QUIPUS AND STORYTELLING IN THE SPANISH LANGUAGE CLASSROOM
Our school was selected to participate in the NatGeo Explorer Challenge “The Human Journey”. We were paired up with Sandhya Narayanan, a linguistic anthropologist conducting research on Quechua, an endangered indigenous language in Puno, Peru. This provided a wonderful opportunity for our upper primary students to explore the connection between languages, culture and society.
In order to contextualise our journey, we first went on a virtual trip of Puno using Google Earth. Then we learnt about the Incas: their history, their culture, where they lived, and, thanks to Sandhya, we also learnt about their language, Quechua. We were very surprised to learn that, throughout the Inca era, Quechua was not a written language. So how did they remember information? - we wondered.
We found out that the Incas used quipus, a series of knotted strings used to record important information. We decided to create our own quipus to tell our explorer’s story.
This is how we did it:
Each student was given 5 paper slips, each one containing one piece of information about our explorer. The information was in Spanish. We were asked to classify our paper slips into 5 categories:
1. Information about the explorer’s personal life (where she was raised, hobbies, etc)
2. Information about Puno, where Sandhya works
3. Information about Quechua, the language she is conducting research on
4. Information about how Sandhya conducts her research (tools, strategies, etc)
5. Definitions (linguistic anthropologist, multicultural community, Quechua, etc)
Each category was assigned a colour. If, for example, a student received two paper slips with personal information about the explorer, one paper slip with information about Puno and two paper slips with a definition, the student would take 2 red strands, 1 green strand and 2 purple strands. Then, we knotted our strings using a traditional knot known as “cuatro” because the strands need to be placed in the shape of a 4 in order to make the knots. We threaded our strings together in order to create our class quipus.
We used our class quipus to share with each other the bits of information about Sandhya that each of us had been assigned. By listening to each other we managed to put together Sandhya’s complete story. We learnt that not many young people speak Quechua nowadays, which made us reflect on the importance of being able to speak the language of our parents/grandparents.
As a culmination point, a Multilingual Board has been set up in the corridor of the Elementary school. The students are now in charge of keeping the board alive and engaging by coming up with language challenges for the Verdala community. Our current challenge is: in how many languages can the Verdala community write Earth, Wind, Water and Fire – the names of our Sports Day teams/ school houses?
We hope the board will become a centralised point for the whole school community to display and admire the beauty of multilingualism.
Ms. Ana Acevedo Nistal - Elementary Spanish teacher
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
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National Geographic explorer challenge “The Human Journey”