INTRODUCTION TO A JOURNEY THOUGH WWII

A journey through WWII

History has always been one of my hobbies but I would have never thought that I would be teaching this subject, especially using a Foreign Language. When I was giving the opportunity to work at a bilingual school in Tunja, Colombia, I was given three different subjects to choose: history, science, and math. I chose history right away. I am happy about this choice because I have seen that I know a lot about history and I can help my students learn more thanks to this.

At the beginning of this year, when I was given the official curriculum designed by the school for the class of History, it was possible to see that it only contained basic principles and a list of general activities, such as “students read a text”. This exact same paper was repeated for all the different grades.  A single textbook is used for all the years of the secondary studies. Since there was not even a list of topics on the official curriculum, I had the liberty of choosing what I wanted to teach by dividing the textbook in six parts (one for each year of secondary school).  

Justification of the choice of the theme of the blog an how it is related to the subject:

Eleventh grade students (final year students) have shown to have a much superior level of English compared to the other students of the school. During the first months of the year, the students of eleventh grade have been learning about the period between the two World Wars. This is a really interesting topic. However, this is only presented on the textbook in a couple of pages. That is why I have been using extra material to make students more aware of the European context that led to the Second World War. Now students are about to start learning about the Second World War as such. This is where this blog with extra material for them comes in handy.                                                     

How students will benefit from it when it is available online:

The textbook used for the history classes for secondary level at this school in Colombia is not a real CLIL history textbook. Instead, it is a textbook designed for native speakers of fourth grade of primary school in the United States. Although in terms of language, the textbook seems to have an appropriate level for students; it is very limited about the amount of content it presents, mainly because it was designed as a primary school textbook. As stated earlier, it shows the content of a unit, for example the entire Second World War, in just four pages with a large font. As a history enthusiast I find that a bit frustrating. Another issue is that students do not own the textbooks. They belong to the school and they only have a limited set of books. In other words, students cannot take the textbook home to study on their own. 

Students will benefit from this blog because they will have extra content about the topics seen on the textbook adapted to their level of English. They will be able to study their material at home. They will also have more access to multimedia material such as videos and audio.