On April 2, Vera Cabrera Duarte presented a talk entitled: Through the Tunnel: ​a way into​ Significant Learning​.

On this page you will find all the slides used in the talk and the bibliography of the research. We will be very pleased if you can share your thoughts about the presentation in Comment Box.

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SUMMARY: This talk draws on my experience as a teacher developer, a researcher and a teacher of English to undergraduates at the Catholic University of São Paulo Brazil. I have always been concerned about the role of affect in the classroom situation, and most of my research has been dedicated to Educational Psychology, especially to the principles of Significant Learning (Duarte,2015), and to motivation as opposed to resistance to learning. As a result, pedagogical proposals to enhance learning were implemented. In this presentation, I will show how, together with the students, the short story Through the Tunnel by Doris Lessing was discussed. I will brief the audience on the story and explain how it can be applied not only as extensive reading literary material for ELT, but mainly as an example of how art can directly impact people´s emotions.  The story helps explain and illustrate more precisely what happens to humans in learning. The narrative is about Jerry, an eleven-year-old English boy who goes to a foreign country with his widowed mother to spend his holidays. The conflict emerges when he wants to prove himself he was no longer a child and sets out to swim through an underwater tunnel. Reflections arising from the analogy between Jerry´s experience as a learner and students´ own experiences include self-awareness of their own resistance versus their willingness towards learning. Students´ reflections on their feelings and discoveries will be shown.