With her students facing the stress of final exams, Fellow Joanie Andruss turned to art to create a more relaxed, yet innovative workshop for her students at the English Language Center through the National University of Timor-Leste. The workshop, titled “Exploring English through Surrealism Art”, allowed students to practice both their spoken and written English outside of the lecture style typically used at their campus in Dili.
Andruss first introduced the Surrealism movement by presenting a variety of mediums in the style–including film, art and music. Students used sentence frames to describe examples of the art style before playing a Surrealist word game of chance. Finally, the students created Surrealist collages inspired by dreams. One of the students said of the project, “I like this, because never in my life have I seen something like this.”
The workshop not only provided group, which contains many future educators, with a stress-free haven to practice their English skills and create art, but exposed them to different teaching styles and methods of designing English lessons.