Introduction
Why would someone want to teach the Spanish Civil War? I am a language teacher and therefore I can easily implement other disciplines, like history, geography and literature, in my instruction. I always try to do so since I believe that meaningful interdisciplinary teaching benefits students greatly: it opens up their minds and gives them a wider perspective.
As a high school Spanish teacher, I always work on including aspects of diverse cultural groups in my lessons about peoples from around the world, because I believe my students should be raised to appreciate the highly diverse society that we all live in. However, I tend to emphasize cultural components of countries of the Hispanic world so students reach a better understanding of the second language they are studying.
I intend to implement the "5Cs" of the National Standards of Foreign Language Learning—Cultures, Connections (among disciplines), Comparisons (between cultures), Communication, and Communities—into context in this unit.
The unit The Spanish Civil War Through Film will allow me to achieve a variety of different but equally important goals: It will give me the opportunity to introduce history, literature and culture in the classroom. My students have not been exposed to many different cultures and sometimes it is difficult for them to interpret or even understand other perspectives, points of view or behaviors. By teaching the students to analyze and decode movies, I will provide them with the tools to relate some of the cultural background information they already have to new concepts (and to their own experiences.) The other important goal I want to accomplish with the unit is to improve student's critical thinking skills by analyzing and synthesizing information. It will also give my students the opportunity to perfect their reading, listening, writing and speaking skills in Spanish while learning about some important historical events and literature.
The unit is to be used at The Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture and Agriculture Center in New Haven. It is a unique magnet school with a hands-on marine and agriculture program offering students a blend of academic and practical education, and encourages interdisciplinary study wherever applicable. The Sound School enrolls students from New Haven and twenty surrounding towns, creating a diverse community that reinforces students social and intellectual learning. The result is a racially, ethnically and socio-economically diverse student body with a broad range of academic abilities. We encourage students to be participants in a multi-cultural society by involving them in a diverse range of high school experience.
The Spanish Civil War Through Film has been designed for my upper level classes: Spanish IV, though with proper modifications, the unit could also be taught in Spanish III and AP Spanish. Students at this level have an intermediate to advanced level of the language and a better understanding, as well as a more critical view of the world.
The unit is designed to be covered within a period of 25-30 sessions, which are from forty to seventy minutes in length. We have a rotational period system that changes every day. The average class size will be twenty or so, a perfect number for the class discussions and the debates.
I enjoy introducing history in my classes, and the Spanish Civil War perfectly fulfills my purposes of improving my students' critical thinking skills. Of all the crucial events in the history of Spain, I would say the Civil War is the one that has to be really understood to interpret present Spanish society. The Spanish Civil War became the testing ground for World War II as thousands of volunteers arrived from around the world to fight for their ideas. It not only devastated the country, but it also led to a dictatorship that lasted thirty-six years. Even though the topic seems to be very localized at first, it is not so. It will drive my students to connect the Civil War to the situation in Germany and/or Italy and how a new wave of fascism spread around Europe. As a fact, we cannot isolate the Spanish Civil War from the situation in Europe at that time.
A vast filmography of the Civil War, filmed during the period inside and outside Spain, allows one to choose a variety of aspects to work with in this unit. We will work with various movies, supported by fragments of other fiction movies and documentaries to clarify concepts or illustrate ideas.
Some of the fiction films chosen for this unit are representative of the two extremes in which Spanish society and politics were divided: La Lengua de las Mariposas (José Luís Cuerda, 1999) takes place in a small Galician pre-war town, where the Second Republic was struggling to survive. Another movie, on the other hand, Raza (José Luís Sáenz de Heredia, 1942), is a propaganda film written by Jaime the Andrade, pseudonym for Francisco Franco. The film synthesizes Franco's ideology in the first years of the post-war era through the stories of four brothers and their experiences during the war. These and other movies to be shown in this unit were written and filmed with different perspectives and different time frames. This is the reason why I have also chosen André Malraux' Espoir (or Sierra de Teruel): the famous novelist filmed this movie in 1939, the year the war came to an end.
We will also work with newsreel footage and documentaries. The Spanish Civil War was the first war ever to be filmed and I think this could be very valuable for my students since they will view real images of the conflict. We will work with Spanish Earth, a documentary filmed on the spot in 1937 in Fuentedueña de Tajo, a small village near Madrid. We will also work with La Guerra Civil Española as a resource to illustrate the main events and a couple of short newsreels chosen from the NODOS, in order to briefly show some of Franco's propaganda in the post war years.
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