Welcome to 'The Class'

One of the ini­tia­tives in El Pun­tAvui TV's am­bi­tious “Eng­lish hour” puts the focus on chil­dren and their learn­ing of Eng­lish. If the pro­gramme aims at pro­vid­ing an Eng­lish-learn­ing en­vi­ron­ment for all and at giv­ing a pres­ence to the Eng­lish lan­guage on TV on a daily basis, we thought that young learn­ers had to have their share: first things first. After con­sul­ta­tions here and there, it was de­cided to pro­duce a se­ries show­ing life in the Eng­lish class­room. We wanted to put cam­eras in the very guts of our pub­lic school sys­tem: a class­room of first year pri­mary school stu­dents (5-6 years old) dur­ing their Eng­lish class. The school is in a work­ing class neigh­bour­hood in Barcelona and the teacher is a pro­fes­sional, en­thu­si­as­tic young Cata­lan who teaches Eng­lish to all the classes in that pri­mary school. We called the se­ries “The Class”.

Each chap­ter of “The Class” records – in a con­densed ver­sion – a par­tic­u­lar ses­sion. With no script, we show what­ever comes out of the in­ter­ac­tion and dy­nam­ics of each class. The focus, though, is on learn­ers and their learn­ing process. The teacher is there, but the cam­era is al­ways on the chil­dren. We want to keep a record, a doc­u­men­tary through­out the school term, of the joys and pains of learn­ing, of the end­less need for rep­e­ti­tion and the sparks of cre­ativ­ity and dis­cov­ery. Hope­fully, the se­ries will also show the na­ture of good teach­ing. We do not pre­tend to sug­gest the virtues of a par­tic­u­lar teach­ing ap­proach or pre­sent a model for teach­ing and learn­ing in a class­room en­vi­ron­ment. But we ex­pect that a num­ber of the nec­es­sary con­di­tions for achiev­ing good teach­ing and good learn­ing will eas­ily be iden­ti­fied by view­ers. Life in the Eng­lish class­room is the main focus of the se­ries, but the doc­u­men­tary will also pro­vide the real con­text to the sit­u­a­tion: the school sur­round­ings, par­ents and neigh­bours around the school build­ing, spe­cial events in the school life, the pass­ing of the sea­sons and so on. All in all we face this risky, am­bi­tious pro­ject with the hope that it will be­come a meet­ing place for view­ers hold­ing dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on the learn­ing process. We hope it will be­come rel­e­vant to stu­dents of Eng­lish (what­ever their age), to pri­mary stu­dents who will have ac­cess to a priv­i­leged mir­ror of life in their class­rooms, to par­ents in­ter­ested in hav­ing in­sights on what goes on in schools, to teach­ers being able to do class­room ob­ser­va­tion from home and ex­plore the na­ture of learn­ing.