Revista simpozionului Eficienta si calitate in educatie 2018 Revista simpozionului | Page 36

kindergarden of Tanakla (India) with 50 infant children that would had no
opportunity without the funding.
Firstly, she wanted to invite our students to do some volunteering in summer in
order to learn about the situation and possibly work there when they get their
degree in the Teacher training Faculty of Education. Secondly, she suggested
them preparing some school materials that could be of interest to the children.
Therefore, that was a perfect idea for the English classroom, where the main
objective at that time was ‘STORY TELLING’, a project that they had to prepare in
groups with collaborative work.
Our educational system encourages students to be European citizens able to
participate actively in our society life as part of the internalization of education as
one of the main quality criteria, so, their teacher said: “Why don’t we tell stories for
the Indian children? But, let’s prepare them in context, using their typical names,
their typical places and their own problems”.
Initially, they formed groups inside the classroom and then, as a first step, they
entered the webpage of the NGO: www.fundacionisabelmartin.es , in order to
search for information about their culture, their school, their village, etc…. What
for? To create stories that could be closer to those particular children. They would
be more motivated if the stories were related to their own problems and not to our
occidental society, full of resources that they are not used to. They would not easily
understand something about unknown places rather than their own.
The second step was making up the sories, in English of course, drawing the
characters, inventing names and looks, writing about the plots or the problema-
solving in every story, focusing in some values that would be useful for the children
to learn ; most of them could be general values for life, that can be useful
everywhere in the world, values like, friendship, generosity, solidarity, creativity,
etc…. At this stage, our student could show their multiple intelligences. Some of
them were good at drawing, some of them at organizing the tasks or the
procedures, some of them at writing, etc….. They even recorded the making-off
and send it to the children in India via mail.
When all the stories were written, the groups were peer-evaluating to find mistakes
so that they could improve their English, and afterwards, the stories were
evaluated by their teacher. (We mustn’t forget that it was a task for the EFL
subject) So that, when they were corrected and evaluated, they could start
designing the look of the final products: ‘Stories for India’.
Luckily, one of the student’s father has an Enterprise dedicated to graphics and the
five stories were going to be published free of charge, ready to be taken to Tanakla
school in India.
Thus, two of the University students travelled personally to India last summer 2017
to take the different stories as class material to learn English at their pace. You can
find out about the Project and their personal experience on the internet. They came
back absolutely excited and dedided to spread the Project, showing the rest of the
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