Andrea Asali

Drawing from my experience as a writer, translator, and musician, I lead creative language arts workshops that engage participants in the ideas of different cultures. By exploring perspectives from other languages, times, and spaces, we reflect on our own personal reality while honing communication skills and styles.

Translation is an exercise in pulling stories from one language and recreating them in a second language. After translating over a dozen books, and writing a few of my own, I am eager to join students in exploring how ideas are framed by the nuances and language surrounding them. As a musician active in several local ensembles, I use rhythm and melody in the classroom to draw students in and create a space for self-expression.

Whether you’re a social studies, communications, music, or world languages teacher, let’s talk about how we can use creative language arts to encourage your students to become wordsmiths, world explorers, and advocates for cultural diversity.

Andrea Asali is available for full or part-time residencies.

Book a Program with this Artist

Explore: Literary Arts, Storytelling, Creative Writing, French, Playwriting, Poetry, Spanish, Writing

Pricing:

Individual workshop and performance prices are determined by each artist. Please contact us for performance and workshop pricing for a particular artist. Visit our Pricing page for other pricing information.

  • Colorado Song Laboratory: Where History Meets Tomorrow

    Residency for grades 7th through 9th

    Students explore the work of Colorado composers while developing their own songwriting skills. Participants start the residency by attending a concert featuring songs written by Denver composers from 1890-1960, and then engage in a conversation with the musicians on how music can reflect everyday reality and address larger social issues. Over the course of the next three workshops, participants are coached on aspects of rhythm, harmony, melody, and message while writing their own original songs. In the final workshop, students’ original musical compositions are performed with/by professional musicians and recorded.

  • World Languages Poetry Residency

    Residency for grades 3rd through 12th

    Students are immersed in poems and languages from around the world
    Residency, for grades 3-12
    Residency activities include:
    – the creation of a World Languages Poetry Corner featuring profiles of different poets from around the world alongside translations of their work.
    – a Community Poetry Wall, where participants are encouraged to “fill in the blanks” of missing lines from translations of famous poems from around the world.
    – Daily Interactive Readings, during which participants are asked to create color sketches of what they think a poem is about as they hear it read aloud in the original language. The translation is subsequently presented and compared to our color impressions.
    Residency-related workshops present specific themes and types of poetry from around the world, and engage participants in creating their own poetry inspired by the translations presented.

  • Arabic Calligraphy Workshop

    Workshop for grades 6th through 10th

    Students learn about the Arabic language while gaining hands-on experience with artistic Arabic calligraphy. Students are introduced to the Arabic alphabet, learn to write their names using Arabic letters, and view a slideshow on Arabic calligraphy. We discuss how calligraphy uses proportion, geometry and stylistic devices to convey subtext and additional meaning to a phrase. Students then use these stylistic and mathematic devices to create their own calligraphic drawings using Arabic words.

  • Science…In Other Words

    Workshop for grades 3rd through 10th

    Students consolidate science concepts using world language vocabulary. This workshop is customized to support themes taught in science class, such as the solar system, photosynthesis, changes of state. Students learn words in a world language for terminology specific to the selected theme. Using these world language terms in individual and group activities, students consolidate their comprehension of science concepts by acting out these concepts using two different languages.

  • Fairytale French / Fairytale Spanish

    Workshop for grades 8th through 12th

    Students use translation to enhance world language comprehension.
    We open with a discussion on translation and how/where translators and interpreters work. Students then watch an animated cartoon of a fairytale in French/Spanish, and are given an abridged copy of the story in the original language. In groups, students translate small portions of the text, then trade and edit the translation of another group. We discuss the challenges of translating figurative language from one language to another, and compare how ideas are expressed differently in French/Spanish as compared to English.