Notes on Creativity Through English

Learning Through The Body

Wings of Change students learn kinesthetically with living pictures

Learning a language is tough. When sounds, inflections and structures are unfamilar they are simply hard to remember. Ultimately, the capacity for recall is what opens the door to fluency. When fluency, the automatic, subconscious ability to draw on vocabulary in order to communicate coherently, is the goal then how to master another language is the clearly the challenge.

Well, there’s good old fashioned rote learning. Yawn. And it works for certain things. Sheer repetition can be great for verb conjugation, vocabulary building and absorbing chunks of knowledge.

To teach a child what a cup is, we can easily show them a cup and now they know. That’s easy, right. This is TPR teahing, or Total Physical Response, teaching in a way that is overt, obvious, and makes a clear connection to the concept being taught.

For Abstract Concepts

But what if the task is to teach an abstract concept such as tolerating ambiguity, or staying open, or being curious?

Abstract concepts are challenging to teach in any language. Translating from the target language to the native language tends to establish a habit of translation. If fluency in the target language is the goal, then surely translation eventually becomes a barrier to thinking and building an expansive vocabulary in the target language.

How to get to that ‘a-ha’ of understanding can be learned through the body, or kinesthetically. Physical movement for learning is fun, requires teamwork, and develops an ability to tolerate ambiguity (how do we do this?) while learning complex concepts.

With Living Pictures = A-ha

Physically making living pictures, tableaux vivants, requires deeper thinking while also being silly and engaging the whole body for learning. Living pictures also visually document the lesson. How fab is that?

If seeing is believing, then seeing or perceiving complexity though the kinesthetic learning exercises of living pictures help to clarify what complex problem solving actually looks like.

And who doesn’t want to make an artful human picture?

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Tanya Knudsen is Creativity Consultant and teaches Creativity Through English at Wings of Change, a vocational hospitaliy school and hotel social enterprise in Nosy Be, Madagascar.