Last week, we finished the classes with our Educational Studies Lecturer, Peter. Until now, we read a lot of different texts regarding different topics. We started with ethics of teaching and classrroom management. Then, we read about learning problems in youth. We studied " the risk society"- which was a new term for me as well-, curriculum and aims, problems of the modern world relating to globalization and modernization. Untraditional education and schooling, care ethics, democracy were some of the other themes that we have discussed so far.
In general, I really liked the courses with Peter this semester. I enjoyed attending the class feeling no pressure, being active all the time and trying to express myself as muh as possible. In fact, this was what Peter was seeking for during the lectures.He wanted us to be active as much as possible. That's why he always had a different task for us. I never felt bored in his classes because we were always dealing with our task in our mixed groups (sometimes it was hard to mix the groups when we were only exchange students ) so that we were in interaction with each other a lot. In our last class, we realized that everyone has been in a group with each person at least once. Moreover when we expressed our opinions in any topic, Peter helped us to be more specific and clear with his questiıons since it is sometimes hard for one to get through others when you are not able to explain what exactly you mean.
I also would love to give some details of our educational studies courses this semester:
In Turkey, our pedagogy courses are generally in Turkish. Firstly, I should state that it is quite better to read the texts in English. Also, it is a lot more beneficial to get the pedagogy courses in English since one of our aims to be here is to improve our communicative skills in the foreign language.. In this aspect, Peter helped us a lot because we read a lot of texts in English inside and outside the classroom and during the lectures we had a large scale of tasks all of which required a lot of discussion, negotiation and communication.
As I mentioned above, we have had many different themes and topics in educational studies. Now I can see that they are like the parts of a puzzle and when you put them all together, it completes the picture ( the core in this picture is education) I mean we have looked at education from different perspectives and we have tried to observe, analyse and understand different educational ideas. One of the things that I liked a lot in this aspect is that we did not just leave some topics behind and move on other topics. For instance, while discussing the idea of untraditional education we turned back to the ideas of Thomas Ziehe and talked about it again. In this way, we could establish connections between different topics and ideas.
While Helma is explaining what to do for our evaluation papers at the end of the class
During our educational studies courses, as I mentioned above, we had a lot of different tasks such as Classroom Parliament, class discussions, mind maping and so-on. I learned not only the subject matter of the course ( I mean the content ) but also different techniques to use in the classroom. Completing these tasks, I also realized how much interaction all those tasks required, which is a desired situation in language classes. I will often remember "Center the Circle Task" from educational studies courses (we did it a few times) and I will probably use it in my classes while teaching.
I really enjoyed attending all of the courses this semester. A few times, we had the educational studies class with Danish friends, which I liked very much. However, when we were only international students (eight Turkish and one Deutch student), I felt a little bit isolated. It is nice to be in a kind of multicultural classroom so that there occurs different ideas and we try to see other people's point of view. Otherwise, the main focus is generally Turkey and examples from Turkey, which is a kind of limit in itself. So, I hope next semester we will have many of Danish friends in our classroom as well as exchange students.
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