Abstract

Early in the history of Western thought, philosophers such as Socrates and Aristotle articulated that the ability to teach a certain subject or skill demonstrates the highest form of understanding of that subject or skill. The primary focus of this project was to determine if this wisdom could be applied in practice to a 2000 level Caribbean History class here at Carthage College. As a secondary focus, this project sought to determine the practicality of teaching complex perspectives in geopolitical history to a class of “low-track reading” eighth-grade students. This project also had a tertiary goal, to demonstrate whether teachers/tutors that are not fluent in Spanish can still support bilingual students reading in the teacher’s content area in Spanish. Twelve students from the Carthage Caribbean History class spent a class period as “discussion leaders” in three groups of four students in an eighth-grade Civilization and Culture class in the Dual-Immersion program that runs through Bullen Middle School. Each group was assigned a group of six eighth-grade students, and was to lead them in a discussion about the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, with the discussion leaders guiding their students through two compositions in Spanish on the subject: excerpts from Fidel Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech and Barack Obama’s speech in Havana. Overall, the experiment was a resounding success and demonstrated the viability of all three of the methods/strategies on which it was centered.