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..."
Tuesday and Friday was Danish time again. We tried out more playful ways of learning a language. On Tuesday we trained our vocabulary knowledge with cards that contained words on the left side and images on the right side. We now had to connect the words with the matching images 
with a red twine and could control ourselves on the basis of painted lines on the back of the cards. The second task was some kind of memory game with images on the one and words on the other side of the cards. That was great fun! And I learned some new expressions and words.
On Friday we cut out personal pronouns and subjects, verbs and adverbial complements from a sheet of paper. Afterwards we composed different sentences. And we had an argument about who is "jumping on the moon" ;-)
On Monday afternoon we visited the Hoptrup efterskole, a private boarding school in a village near Haderslev. The school accommodates round about 80 pupils aged 15 and 16. They usually stay there for one year in the 9th or 10th grade. The main focus is on theatre, dance and music. These are also the topics the 
pupils can chose from for their afternoon classes.
We had a nice guided tour by two of the pupils and I think all of us liked the atmosphere and the possibilities the pupils have to arrange their free time.
After the tour we joined the English class. The lesson started with a role play in which the pupils should act out various situations in pairs(arguments, shopping tours etc.) they had made up before. Tim and me joined the "acting crew" and it was a lot of fun, especially because most pupils were not shy at all to perform in front of the class (well, it' s a school with an aesthetic profile, so...). Then the class was split up into three groups and we discussed with them. They had many questions, for example why we wanted to become teachers, 
what our impressions of Denmark were and so on. It was a nice discussion because they were not afraid to speak and seemed to be very interested. The last part of the lesson was a summary of the previous teaching unit. The topic had been South Africa and the pupils were asked to design a mindmap and present their results to the whole class. It was again quite impressive to see the pupils use the English language naturally.
Well, the next part of our observation day contained the dance lessons. I was a bit afraid that we would 
also have to participate in these lessons (well, not exactly "have to", but you know, when you are asked politely...) but we didn't have to, phew! The first hour we joined the class more oriented towards techniques and the accurate performance of movements. The second hour we spent with the more creative class. The pupils had to listen to music and make up their own performances according to more or less strict orders. We left the school at five in the afternoon and went back to Haderslev. It was a very nice and impressive afternoon and I could easily imagine to do my practice at that school, but it's still too soon to make a decision about this because some more school visits are to come soon.
The guiding question: "What is intercultural competence?" lead through our Monday's course with Jette. As a preparation we had to read an article about the teacher's intercultural competence. It was approximately as hard to understand as our homework for the citizenship course since it was a rather theoretical approach. Working with the text in a more practical way during the course helped a lot to understand the ideas expressed in the text. Defining intercultural competence as gaining knowledge
and abilities concerning your own culture and intercultural learning as learning from people from different cultural backgrounds inavitably lead to the question: "What is culture?" A possible answer to that question was furnished by the onion diagram by Geert Hofstede. Symbols include sights, royal families, buildings, landscapes, flags,... Heroes are persons (dead or alive) who are popular in their own country and who become also known in other countries (e.g. sportsmen/women, politicians, actors, singers, models,...). Rituals could be for example greetings, the celebration of public holidays,... Values finally are freedom, equality, emanzipation,... The onion diagramme shows how the culture of a society 
is devided into subcategories. The importance and influence of this culture on individuals Hofstede tries to make clear in his mental programme. He distinguishes between inherited vs. learned on the one and universal vs. specific areas on the other hand. At the end of the lesson we returned to the text and had a closer look at the three dimensions of the teacher's intercultural competence:
1. cognitive: knowledge about the world, education, media
2. behaviourial: body language, clothing, rituals, understanding
3. affective: emotional base, self-respect, empathy, curiosity
On Wednesday we met at noon with the cooking class to prepare an international buffet. The variety of different dishes ranged amongst others from czech potato soup, pancakes and fruit dumplings over German-Danish hot dogs and Belgian mashed potatoes with sausages, chocolate mousse and waffles to Sushi and smorebrod compositions. The teamwork within the multicultural groups went well and even the cleaning and washing up turned out to be unproblematic. It was quite a challenge to have that many people in the kitchen but in the and one had to say that "many hands make light work".
On Wednesday it was art time. We met with Dorthe Rizzi in the art room and for warming up we had some coffee and tea. Then we went to business: 
We should produce drawings of each other in only two minutes (so we actually hadn't time to think about what we were doing). Most of the drawings didn't look like the persons pictured but we had some fun and lost at least a bit of our fears for the pen and paper. Afterwards we were told to draw ourselves, sitting in front of a mirror. This task wasn't designed to take more than five minutes but I somehow developed some kind of connection to my drawing that made me keep on drawing (quite strange situation since I hadn't drawn for years,
but I just couldn't stop...). I was quite happy that Dorthe didn't have something to object about my wish to continue. Regrettably, I missed the other tasks that my classmates had to work on (painting on mirrors, printing,...) but the picture I produced made up for that. It doesn't really look like me completely but you can maybe find some similarities or at least attest to the fact that it shows a human person...
On Tuesday morning we presented aspects of our home countries to each other. Tim, Charlotte and Manu started with Belgian history, politics, food and prominent persons. They drew a very nice and true to scale ;-) map on the blackboard to illustrate the problems and conflicts between Flanders and Wallonia. The also told us about an ongoing discussion about a possible disunion of both parts. Kate, Iva and Sylvie presented the Czech Republic with an amazing powerpoint presentation. They had included a vast number of pictures and told us a lot about landscape, sights, buildings, popular culture and so on. I really regret that I probably missed some information because they had made a great effort to deliver a diversified presentation with plenty of important aspects. My presentation concluded the lesson. I started with a short part about geography and politics but since I didn't want to go into detail about history and politics, I rather concentrated on what's really important in life: traffic signs (just kidding, it was a part of the presentation, but not the most important one). I finished my contribution with a personal estimation of what it means to be German and showed the TV spot "Du bist Deutschland" ("You are Germany") which had been aired before and during the FIFA Worldcup 2006. (search on youtube.com: Du bist Deutschland english subtitles)
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.
At the end we tried to apply Poppers diagram to the different ways of planing a curriculum. Here the circle closed.
