ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Curtis Kelly

Panelists: Marc | Curtis | Peter
Date: July 2004

Topic: "What can be achieved through English camps/intensive courses?"

Curtis Kelly

The First Nations English Camp for Japanese Elementary School Students

Maybe the greatest advance in education in the last twenty years has been a rather quiet one. We are finally filling in the picture of how learning happens. Most of what we have discovered came to us at three intersections of psychology and education.

First, Kolb and others worked out a theory of experiential learning, somewhat related to constructivism. The theory claims that learning occurs in a cycle of experiencing, hypothesizing, integrating and experimenting. The theory also posits that we cannot learn something unless we have experienced it. Second, developmental psychologists and motivation experts found that the brain does not just learn anything. It learns what it needs to know, or as Eric Jensen puts it, what it needs to "survive." Third, brain studies indicated that learning takes place best when it has meaning and causes us to use multiple parts of the brain, as we do in real-life activities.

“People only learn what is meaningful, and it is learned more deeply if it is something we actually experience, rather than just being told about it.”

In sum, we have discovered that people only learn what is meaningful, and it is learned more deeply if it is something we actually experience, rather than just being told about it. These notions are changing universities with the rise of "learning colleges," but the funny thing is that elementary school teachers have known this all along. And it was this concept of learning, old for them, but new for me, that helped me solve a difficult problem: how to set up an English camp for kids.

The Adokawa Board of Education, in Shiga, asked a couple colleagues and myself to set up an 8-day English camp for 20 Japanese 5th and 6th graders. The camp was funded by a grant from the Ministry of Education, but no one involved was a bona fide elementary school teacher. To make matters worse, it was well-known that fifth and sixth graders tend to have a kind of English burnout. They seem to lose interest in English classes at that age. (What I learned later is that development in their brains change from the right side to the left side at that age, so they need greater cognitive challenges.)

Keeping them interested in English for an hour or two seemed hard enough, but for eight hot summer days without a break, in a mountain camp without TVs or computer games, it seemed like an invitation to disaster. The camp we held was not a disaster, though. It was a complete success.

A few Heian college students and I, and some staff from the Board, planned and ran the 8-day camp, but instead of holding English classes, we used a completely different approach, a content-based one. We turned the camp into a giant role play. The children were assigned to four First Nations tribes - Navaho, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Iroquois - and each member was given a role in the tribe, as chief, elder, medicine man/woman, musician or hunter/huntress. For example, the elder reported tribe happenings to us; the medicine man/woman did the daily heath checks; and the hunter was in charge of collecting and distributing supplies.

Each day carried a different regimen of activities, from buffalo hunts (treasure hunts with instructions written in English), to fire dances, to moccasin making (kits ordered over the Internet from the US). Other activities included tribal entrance ceremonies, totem pole making (with rolls of toilet paper), fire bread cooking, and a final show put on for parents. We didn’t teach English per se, but rather used English to explain how to do these activities. In this way, we created their need to understand it, and reinforced the learning through experience. To our surprise every single one of those children loved the camp and none of them wanted to go home when it ended. Better yet, they truly learned a lot, both in terms of language skills and Native American folklore.

I learned something too, that real teaching is having people do things, not just hear or read about things.

Panelists: Marc | Curtis | Peter

Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University

Author of Writing from Within

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