The local environment is, of course, also made up of the people within it, and these can provide a rich resource to use in your teaching. For example, as a teacher, one of your main roles is to help your students become fully literate in their mother tongue and other languages as appropriate, so they can access the full curriculum and achieve personal, social and economic progress in their life. In the primary grades this is a major responsibility, but as the curriculum becomes more specialised in secondary school, a range of teachers take on the task. Alongside the teaching of their particular subject, all teachers have a responsibility for students’ language development. In secondary school, specialist mother tongue teachers have a particularly important role, and here the local community provides an important resource.
For example, in most communities there exists a range of stories, from fiction to historical tales, of the changes that have happened over time. Older people in particular may know stories that they were told as a child, but which are beginning to disappear from the local culture. These may be tales of ancestors or fictional folk tales that have survived through the ages. Students can be asked to try to find these stories. Your knowledge of the local community can help you identify people who could be invited in to tell their stories to the class. This might be an activity that extends over two or three weeks with someone invited in each week.
Students are likely to be highly motivated by this activity. They can use it to build their own stories in oral and written forms. At the end of the two or three weeks, you could organise a “presentation” of one or two stories by the class, perhaps to another class or even to the whole school. Children and young people love events like this!
Such an approach serves many purposes. Not only is it at the core of literacy, but it also helps promote cultural and community pride.
Now read John’s story of how he asked a local storyteller to come in to class. This was the starting point for a range of drama activities that helped his students practise their language skills while thinking about the best way to act out a story or explore issues.