Strategies
The unit will be taught once a week, starting in the third marking period (end of January, beginning of February.) By then, students will have acquired confidence in their oral and grammatical skills, and they will also be accustomed to the structure and pace of the class.
In order to help my students to understand the importance and implications of the Generación del 27, I will start the unit introducing different notions of history and literature through a variety of texts, graphic organizers, pictures and power points. We will first deal with the history since I consider understanding the time frame in which the Generación developed to be crucial in order to be able to grasp the complexity of the movement with all its different layers. We will briefly learn about the loss of the colonies, the Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and the situation before and during the Second Republic. After dealing with most of the unit's historical information, I will divide students in groups of four, giving all of them a set of resources to use. We will then go to the library so students can work in their groups gathering a set of questions (about 10 per group) and their answers that will ultimately be used as part of a game.
Right after, we will deal with the literary part of the unit: the concept of Generación and some of the group's main characteristics and trends. Once the students understand the basics of the movement, we will move into Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti, I chose these two authors because of the apparent simplicity of their poetry: students will be able to understand, interpret and analyze their poems easily. In order to lead them to that point, we will work with a couple of poems (mainly from Lorca's Romancero gitano and Alberti's Marinero en Tierra,) as a group. Later on, I will assign some poems to different groups of students (2 or 3 students per group) so they can explain, decode and present the poems in front of their peers. (I will encourage them to use technology and visual devices.) At the end of this section, we will go back to the library and work with other sets of questions, this time related to the authors, poems, plays and trends of the group of 1927.
In this literary section of the unit, we will also work on student's reading, listening and pronunciation skills by having them read some of the poems out -loud or working with some adaptations musicians have made of Lorca's poems such as Enrique Morente's Lorca (Virgin Records España, 1996,) Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: Oratorio de Vicente Pradal (EMI, 1998,) Federico García Lorca: El diván del Tamarit also by Vicente Pradal (EMI, 2008) or Ana Belén's tribute Lorquiana: Canciones populares de Federico García Lorca. (BMG, 1998.)
Final project: Teacher for a day
I will assign a final project that I have used before. It consists of having students teach some of the material we have gone through during the unit but they have to do so using different strategies and activities; they will have to use their own imagination and resources, with my assistance and help, if needed. Students usually like this project and they generally develop creative, well-structured lessons, and it is a great way to assess if they have grasped the main concepts and ideas, as well as giving them the possibility and freedom to think out of the box!
Students will work in groups of three and will have the option to choose from a list of topics in order.
"Generation Trivial"
To close the unit, we will play our own version of Trivial Pursuit with all the questions and answers we have gathered through the unit in groups.