[:it]by Elisa Lucchesi and Igor Tavilla

As you probably know, CLIL stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning.

But what is CLIL in pragmatic terms?
CLIL methodology does not consist in teaching a subject in a foreign language, e.g. English, but through the language.

It means that CLIL methodology involves innovative educational strategies – such as multimodal approach, cooperative-learning, videos, practical activities – which radically change our traditional way of teaching.

This is easy to say but hard to put in practice, because, as you can see, it is not just a question of learning English.
First of all we need to reset didactics and rethink education.

How to teach history in CLIL methodology? was the specific topic of the lesson we took in Prato on Wednesday 11th November.
Umberto Baldocchi, teacher in History and Philosophy at the Liceo linguistico “Vallisneri” in Lucca, now retired, gave us an example of a CLIL lesson in History.

We started from the following question: “What was really 1968?”. Prof. Baldocchi shortly explained us that 1968 was a turning point in the XXth century history. But the evaluation of this important event can be quite different, depending on the viewer’s perspective.

In order to show it, Prof. Baldocchi submitted to us a very interesting group activity. It consisted in making a comparison between two popular songs from the sixties: The times They are a-Changin composed by Bob Dylan in 1964, and Revolution released on 1968 by the Beatles.

After having read both of the texts of the songs, we had to underline the key-words and focus on their logical subject and semantic areas.
The differences which came out were very significant.

While Bob Dylan presents the change in a sort of biblical way, as a destiny that nobody can stop, the Beatles are much more critical about the so called revolution, describing it as a violent process acted by a minority of fanatical people.

In the end, Prof. Baldocchi stressed that while 1968 started in the U.S.A. as a non-violent movement which involved a lot of people fighting for extending civil rights to black people and protesting against the Vietnam war, in Europe, it was much more ideological, and it dealt with a lot of strikes and urban riots.

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