IN A HEARTBEAT (JONATAN MANSILLA)

This story is aimed to students of second year of Secondary Education and the technique used is Story Seeding, specifically constructing a story from an image and constructing a story from story items.

We first show the students a screenshot from the Short film and we start a conversation about the setting of the video just to engage the students into a conversation.

Once the students are introduced to the activity, we ask them to create a story using some story items as for example: “a busy high school, shattered, bump into, heart”

The following step is comparing the students’ creations, emphasising the vocabulary that may be useful or new to the group. This step should encourage their creativity, but the teacher must be prepared to fill in the gaps in the stories, to help the students to complete them using questions and to guide the process in general terms.

Once we have completed this process, we play part of the video, but we stop just before the ending. At this point, once again, we ask the students to make a prediction of the ending. There is no wrong answer here, we just encourage conversation even among the students.

The final step is playing the end of the video. We present the students with some questions in relation to the story played: Have you ever felt different? How does the main character feel? Have you ever done something that could make someone feel ashamed of who they are?

This activity is an opportunity for debate and for developing tolerance among students.