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!