Student Activities
The varied media and the interplay of themes in this unit will offer the potential for a diverse range of activities that will engage students' creativity and critical thinking skills along with their productive and interpretive language skills. There is ample opportunity to employ classroom technology and students' personal hand-held devices as well as activities that require little use of technology beyond the ability to display an image.
The activities in the unit are arranged by country and chronologically by artifact for maximum clarity and coherence. We will open in 1959 with the Valle de los Caídos basilica and monument and will proceed to the 1964 Franco Peace Medal. Moving across the Atlantic and ahead to 1965, we will study the Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco and will proceed to contemporary Mexico with the hundred-peso note featuring Nezahualcóyotl. The concluding project will invite students to muster their own creative skills to combine text and image to design a medal, monument or banknote on their own.
Art Detective
Each artifact will be introduced through the Friedlaender method described above. Because the activity will be conducted in Spanish, accommodations must be made to facilitate the experience for language learners. Some days before each new artifact is introduced, students will receive a vocabulary list with appropriate vocabulary that will help them navigate the experience with minimal frustration and reliance on circumlocution.
After completing the Friedlaender method, the question-and-answer experience with an image or images of the Valle de los Caídos, students will read an excerpt of oral history detailing the treatment of vanquished leftists by Franco's forces. 35 The passage is the testimony of Manuel Moreno Ramírez, a fifteen-year-old boy describing the massacre of captured loyalists in the bullring of Badajoz following the capture of that city. Students will conduct a think-pair-share activity in which they will verify comprehension of the passage about the massacre and will then share their impressions of it. As a writing assignment, students will be asked to evaluate the stone cross and basilica of the Valle de los Caídos in light of the testimony given by Manuel Moreno Ramírez.
QR Detective
The teacher posts an image of two different artifacts and displays in the classroom or hallway the series of QR codes linked to information that will help the students identify and understand the objects. The teacher shows the students how to access a QR code using a smart phone. The teacher then tells the students they will be responsible for figuring out the provenance and meaning of the artifacts provided using their smart phones to read QR codes. The students are given two artifacts, each with five QR codes. The QR codes are not segregated by object, but are presented at random; the students will have to determine which Internet resource relates to which QR code.
Presenting the Franco Peace Medal of 1964, students will be given links to related images and media. They will encounter, of course, the front and back of the medal. They will also have links to film clips of the 1964 celebrations and to posters commissioned by the regime for the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the war's end. Other images may include Spain's vice president at the time, Agustín Muñoz Grandes, posing first with Hitler during World War II and later with President Eisenhower. Students will discuss the sequence of images and will attempt to connect the different images, text, and voice information. As a whole group, we will compare our findings and conjectures and discuss the significance of the 1964 peace celebrations in Spain.
We will conclude by discussing the tú versus usted forms of address in Spanish. Students will brainstorm about the ways choice of formal or informal address can make a speaker or writer more or less influential depending on the situation.
Learning With Maps and Photo Essays
Google Maps gives an excellent view of the buildings and terrain at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City. Using an interactive whiteboard or other display, we will examine the three types of architecture extant at the site (Aztec, colonial Spanish, and modern Mexican). Students will be asked to make inferences about the time period and provenance of each different type of architecture they see.
Students will then take in a series of photographs of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and the Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlateloco. In no particular sequence they will see photos of the newly constructed urban complex and photos of the violence that broke out there in 1968 when government troops attacked student protestors. They will see the damage caused by the 1985 earthquake. Students will see the present state of the complex, with once-gleaming buildings covered in graffiti and causeways filled up refuse due to the interruption of trash collection. Students will work in small groups in the target language to place the photos in chronological order and write a caption for each picture. Groups will present their results to the class.
Money Talks: the Indigenous Past in Modern Mexican Nationalism
Students will read, interpret and recite the poem of Nezahualcóyotl that appears on the hundred-peso note. As a class, we will compare the image of Nezahualcóyotl that appears on the banknote with images of Aztec and other indigenous rulers taken from modern Mexican murals.
As a concluding project, students will combine images or forms with Spanish language text to create a medal, monument, or banknote of their own design. They will record audio or video of themselves giving an explanation of their artifact and the rationale behind their intended propagandistic effect. Students will upload their recordings and images of their artifacts to educational blogging site to create a virtual gallery. Students will also create QR codes to accompany their artifacts that link their artifacts to the uploaded video files. Students will then have a gallery opening presentation in which they will be able to circulate from one artifact to another, listening to the different presentations. Instead of the class sitting and waiting while each student presents in sequence, students will access their classmates' presentations with the QR code links accompanying each artifact.
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