Back in Lessons - Week 43

After a long vacation, this week, we have started lessons again. Since we were fresh after the vacation, it has been a good start for this week.

In English class, today, we have started with punctuation and punctuation errors. Although I think that I am not that much bad in punctuation, it has still been a very good review for me to see how successful I  am in punctuation. After a general review of punctuation marks, we had an interesting task: we were assigned to put the correct punctuation marks in their places in a text in which all the punctuation marks, except for fullstops, were deleted. In fact, it was a hard one to deal with because the author of the text seemed to have his own way of writing, but still we could work it out. After placing the punctuation marks in our texts, we changed our texts with other groups and we tried to figure out each other's errors so that the text made sense and we could help each other. Then, we could see how good we are in punctuation and which point we should review. It was also interesting to hear about punctuation in Danish as well since some of the punctuation errors are the result of negative transfer from the native language, both for Danish and Turkish. Now, I have the chance to think about what kind of errors I do in using the punctuation while writing and what might cause this. In this way, I can learn from my own mistakes so that I can help my students in punctuation when I am a teacher.

Then, we also talked about the language policies and adopting words from English, for both Danish and Turkish. Some people are quite concerned about this issue because they think that they can lose their national identity if they keep adopting words from English. It is the case not only in Denmark but also in Turkey because we, in Turkey,  don't have a language policy as well. To some extent, one can argue that it might be dangerous to adopt too many words from other languages, however it is still not a that much vital issue  to worry about. Even English vocabulary includes twenty per cent of French words. Language is a dynamic concept and it is very natural that languages influence each other. For me, as long as it is limited with the adopting words and that is nothing to do with the changes in morphology or the basic sentence structure, I mean the basic features of a specific language which identifies that language, it is a natural process taking place. Anyway, if one considers the idea of "being an intercultural speaker in a globalized world", then he will probably feel that there is nothing to worry about whether we have a language policy or not.

Week 41 - The Movie - "The Class"

Last week, in educational studies class, we watched a movie named "The Class". Before analyzing the movie in terms of Classroom Management and/or Klafki and Thomas Ziehe's ideas I want to summarize the movie:

Teacher François Marin and his colleagues are preparing for a school year teaching at the very beginning of the movie.The school is in Paris and in this school, François is a French teacher who tries to get through his students. Sometimes, he is quite successful but, still, sometimes it results in failure. The school has a multicultural atmosphere with the immigrant students in France. Although there are many strict disciplinary rules - in a sense unwritten disciplinary rules relating clothes and so-on- in this school , it has a kind of fair system since the representatives of students are allowed to be in the Student Evaluation Committees. When it comes to "the Class" itself, it seems to be quite complex to get through since there is a great  deal of issues and problems relating to the discipline, classroom management, diversity in the classroom and so-on. If you also think about the teacher's expectations, from their students and the way they influence the students with the "labels" they have for the students, it becomes even harder to explain the consequences and results in a certain way.

In the movie, as I mentioned above, there are many issues to think and talk about. There occurs a lot of problems - deriving from a large scale of reasons e.g. ethnicity, teacher's expectations and beliefs about students namely the labels students have, family influence and so on - relating the classroom management. Then, what exactly would explain the problem or the case so that it would give us a better insight of "the Class" itself and a viewpoint of being a teacher in a multicultural class? The conflict between the school culture and the popular culture - I mean the culture of the students? The students' being so inappropriate? The diversity in the classroom? The lack of classroom management? The answer would be relating almost all of these and many others in many cases in the movie. It is quite hard to explain the movie in general since it is so complicated but we can summarize some important points with the examples from the movie so that it covers the movie in general. 

As the movie starts with the meeting between the teachers of the school, there appears an important point to think about: Teachers' expectations and beliefs about students; namely "labels" teachers have for their students. It is obvious that even teachers themselves influence each other in shaping the ideas about their students. To illustrate, at the very beginning of the movie, some of the students were being labelled as smart,or troublemaker by the teachers who met students before. The teacher was introducing the students to a new colleague with the labels he has already been familiar with so that the new teacher had an idea about his new students. But, unsurprisingly, it was not the way it goes all the time. As Chapman states labels has a social-control effect. It may stop the student to behave in the way he was labelled or may amplify the behavior. The movie includes examples of both situations. A student called Carl, who probably was expelled from another school, was labelled to be not a very smart student by the teacher and then he turned out to be competitive by doing his homework. On the other hand, the teachers' labelling Souleymane as limited accademically provoked many problems and all resulted in his being fired from the school. Of course there were some other reasons which let this happen but the important point is that teachers' labelling their students would affect them very easily. 

In the movie, François, the teacher, was sometimes quite good at classroom management but, still, he had many problems, deriving from different reasons. For example, he couldn't manage the time very well in some cases. Sometimes he had endless arguements with students. The arguements might not be created by the teacher himself; but, instead of sharpening the conflict between the teacher and the students by continuing the arguements he could easily make the students remember the task they were supposed  to be dealing with. I simply do not mean that everytime teachers should focus on time-on-task and avoid discussions.Of course it is important to answer the students' questions and discuss about their ideas about what is going on in the classroom; but, it is also important that teacher would explain it in a way which directs the students back into the task so that there occurs no endless and meaningless arguements between teachers and students.

In the movie, one could easily relate the cultural conflicts between "students and students" and/or "students and the teacher " with Thomas Ziehe's idea of self world. According to Thomas Ziehe, kids are very much centered on their own worlds and everything that is not compatible with their self world seems strange to them. To illustrate, the students were once complaining about using a certain pattern of the language because it was not the way they used the language in their everyday life. At this point, Thomas Ziehe says it is the teacher's job to open the students to be willing to leave their self worlds. The teacher could try creating "artificial islands". That would mean not getting closer to everyday lives of students but instead offering situations and topics different from student's self world so that they would be a part of high culture or be willing to know about high culture. If we were to turn to the case in the movie, when the students were complaining about that language pattern and asking the teacher to relate it with daily life conversations
( Angelica : Tell me, when was the last time you heard someone talk like that? ) the teacher's explanation was insufficient ( François : "Yesterday, with friends, we used the imperfect subjunctive" and then contradictorily "All right, it's true not everyone talks that way" ) and  contrary to what Thomas Ziehe suggests in such a case.

The last thing I want to mention about the movie is the discipline and the democracy issue. There was a kind of  Student Evaluation Committee in the school and the representatives of students were allowed to be in that comittee. If the teachers are to talk about students academic level and social behaviors at school, it is almost  impossible to expect students to be as objective as their teachers are. To illustrate, in the movie, the main conflict between the teacher and one of the students, Souleymane, derived from the representative students' telling their fellow students what was talked in the committee; namely it derived from their misrepresenting. That would be a good example to think about the question of  "What extent democracy" or "How to determine school structure".

There are many other important issues to talk about but mainly we can summarize that one could get a lot from the movie in terms of classroom management and all of the topics that we have been discussing so far. All in all, The movie "The Class" is a good starting point to see to what extent theory owns its place in practice.

Material Design - Land-Art

Yesterday, I had a material design class. This was the fourth time I've been atending this class. During the first three weeks, we have been making some tools from the wood, leaves and anything that can be found in the nature. I find it quite beneficial in terms of improving your creativeness, and of course learning some techniques of hand-made tools so I really enjoyed the first three classes with Peter, our teacher. That's why I am always looking forward to attending the next class.

We were supposed to do land-art ( the art that is created with anything from the nature ) during the class  yesterday. We were five groups including two or three people and each group was assigned with a kind of topic or the context  for the land-art. I was pair with Hatice and our topic was "broken line". Then, we started to walk around to see what we coud do and what would "broken line" mean to us. As soon as we started walking, we saw a small hill of rotten  leaves which were quite incidentally in a kind of line. Then, we thought about our topic and we decided to have a kind of grave - I will explain the reason later. We swept the leaves that were not in the line and we broke the line in the middle. Then, we made the grave which was in the middle of the leaves and we placed two feathers inside. We put some flowers around and we broke a wood and placed it in the middle. When the time was up for the assignment, we couldn't help going on our task because it aroused the feeling of creativeness.

Broken Line - Land-Art

When we were done, we listened each group to explain their land-art. The first one was a kind of ship. This group was assigned with the topic "In between" and they did it very well. When you looked at the ship in between two trees, everything was a kind of in between each other. Then came the two group of "Balance" and "Wonders". It was quite surprising to see that they had the balance of their land art in the air, not on the ground. Their land art was something like triggering the idea of being contradictory,or thinking the opposite way of what everyone can easily think.The other group was also quite successful; they built pyramids from the sand; as their topic was "wonders".

Wonders - Land Art

When it comes to our land-art, we thought about broken line and we decided that this line could symbolize a person's life and the broken line would mean the end of this person's life. That's why we decided to have a grave just in a broken line. Then, it turned out to be two different, imaginary person's "life line"with the contributions of other friends. That was also quite interesting to see that the process of creating the art would never end: I mean people would understand different things from that specific art and it would contribute the art itself.

While we were cooking...

After seeing what all of the groups did, we had some food with Peter and other friends and we played some games. We enjoyed the sunny weather and we had a lot of fun. It was the end of our workshop. Fortunately, we will go on our class after the autumn vacation. I am looking forward to attending this class again.

5 October - WorLd Teacher's Day...

ABOUT WORLD TEACHERS’ DAY

World Teachers’ Day, held annually on October 5th since 1994 - when it was created by UNESCO - celebrates teachers worldwide. Its aim is to mobilise support for teachers and to ensure that the needs of future generations will continue to be met by teachers.

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First Impressions In Denmark

I have been living in Denmark for four weeks so far. I will be an exchange student in University College Sjælland, in Denmark for one year.


Before I start talking about my first impressions in Denmark, I want to include a short story of my arrival to Denmark and first four weeks of my stay in Vordingborg.

I got on the plane on the 27th of August to come here. I was not alone when I arrived Copenhagen Aiport; we, four  exchange students ( Hatice, Nazlı, Sevim, and me ) from Turkey, were together and we were trying to figure out how to go to Vordingborg by train. We couldn't buy a ticket since the ticket machine was only programmed to Danish Krones, which I found quite worrying without knowing that I had to wait two days for exchanging Euros in Danish Krones as it was Saturday and all of the banks were closed during the weekend. Then, luckily we learnt that we could pay on the train and finally we arrived at Vordingborg at six o'clock in the morning. We were met by our tutors ( Martin and  Trine ) at the train station. Then, they showed us our rooms and the school. On Sunday, we met our counsellor, Dorte. She came to see us at the weekend on Sunday, which was very kind of her. The next day, we figured out how to do things at school, such as copying the lecture notes and so-on, with Dorte. We've started English class with Anne Kristine on Friday and after two weeks we've started educational studies with Peter. Now, we are in Peter's class and we've started to a Blog project which I find quite interesting. 

To begin with, adapting myself to circumstances of living in a different culture and staying in a different country was not as hard as I expected it to be but, of course, I had some difficulties as soon as I arrived. First problem appeared when we were out in Vordingborg. When we left our home town, it was almost 40 degrees and it was around 15 when we arrived in Vordingborg, which was equal to the tempreature in winter in our hometown. So we were  a little bit cold but to our surprise we got used to the weather very soon.

One of the most challenging things I have experienced in Denmark is that documents that were mailled to me in first four weeks were all in Danish. When we went to the city hall to apply for Yellow Cards, we were given a form which is both Danish and English but it was the first and the last document that was in English. Including the welcome letter to Denmark, almost all of the papers that were sent to me were in Danish so I needed fellow student's help to figure out what they were really about. But still it is a good reason to start learning Danish during my stay here.