Iqbal

Rhea’s goal of helping children to develop a social conscience that takes them out of the smallness of quotidian existence generates a fascinating grade 4/5 project based on the life of Iqbal Masih. This amazing child, whose life story is the subject of D'Adamo’s novel Iqbal, is sold into slavery, escapes to become an international activist and is assassinated before reaching puberty. Rhea and Farah guide the children, a number of whom are in special education, and as in the school generally, most are at some stage of learning English as a second language, through a panorama of embodied meaning-making modes, including reading and rewriting text in English, weaving mini-carpets, play-acting the narrative in dance sequences, and creating a DVD of their performed shadow play of Iqbal’s life. This eclectic, innovative project concludes with a collaborative multilingual recitation of selected international rights of the child, which class members have researched and translated into their home languages. The juxtaposed recitations are scrolled as surtitles in English providing an excellent example of how communicative modes can be stacked to accommodate linguistic pluralism. The collaborative performance brings to life and values the richness of individual students’ community language knowledge.