The PLACES Project

An “International Experiment”

Themes and Learning Objectives

  • Working with orality
  • fables
  • well-being
  • empowerment through active participation
  • procedural drama
  • enhance the inclusion of bilingual migrant students
Brædstrup Skole

Location: Brædstrup, Denmark

Pupils involved: 28 pupils

Age Group: 9-11 years old

Lesson: Danish

Implementation Procedures

The class worked with it in five double (2-hour) lessons. These lessons were with a co-teacher and partly with a focus on well-being and empowering students through active participation. The teacher combined this with working with procedural drama.

Materials and tools used

The PLACES tutorials videos on how to tell, including The Lion and the Mouse.

For each lesson the teacher added one or two tools from the tutorials and just like the Danish storyteller does in the tutorials in the “Road to Tell” videos and continued to work with the same stories.
Pupils were supposed to learn about fables, practice drama and their orality overall. As a number of pupils were migrant bilingual with poor linguistic skills in Danish, the teacher used this opportunity to practice Danish language and improve language skills through orality, as well as foster a better experience of inclusion.
In the first PLACES lesson, the pupils watched ´The Lion and the Mouse´ and the video ´ Senses and Action´. Then they had to work on another fable by themselves in small groups of three. One narrator, one fox and one stork, the two latter having the phrases of the animals. They could switch roles from time to time. They showed their little story pieces to each other each time at the end of the lesson.
For each lesson the teacher added one or two tools from the tutorials. And just like the Danish storyteller does in the tutorial videos and continued to work with the story. In this class there were three students, who were “still very weak in Danish” according to the teacher, as they had migrated from countries with very different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. And in most lessons, “they were the ones who had short lines, very little to say” . So, they just had to learn a few lines by heart in Danish.

In one of the later lessons the teacher tried an “international experiment”, in which pupils with Danish as first language could voluntarily join. In the three ‘international’ groups, the migrant students were the narrators of their respective groups, and they narrated their parts in their own mother tongue and then showed to the students with Danish as their mother tongue how to tell their few dialogue phrases in that language (Arabic, Ukrainian, Polish). The class tried to write the Arabic sentences that the group was supposed to say, but they didn’t have the letters for the different sounds, so they also worked on phonological awareness. The rest of the class continued practicing the story as usual based on the storytelling tutorials. They ended the lesson with every group telling the whole class their version of the story.

Sharing Outcomes and Experiences

Working through the fables with the tools presented, gave the students the opportunity to both rehearse drama, orality, storytelling and language at the same time. Inclusion of students with different cultural backgrounds and languages was supported.
Several students would like to work more with gestures and mimicry. This is something that they’ve become aware of, after working with the PLACES materials. They think it was fun and inspiring to work more with this. There are also some of them who generally wanted to do drama exercises, which are some of the other things that the teacher wanted to work more with the class.
It can be difficult to teach about orality and storytelling, if the teachers themselves are not very good storytellers. And these PLACES video-tutorials on the platform solved that problem. The students said that the Danish storyteller was talented and inspiring, and it really inspired them want to tell the story themselves.
This “experiment” of storytelling in the migrant students’ mother languages, gave the Danish students a slightly different understanding of the situation that one can find oneself in, when one faces difficulties in relation to the local language. Also, the process really increased the students’ ability to work together in groups and made them feel comfortable talking in front of their classmates.

In the words of the teacher:

“I wanted to promote empathy and understanding of how newly arrived bilingual students feel every day when we ask them to speak Danish. It was also my wish to use bilingualism as a resource in the classroom a long side the storytelling language lanes.
I wanted the three migrant students to feel at home in the story in a completely different way, to get a chance to use the language tool of the lesson in their own language, finding the words in that language empower them I wanted the other students to really listen to the migrant languages and experience it in a different way in a story that they knew well to see, that the migrant students also could use the language tool to feel how difficult it is to have to make yourself understandable in another language to feel what it was like to have to be the one who could only contribute very briefly, to have the opportunity to play with language and learn something totally new.”