Well, it's not REALLY 11 hours, but I was at school from 09.00 'till 20.00 regardless. I had a 2 hour break in-between classes. Next week however, I will have no breaks as I'll have three sessions back-to-back. I'm NOT looking forward to it!
Although, in a way, I am. I'm really enjoying Lilian's English class, as it gives me a chance to interact with a lot of Danish students I normally wouldn't encounter.
They are a "test year" for a CLIL-style teaching course, so all their classes are in English, and even though I was already experiencing that in the Erasmus module, it's cool to see it's being used in an actual class, not just a temporary one.
The ages in the group vary immensely, but that's okay, that just adds to the input we can bounce off each other. Buzzgroups are key in Lilian's class, which is something I'm not REALLY used to anymore. (since my English class in Belgium consisted of 5 people last semester, which basically meant we were a constant buzzgroup ;) )
In Lilian's class, we're planning an English event day for a group of 56 8th graders who are coming to Blaagaard/KDAS next week. I'm actually actually really excited to realise that I have some didactical knowledge in me, and I enjoy bouncing ideas off first years. (I know that sounds so cocky, but it's not meant that way, I'm just really psyched that I retained some of the material we saw in Belgium as an automatism!)
Anyway! Like I said, buzzgroups! In our buzzgroups, we had to think of ideas for activities, at first just thinking on our own, and then Lilian gradually gave us tips to finetune our ideas, or come up with new ones. (For example, she gave us a list of "possible audiences" to which we should tune our activity, like "the hyperactive pupil", "the introvert pupil", "Barack Obama", ...) - And then we gathered all of our ideas (on post-its) on a window, and we 'buzzed' some more.
During this four hour class, we took various "brain breaks" to rest our brains, and some groups also did a presentation on American culture, which is of course pretty much the same as we did back in Belgium in our first (UK) and second (USA) year. Although they didn't use the same book, and their themes were quite different from ours.
So yeah, English was interesting, I'm looking forward to next week's session!
During the lunch break, I met up with some of my Visual Culture group, and we decided our first task is ready to be seen by the public, you can find our work here.
After lunch, we had Globalisation & Professional change, which started off with (yet another) change of programme. We started off with Lilian going back to some of the social models we already saw during the first weekend (and in my case this morning too) and we discussed culture, stereotypes etc etc
We were given some nationalities, and were told to find typical things for those people to do. For example, Italians are playboys, they use a lot of body language, ... while the Japanese are very polite, ... etc etc
Then when we looked at it more closely, we ""realised"" that all of these were stereotypes and not applicable to 100% of the population in those countries.
Then we devised questions to ask people from a different culture, with the aim of those questions being to actually find out more about their culture. We based ourselves on Gullestrup's 8 layers of culture. We then interviewed a classmate of whom we knew very little.
After the dinner break, we joined Egon who had invited (another) guest speaker, to talk about a social project she worked with in Turkey. The goal here was to ask questions in a structured manner, so that we ourselves could define what we wanted to learn. That technique was pretty interesting. At the end, we had to reflect (as always) and say how this session made us look "through the window" (comparing) or "in the mirror" (reflective).
So yeah, a very interesting day! Religion tomorrow, finally going to get some Grundtvig & Kierkegaard in!
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