NEW ACTIVITY AT THE LIBRARY: GROUP DISCUSSION FOR TEENS

 

In recent years, the Library has started a program of activities aimed at attracting new audiences. The first target was the children's audience (from 4 to 8 years old), currently consolidated as a growing group thanks to the “Storytellings” and later the age group from 9 to 13 years old with the “Reader's Theater” activity. The next challenge was capturing a difficult-to-attract group of users, teenagers. For this purpose, this quarter and jointly with the English Program and American Space, we have launched a new initiative, Group Discussion for Teens, whose results are very promising.

At the initiative of the English Program, the activity was designed with the objective of an entire class of a High School, in which through short stories, poetry or graphic novels, we would invite them to learn about American literature.

We contrasted the project with different secondary school teachers linked to the library or the English Program who offered to carry out a pilot experience with their students.

The proposal was finally presented as part of the activities of the American Space Madrid in the library under the name of "Group Discussion for Teens" with Andrew Bennett, professor of the Institute's English Program, as coordinator of this activity.

Andrew proposed a program focused on poetry and chose poems such as “Fog” by Carl Sandburg, “Mask” by Shel Silverstein, and “If I can stop one heart from breaking” by Emily Dickinson. A second part of the program consisted of the creation of a poem jointly among the students. This has been the scheme of the program that has been carried out with all the groups, except for the group from the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute with whom the short story The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was analyzed.

Patti Trimborn, director of the English department, organized an interactive welcome presentation on the history of the Institute for each group, grouping the information received into three blocks according to the KWL method (What we Know / What we Want to Know / What we Learned).

The students have shown great interest in the short story and the poems; As a result, the debate raised was of a good level and lively. Also the joint creation of the poem has been particularly successful. Andrew's experience and know-how have been crucial in the development of this new initiative.

Between the months of March and April we have held four sessions with about 20 students aged 12 or 13 in each one, belonging to three institutes: IES Ramiro de Maeztu (a bilingual institute with an international baccalaureate close to the IIE), IES Gabriel García Márquez (a bilingual in the neighborhood of Hortaleza) and IES Mariana Pineda (a non-bilingual public institute in the neighborhood of Moratalaz). On April 23, Book Day, a last special session was held for students from IES Ramiro de Maeztu and IES Mariana Pineda to analyze and read poems about nature as a common theme.

This initiative has been a great way to make the Institute known, fragments of American literature in a collaborative learning environment and different from that of a class. We believe that the result is very satisfactory, which is why we intend to continue with it in the future, expanding the number of participating institutes.