Learning by Immersion

Teaching Spanish to children in Santa Cruz was possibly the last place Lisset Orozco thought she’d end up. With her degree in political science and work in rural Mexico on literacy, Lisset planned to go to Italy for graduate school.
But then she fell in love surfing in Puerto Escondido with a man from Santa Cruz, a town she couldn’t even find on the map. When she arrived, she didn’t speak a word of English. So she learned it the old-fashioned way, by asking, “How do you say…?”

“I really believe in immersion—I did it when I was 33!” Lisset laughs.
She has to believe in immersion to do her job. Lisset runs Spanish Nature Club, which offers preschool, afterschool, summer, and adult programs. The concept is simple: get out in nature, speak Spanish.

But getting from idea to realization of her business wasn’t quick. When Lisset first brought up the idea to her nannying clients, they told her they wanted something indoors. In fact, she says, many of them told her they thought being outdoors was too dangerous.

Ironically, it was being outdoors that helped her business take off. When the pandemic hit, Lisset was faced, like many people, with the question of how to make a living. And parents suddenly considered the outdoors much safer for their kids than indoors. Lisset went from two children to a multifaceted program in a couple of years.

Her approach is simple but it is based on sound learning principles that she brought from her social work background and also from raising her two daughters, now teenagers. You can learn a new language, Lisset says, “If you like it, if you are curious, and if you aren’t shy and don’t block yourself.”

Being in nature allows children to transition to a quieter, more open state of curiosity. “We can spend twenty minutes observing how long it takes for a banana slug to get to the other side of a leaf!”

Lisset says that the children absorb Spanish without thinking about studying a language. They’re just asking questions and talking about ideas they get now that they are away from the rush—and the technology—that dominates their everyday lives. “I feel like this society is losing the capacity to enjoy the little things.”
Teenagers, Lisset says with a laugh, are another thing altogether. “Teenagers don’t want to talk!”

As the mom of teens, Lisset enjoys helping her teen students relax into a nonjudgmental environment. “I like when they realize that they still have an inner child in them. They still want to climb trees.”

It’s a long way from working on social justice and planning on graduate school in Italy to teaching children in Santa Cruz. But Lisset sees her work as deeply important.

“I feel like I am planting a little seed, which is either curiosity for a second language, or the seed of just being able to enjoy nature as it is. I feel like I’m doing something good for humanity.”

For more information:
VisitSpanishNatureClub.com to learn about programs for children and adults.
Listen to a podcast of this interview at Babblery.com.