Week 4 - Day 26

Hej! Today we had our first lesson of "The Multicultural classroom" (taught by Lilian) which was quite interesting, and it adds onto our Diversity class from Semester 5 very well. We will learn a lot of techniques to actually work with cultural diversity in a classroom.

One of those techniques was the "Me-bag" - And the idea is to bring five items to school which have significant meaning to you, put them in a paper bag, then decorate the bag, and then introduce yourself to your peers using the bag and its contents.

This was my me-bag:


The main point to this exercise is that pupils will find differences, but mainly similarities. For example, in our class, almost everyone had a cellphone, and mp3-player and pictures in their bag.

We then had some time to talk about this in our buzz-groups, and we came to the conclusion that you can alter this method in an endless number of ways, but we especially liked the idea of limiting the items inside to three, because then you'd have to make conscious decisions about the three most important items, and you'd be able to give a more thorough explanation for why you chose these items. This is only really suitable for "older" pupils though.(ie. secondary school)

Another idea we had was to show the contents of a bag to the class, and have them guess who the bag belongs to.

After we discussed our ideas with the other groups, we were split into different groups again to discuss multiculturality in our own home communities. It was pretty interesting, especially because a lot of countries are still dealing with "ghetto-forming" in their major cities.

Our conclusion was simple (and obvious) though: We all like to say we believe in multiculturality and we want to make it happen, but the actual application of it is far from perfect.

One point illustrated this feeling perfectly, for us: What school holidays do our schools give their pupils, and do pupils from every culture accept and adhere to these days?

Aaaanyway, since I figure I should do some English while I'm here as well, I figured I'd ask Lilian if I can sit in on some of the "advanced English" classes, and she said sure! I'll be heading out to Copenhagen tomorrow to participate in a movie workshop etc. - I'm looking forward to it!