
I wanted to share a little snippet of a discussion we had recently with one of my classes as we step into a unit on La Religion in la Francophonie. As we do with all of our units, we always start from home.
Before we go on to discuss some religious identities in Benin and in Lebanon in this unit, we talk about what some religious identities and belief systems are in our own school community.
This bit of the discussion was about our class making predictions about what we believe to be the most common religious identities, followed by students comparing and contrasting their predictions about the different percentages for each identity.
Later, we send out an anonymous poll to the faculty and students to collect some data that we can analyze and compare to our prior predictions.
I absolutely love this unit and the way how starting from home really lends to A.) building vocabulary to speak about "familiar topics," as the ACTFL Proficiency Benchmarks lays out and to B.) allowing everyone to see how their identity counts. To the latter point, often when I've done this unit, there are students who have minoritized/marginalized identities that now have the chance to see those parts of who they are highlighted as a part of our community.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this! Please forgive some mistakes and mispronunciations (for the life of me, I don't know why I kept pronouncing it 'agneau-stique,' but I have since corrected! lol, don't judge me.)
Thanks for the love. Take care!
bt