School practice part 2

We spent our second week of practice in Hoptrup in the efterskole. We stayed there from Monday to Thursday all day and all night long. Doing so we got a great insight into the life in a boarding school - another experience I had never before...
Compared to the VUC this was more my idealized teaching atmosphere: the students had a similar level of knowledge and treated their teachers more like a friend than like an educator. I had a nice time sitting at the students' tables during the meals talking to them. The fact that the school has a profile focusing on theatre, dance and music manifested itself not only in the students' outgoing behaviour but also in the organisation of the lessons and free time activities. On the one hand this was great because it left much space for creativity and freedom. On the other hand the rather unorganised chemistry lessons for example made me a bit sad because they did not really arouse the students' curiosity and interest. In my personal opinion this was a pity.

I think Kate and I did a good job teaching our lessons together. I had never tried team teaching before but during the two weeks I really enjoyed sharing responsilbilities with another teacher. It was an important experience for me to have somebody supporting me or to support during the activities.
We did mostly creative activities during this week. For example we had a creative writing exercise with a 9th grade class or played "Activity" (miming, drawing, explaining) with a 10th grade class.

I definitely enjoyed the time in Hoptrup and I was quite sad when we had to leave on Thursday. I would consider these two week to be the weeks I learned the most during my stay in Denmark. Not really factual knowledge but many small things about my own teaching skills, other teaching methods, interpersonal relations, "living and learning together" ;-) and many more.

School practice part 1

During our first week of practice Kate and I stayed at the VUC, the adult education centre, in Haderslev. We observed and also taught in the elementary courses (corresponding the 9th grade in public schools) as well as in the advanced courses (corresponding the 10th grade in public schools). Although the students were devided into these two levels there were striking differences in their abilities to speak English. I can't say much about their writing skills but probably there might be a similar situation. Another interesting impression was the difference in age among the students. Some of them were just 18, other almost 70 years old. And they all learned together in the same group. I had never seen members of different generations working together so close before in the sense of being educated. So this was a very special experience for me though I'm still not sure whether I like the idea or not.
I liked the way how the teachers involved us in the classroom activities and I really apprechiated the openness and curiosity of the students. They seemed to be very interested in what Kate and I were doing in Denmark and why. So we had to answer the same questions over and over again, but still it was always a different communicative situation and that made the whole story exciting again. We also learned much about being spontanous and changing plans within a short time. Sometimes students would have questions and problems that would not really fit into our plans. On other ocasions the teachers changed their plans spontaniously so we also had to reorganize ourselves.

After all it was a great week for me because it was something completely different compared to my practice times in Germany in ordinary public schools. But still I would probably not want to teach in such an institution because I prefer more homogenous learning groups with more similar states of knowledge.

Our even more international week...

Our bunch of seven erasmus students was enriched by eight other European students during this week. Together we lived through a well-composed programme under the headline "language and culture". We experienced a mixture of courses about cultural differences, differences in the educational systems and nursery rhymes paired with school visits, an excursion to the Viking town of Ribe and a "Eurovision song contest". Because we often talked and discussed the topic of stereotypes, why we have them and what we can do with them or to get rid of them, I chose stereotypes also as the topic for my portfolio of this week. This is what I brought together:

We are different - we are same

Those are the drawings the students had to make about a person from another country. In most cases the pictures matched with what people from the countries pictured could tell us about their countries. But in some cases one could make out differences between the stereotypes and reality.

Stereotypes (an acrostic)



S tronger than our parents

T ogether as one

E ager to learn

R eady to make a new start

E verything is possible

O vercome boundaries

T ravel the world

Y ou have the choice

P roduce new ideas

E nrich the world

S tay true to yourself

This acrostic came to my mind when I thought about the last six weeks. For me it contains some different points of depatures from which we could start to grow together on a global scale. I learned a lot from the others regarding behaviour, communication, culture, understanding and many other things. I feel more as a European citizen now than when I came here.

Mr. Ifference and Mr. Ame (an allegory)

Samuel Ame was new in town. He didn’t know anybody and sometimes he wanted to be somewhere else. He had travelled the world and seen many ifferent places and many ifferent faces. He was used to be new somewhere, but in this town it felt ifferent. He felt like a stranger and he didn’t like it.
David Ifference had lived in the ame town since the day of his birth. He had never left his town and he had never seen something else than the ame old places and the ame old faces.

One day S. Ame and D. Ifference met in the street. They looked at each other. D. Ifference looked into a friendly and curious face but S. Ame looked into a petrified and hostile face. S. Ame said: “I’m new in town and I would like to talk to you. My name is Samuel Ame.” D. Ifference was surprised because normally strangers didn’t talk to him. But he just said: “My name is David Ifference. I think we have nothing in common, we are not the ame. So what should we talk about?”

S. Ame was puzzled by this remark and thought about it for a while. Just in the moment when D. Ifference turned around to go away he said: “We are not as ifferent as we might seem to be. You are right when you say that we celebrate ifferent holidays and we have ifferent traditions. We might have ifferent opinions and ifferent values. But we live in the ame town and we buy our food in the ame shop. We read the ame newspaper and do the ame sport. We send our children to the ame school and work in the ame factory. And we stand here talking to each other in the ame language.”

Now it was D. Ifference who had to think about what had been said. After a while the expression on his face softened and a shyly smile could be seen. He said: “You know, we both stand on ifferent sides of the road but if we both take one step towards each other the distance would not be that great any more. Maybe you should change your name, what about Samuel Imilar?”

S. Ame answered: “You’re right about the road. And I will change my name if you change your name, too, what about David Iverse?”

S. Ame and D. Ifferent agreed on this and walked away as S. Imilar and D. Iverse.

This allegory is definitely too much coloured in black and white but maybe we can find at least a small piece of ourselves in these characters.


I'm absolutely aware of the fact that the world will not change within days but I like to believe in the possibility that human beings are able to live together in peace and with respect for each other on the one hand but also openness and curiosity on the other hand. For me growing together in Europe does not mean to forget about national culture or to deny national history because these things belong to us and make us special. It rather means to accept and understand other cultures and values that may seem strange to us at first glance but sometimes are not that different from our own if we sacrifice some time to get to know them.

On Friday we continued our discussion about Popper and his theories. Popper’s approach to alter the historical way of knowledge acquiring also implemented a change in the social hierarchy proposed by Plato (philosophers at the top of a pyramide). In Popper’s view democracy was not to elect a government but to have the possibility to get rid of a bad government. This could only work if the respective leaders subordinated their own interests to the interests of the society. The education of pupils therefore has to serve the aim of providing the possibility for the pupils to stay within the “democratic circle” discussed a few lessons ago. Hence we should train pupils in scientific working.

The concluding discussion about Popper's scheme of the human mind should again underline the differences between traditional learning and modern approaches. While traditional teaching methods often concentrate on learning the modern problem-solving approaches invclude parts of all three areas (learning, storing, practising). But it also warns against always using the same strategies because in this case nothing would be learned.

In the second part of the lesson we were asked to come up with problem-solving-exercises that we could use in our subjects. Since I had been taught about problem-solving teaching methods in chemistry lessons it was no problem to create a task according to Popper's approach of falsifying theories. I developed a lesson about acids and bases, the pH-value and indicators. I used a similar one during my school practical course last year. In my opinion it was a quite good example but I can also understand that my classmates were a bit overburdened and maybe bored. Well, nevermind...

Shall we dance?...

Oh what a pleasure! Didn't I always dream about standing in a gym with many other more or less talented people learning how to dance? No, not really... Well, we tried our best to follow Lone's instructions on Wednesday morning to learn traditional dances, some kind of disco fox or whatever and a European tango version. For the limited talent most of us are featured with we did a pretty good job. Only the tango was a bit too much for me. But anyway, thanks a lot for the dance, Tim...

In the afternoon it was our turn to first create a dance and afterwards teach it to the others. We were divided into two groups: Manu, Charlotte and Iva made up a country style dance matching with Shania Twain's song "Up!". Tim, Kate and me created a dance for Ronan Hardiman's "Dance above the rainbow". Watch and enjoy it!

Cogito, ergo sum...

Monday afternoon we met with Torbjörn again for a rather theoretical lesson. We were presented the philosophical roots of Popper's way of thinking starting with Plato and his "cave" tale. The guiding question in traditional philosophy: "How can we reach the truth (or also Truth when refering to the one and only truth)?" was answered by Plato with the assumption that truth can't be found when looking at the world. One of Plato's students, Aristotle, devided truth into three parts:

1. episteme (logical truth (scientific truth))
2. techne (used knowledge (technology, art,...)
3. phonesis (wisdom to make good choices (behaviour))

With Christianity the traditional philosophy lost its importance due to God's absolute truth. Only with the renaissance, reformation and enlightenment the absolute truth of the church was again put to the question. Two different schools of philosophy developed out of this primordial soup: the French school (Descartes) going from theory to observation (deduction) on the one hand and the English school (Locke) going from observation to theory (induction). The latter was challenged by Hume who stated that for example not all swans are white.
Popper finally furnished a new approach. He answered the traditional guiding question with a denial. In his opinion we can't reach the truth, or at least we wouldn't know we are there. His new guiding question was then: "What mistakes do we make and how can we avoid them?" His idea of teaching deriving from this question focused on the pupil comming up with a theory and trying to falsify it. He stated that criticising theories is an important step in the education of innovative and democratic pupils. In this context it is necessary to mention that inductive and deductive teaching-learning-processes do not take part seperated from each other. Whenever the teaching is inductive (student-centred) the learning process is deductive (problem based learning). One the other hand, when the teaching is deductive (monologue) the learning is inductive (observation -> theorie).
The problem with Pooper's theorie is that he also talks about three different worlds:

world 1: everything you can touch (e.g. books, tables, pictures,...)
world 2: the world actual persons perseive it (personal impressions)
world 3: general knowledge of mankind (e.g. what's written in the books)

Pupils can only get access to world three when guided by teachers. This indicates one of the paradoxes of the Popperian philosophy. It is impossible to let the pupils come up with their own theories when they need guidance to world three at the same time. The solution then has to be a mixture of teaching-learning-practices.

European school traditions...

On Monday we were supposed to meet Tove Heidemann. But something was wrong in the schedule so we got an extra hour to get rid of our morning fatigue. Which was to be honest not the worst idea. But finally we started into our lecture about different European school traditions with learning about the European Commission's goal to indicate European core values and a common history and culture. On the other hand we learned about historical and geographical borderlines, e.g. the "limes" (lat.: borderline farest away from Rome) along the Rhine and the Danube, deviding Europe into a northern and a southern part. We came across differences in culture, society, religion, and so on. As these were more generalized assumptions we afterwards turned towards the rather local level, i.e. the schools in the different countries. Tove presented us the theory of Edgar Schein who seperated the organization of school culture into three levels:

Level 1: Artefacts (what you can observe): e.g. appearance, equipment, cantine, subjects, interaction, behaviour
Level 2: Exposed values (what you can explain): e.g. rationalities, reasons for organization, aims
Level 3: Basic assumptions (what you cannot observe / explain): e.g. interpretations of values and artefacts, main tasks, how is "learning" looked upon

After this rather theoretical part we made a short journey to France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Belgium (encyclopedic approach), Great Britain (humanistic approach) and Germany, The Natherlands and Scandinavia (naturalistic approach). The data presented was taken from the book "Britain and a single market Europe" by Martin McLean but unfortunately almost 20 years old. Therefor it has to be critically questioned whether these data is still valid today or whether things have changed. The data was as follows:

encyclopedic: Uniformity (knowledge about as many issues as possible, centralized curriculum and tests), rationality (no emotions, logical way of thinking, France, science, history and philosophy), elitism (competition rather than cooperation, universities and grand ecoles)

humanistic: high moral standard (ideal of the gentleman, empathy, sense of duty, brotherhood), individualism (close contact between teachers and students, individual learning speed), specialisation (choice of 2-3 subjects to focus on at the age of 16)

naturalistic: community needs (streaming of pupils, every job has its function and own dignity, hard work, economical behaviour), imitating of parents' way of socialising (parents have much influence, learning by imitation, process as important as product, skills-oriented)

Many of those values and strategies may have disappeared or been altered over the years. Thus it's difficult to actually work with this data. But nevertheless it indicates that there have been differences between countries and their concepts of education. In how far these differences still exist could be an interesting topic to do research in.

A very controversial question came up towards the end of our meeting: there are schools for pupils with special needs in Denmark but no (or very few) schools for highly gifted pupils. What is the reason for that? Do not pupils with special talents or above average intelligence also deserve an adequate education? We again mentioned the "jante" law - which I personally think to be a questionable value after reading the ten rules - but is it a sufficient explanation to "suppress" talent? In my opinion talent should be advanced. Not to educate a superior elite of pupils but to help gifted pupils to use their talents to support and improve the society and to become socially capable citizens.

save the world...

On Friday we started off at 8.15 with our citizenship and globalisation course. Originally Birgitte wanted to sing some songs with us just for warming up our brains. Most of us were pretty tired and didn't really look forward to working ;-) .However we couldn't find any English songs in the songbook so we skipped the singing part and went directly to work. For homework we had prepared a short presentation about the influence of our educational systems on becoming citizens. That's what I wrote down during the presentations:We had discussed the introduction of citizenship as a subject in Denmark before, so in this respect we didn't learn anything new. But it was interesting to how the different educational systems try to compensate their "lack" of a subject citizenship. In all out countries we have aspects of citizenship included - more or less overtly expressed - in other subjects (hidden goals, cross curriculum,...).

The second part of the the lesson we spent discussing. We started with the challenges we consider to be some of the biggest today, but we soon found ourselves amid a discussion about the caricature argument, different worldviews, religious vs. democratic values and so on. During the discussion Birgitte showed us some of the caricatures that caused the crisis in 2006 which experiences a revival those days. Some of us had quite opposing opinions about these caricatures, about why they were made and about the reactions they caused. I learned that they were made because there had been increasing problems with islamic fundamentalists in Denmark. The caricatures were meant to make people aware of the problem. Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten's culture editor, said about this On September 30, 2005:
"The modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where you must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule. It is certainly not always attractive and nice to look at, and it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that is of minor importance in the present context. [...] we are on our way to a slippery slope where no-one can tell how the self-censorship will end. That is why Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten has invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him. [...]"
A bit later (February 19, 2006) he also explained that
"The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims."

Personally I know that these are caricatures and that they are supposed to show contents in a highly exaggerated way. But one the other hand I ask myself if it's the right way to draw a person with a bomb in his head and the Shahada (the Islamic creed) on top of it (I don't know for sure if it's really the shahada because I'm not that good in Arabic, but to me it looks very similar). In my opinion that is an insult to all Muslims and I can actually understand that it caused indignation within the Islamic world. But I'm certain that this again is not a reason to start riots and violence resulting in more than 100 deaths and setting fire to Danish Embassies and storming European buildings.

We talked for a long time about the different values within societies and if one societiy can assert a claim to superiority to others. Another important question was whether democratic values are more important than religious beliefs. I think not all of us were really interested in these topics but to me it was quite important to discuss these matters. In the end we didn't reach a consensus and we certainly didn't save the world that day but after all I found the lesson very informative and interesting (I think more than any other lesson before during the last weeks).

I arranged a small list of links you can visit when you are interested in the discussion. The first one is a link to the twelve caricatures published on September 30, 2005. The second one is a wikipedia article about the caricature argument (that's also where my quotes are taken from). The third one in an article about the shahada.

http://www.citybeat.de/news/2070231/die-12-mohammed-karikaturen.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahadah

digging deeper...

On Thursday we met Torbjørn again and evaluated about our experiences and observations at the Hoptrup efterskole on Monday. We all had recognized the freedom of the pupils, the friendly relationship between teachers and pupils and the homelike atmosphere in the school. Afterwards Torbjørn introduced us to the theoretical approach towards planing a curriculum by Alistair Ross. Ross distinguishes between three different ways of planing a curriculum:

1. classical humanist academic way (content and subjects in focus, teacher as instructor)
2. utilitalian way (objectives in focus, teacher as guide)
3. progressive way (process in focus, teacher as equal partner)

How intensively these ways are followed or if there are mixtures in between the ways differs from country to country. Our task was it then to make up tree diagrams about our own educational systems and the Danish (according to our observations and what we've learned so far) one. These are the tree diagrams I came up with:








We presented our results to each other and concluded that there are approaches in all countries to work more learner-centred. We also talked about the political dimensions of this paradigm and the relationships between the three ways.

The second part of the lesson was about citizenship again. Torbjørn presented the book "The open society and its enenmies" by Karl Popper to us. Popper deals in his book indirectly with the threats to society like nationalism and communism. He uses the works of Plato about collectivism and altruism on the one and individualism and egoism on the other hand. But unlike Plato he allows cross-connections between these expressions and denotes them with political attributes.

In a second step we added extreme formations of these political/social ideas which are located somehow outside the society.

For me it was interesting to hear that even Plato dealed with the problem of threats to a society (so it's not a modern phenomenon at all) and that political attributes like "right" or "left" just refer to the historical distribution of the members of parliament seen from the speaker's perspective.

At the end we tried to apply Poppers diagram to the different ways of planing a curriculum. Here the circle closed.

"You're so meeeeeaaaaaaan..."

Our music class on Wednesday started with lecture by Flemming Rasmussen about the influence of art and aesthetics on learning processes. It was a bit difficult for me to really get the point of the lecture. At the beginning I thought that he was of the opinion that aesthetics and pupils freedom to act, perform and produce art are more important than the actual learning (mathematics, vocabulary,...). It took some time and some more explanations for me to understand that aesthetics should only work as transport media for the content. Well, now I have an idea about that and I must say that it could possibly be a good way of teaching. On the other hand we already include games, role plays, presentations in our lessons which can - in my opinion - be seen as aesthetic learning. But maybe we should strengthen this part even more. I will have to think about it a bit more, but it's another idea/impression I will probably check out when I do my next practice in Germany.

In the second part of our lesson we presented the performances and posters we had made in connection with a piece of pipe music Else Marie had given us at the end of our meeting. We came up with three different stories and three different interpretations of the music. What they had in common was some kind of argument. Kate and Sylvie performed the argument of a wife and a husband. The husband had forgotten their ten year's anniversary and she was upset and crestfallen. Tim, Manu and Charlotte presented a princess (good job, Tim!) asking her father for permission to marry the prince of her heart, but he wanted her to marry the one he had chosen. Last but not least Iva and me performed our shopping scene of a couple. You can watch the movie if you like. In case that the dialogue is too fast or you don't understand everything look at Iva's blog, she has the text in written form.

After our presentations we repeated the songs we learned three weeks ago. Maybe we can teach some of them to the international students coming to Haderslev in week 11. Sing with me: "Hand and shoulders, knees and toes..."