High School Studio Lesson
Autorretratos
en la Clase de Español
(Self-Portraits in the Spanish Classroom)
Jose M. Palos
Foreign language teachers
know the benefits of bringing art into their classrooms.
On one hand, works of art
are cultural artifacts that convey
rich cultural perspectives. Integrating art into the foreign language curriculum facilitates visual learning,
providing valuable opportunities
to help the students develop visual
thinking. Furthermore, art can also
be an effective resource to enhance
oral and written communication.
Such was my experience in
designing a recent unit on Spanish
self-portraits for students enrolled
in Spanish IV. As one student
summed it up in the end, “I had a
lot of fun being creative and I developed a new appreciation for artists
and their portraits. But I learned a
lot of Spanish in the process!”
The unit was inspired by an
exhibit in Madrid’s Prado Museum.
El Retrato Español: Del Greco a
Picasso provides a masterful retrospective of Spanish painters and
their portraits. The Web site combines digital reproductions of the
paintings
with analysis
and descriptions written
in Spanish.
While I had
taught a unit
about artists
of the Spanish-speaking world in
previous years, I often struggled
with how to make the topic more
relevant to students. Having students paint their own self-portraits
at the end of the unit, emulating
the artists that we studied, could
perhaps be a way to connect the
topic to their personal experience.
Learning from Looking
Since the Prado Web site provided
detailed background information
and analysis about many of the
portraits in the special exhibit, I
decided to use this resource to teach
some of the Spanish terminology
and concepts
By combining what we learned associated
in class with the personal nature with portrait
of self-portraits, student learning painting. I prepared
became individualized and a handout
relevant to their experience. with descrip-
tions and
analysis of nine different paintings
that I wanted to discuss with the
students. In order to help students
think through these descriptions,
and to look at the paintings atten-
tively, I intentionally omitted any
references that would identify the
portraits. I asked students to match
the various written descriptions in
