Innovation in Language Learning

This paper and presentation will outline how a high school Spanish teacher, middle school English language arts teacher, and a high school art teacher developed and implemented a successful interdistrict art and language collaboration.   The project immersed students in various levels of expression and translation across districts, grade levels, disciplines, genres, and media.  Inspired by her success using blogging and translation as a means of language acquisition in her high school Spanish class, Ms. Nocton reached out to Ms. Marcus to include her 8^th grade English language arts students from a nearby district.  Ms. Marcus’ students had been successfully exploring, writing, and performing spoken word poetry.  The idea Ms. Nocton and Ms. Marcus developed required the middle school students to share their poetry with Ms. Nocton’s Spanish students, who then translated the work and posted on their class blog both the written poems as well as audio files of the spoken poems, in both English and Spanish.  A further component of the collaboration involved art teacher Beverly Fisher, whose high school art students created visual art interpretations of the poems.  Ultimately, the multifaceted collaboration demonstrates the interrelatedness of spoken, written, and visual expression; the varied means and methods of translation; and the relationships between and among print, digital, vocal, and plastic art expression.  This paper and presentation will outline how the students and teachers collaborated to bring this project to fruition, the benefits reaped, and the insights students and teachers gained into their own learning and teaching as a result of working together.