The students in Pablo Chignolli’s Spanish 2 classes at Westerville Central High School gathered in the auxiliary gym for their third lesson in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines elements of body movement, martial arts, music, history and culture.
The three-part lesson is part of an education series with Ohio State University’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for Latin American Studies called “Capoeira in the Classroom.” WCHS is the first Westerville school to host the workshop, which launched this year and is available to all schools throughout the region.
For Chignolli, the lesson is part of a broader effort to honor Black History Month by teaching students about Afro-Latinos, their culture and national identity in Brazil.
“Culture is a very important component in a world language class for students to be able to fully communicate and to meaningfully interact with members of the target language,” he said.
Last week, students learned about the history of capoeira, how it was derived from enslaved Africans brought to Brazil and how it became a means of breaking the bonds of slavery — both physically and mentally.
They also explored the various instruments that produce the unique sounds in capoeira: berimbau (a musical bow), pandeiro (a type of tambourine), atabaque (a tall hand drum), agogô (bells), reco-reco (a notched tube played with a stick) and caxixi (a percussive instrument consisting of a closed basket filled with seeds).
During Tuesday’s lesson, students launched into different capoeira techniques, from practicing the rhythmic footwork of its fundamental move, the “ginga,” to rolling their bodies in cartwheels.
Julio Beltran Tapia, a local capoeira teacher and a staff member at the Center for Latin American Studies, and Leila Vieira, the Portuguese language coordinator with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, lead the workshop. They created the lesson as a way to explore Brazilian culture and foster interest in the Portuguese language, which has more than 200 million native speakers and serves as the official language in 10 countries and territories.
Tapia and Vieira hosted the Capoeira in the Classroom workshop for K-12 educators, which Chignolli attended over the summer. The two reached out to Chignolli to see if they could bring their workshop to his students, offering an interactive, hands-on experience for a topic Chignolli already covers in class.
As part of the workshop, students played a variety of instruments as a group and learned songs performed in a capoeira circle. On Tuesday, Tapia demonstrated a variety of capoeira moves, encouraged students to pair up for practice defensive moves and ran them through various tumbling techniques. And he explained the purpose behind the constant state of motion: to prevent them being an easy target or getting caught.
Freshman Rowan South had never heard of capoeira until Chignolli’s class. He dove into the workshop, volunteering to play the berimbau in class and throwing himself into the ginga and other movements.
“The fact that you can experience new cultures in (a class) period — it’s just fun and new.”