Lesson Plans

The Lesson Plans Explained

The Para Nunca Olvidar documentation in original Spanish language audio testimonials, transcripts and illustrations is a unique and free source of inspiration for the pedagogical community worldwide. Below are some suggestions for lesson plans and exercises – some of which are made by the editors of the site and some by professional users like you.

If you and/or your students wish to contribute their own exercises for Para Nunca Olvidar Education, please contact the editor-in-chief Patricia Jouglas in English or in Spanish, write your description of the exercise, your pedagogical considerations and purposes and tell us which group of students is supposed to work with the exercise. After evaluation by her and by Lotte Holmen, the creator of the site, it may get published here online for the world to benefit.

The range of exciting subjects for student’s work is almost endless since the materials are like a live laboratory of strong human feelings, real spoken Spanish and issues of the past and today concerning Mayan culture, Central America, Guatemala as well as local and regional issues. Most of the narrators have experienced horrible things, i.e. slaughtering, burning of villages or having been victims of intimidation, discrimination and torture.

Thus subjects may be about democracy and the process of reaching democracy, peace treaties, dictatorship, torture, fear, trust and mistrust, everyday life, international help, justice and injustice, discrimination, envy, hope, poverty, the trauma of not being able to bury your loved ones, the necessity of talking about the past, the problem of standing between the guerrilla and the army and much more …

When you create your own lesson plans or exercises based on Para Nunca Olvidar, one of the primary pedagogical considerations must be to determine the students’ linguistic level. In order to work well with the material, we believe it is necessary to have studied Spanish as a foreign language for two years, if the students are supposed to use more than one dimension of the material.

However, it is possible for students in their first year to use the testimonials to get familiar with the sound of the spoken language and also to use the photos for descriptions of pictures, training of vocabulary, etc. Also in the Documentation section all words in each testimonial are listed and there is an analysis of frequencies of word use.

Verbs and pronouns in the transcripts of the 16 testimonies have been revised according to the grammatical rules of La Real Academia Española. This means that some verbs have been changed from singular to plural some from plural to singular and the case of some pronouns has been changed in order to avoid confusion and misunderstandings. These modifications can be noticed, when listening to the testimonies and, at the same time, reading the text.

We hope that you will enjoy working with the materials and will contribute with new exercises with the links to related websites and add new links that could be of use in the future. We also hope that, so the Para Nunca Olvidar Education website will grow and expand as will the world’s knowledge of what happened and is still happening in Guatemala.