What is the workshop about?

How does one come up with creative solutions to complex problems in the education space, particularly in a country with such a challenged history as South Africa? How does one change or impact the education world you have been called to? In this talk, the example of Calling Academy will be discussed to draw out principles that students can apply in their own lives to strengthen their own purpose for their career in education.

Our guest

Werner Cloete is from Stellenbosch, South Africa where he co-founded Calling Education in 2016. Calling Education operates a low fee independent school that serves learners from townships and low-income areas. After the initial success of the school, the organisation is now looking to enable others to start similar schools in other parts of South Africa. Werner has spoken at many schools, educational conferences, leadership forums, radio and TV on matters relating to education. He also authored a motivational book for teachers. He was featured as one of the University of Stellenbosch's "100 voices" in the university's recent centenary. His talks at Stellenbosch University have included How to Change the World and Why Choose Teaching as Career.

What is the workshop about?

Key points:

• Diversity and inclusion in education and society

• Research collaboration: key findings

• Contribution to UNESCO Guidelines for inclusion

• Background paper for UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report 2020: Teacher education for inclusion

• Inclusive educational leadership advancing SDG4

Our guest

Prof. Elina Lehtomäki is a professor of global education at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her publications cover, among others, the topics of global education and learning, inclusion and equity, as well as the internationalisation of higher education. Her activities include, but are not limited to, co-chairing the Global Education Research in Finland network as well as participating in the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture working group on internationalization of higher education and the advisory board of the international Academic Network on Global Education and Learning (ANGEL).

What is this workshop about?

To teach is to communicate! Our lecture halls and classrooms are increasingly characterized by cultural diversity. This enriches our daily educational routine, but also makes the communication processes more complicated. Therefore, teachers today need an awareness of intercultural communication processes for optimal classroom management. In the following workshop we would like to deal with the topic of intercultural competences in educational contexts. In the first part of the workshop we will deal with some of the basics of intercultural communication and throughout it, we will acquire cultural communication skills. Afterwards, I would like to invite the participants to briefly explore the topic of critical and culturally responsive pedagogy and reflect on the teacher's role in students’ intellectual development coming from an intercultural perspective.

Our guest

Jan-Philipp Brinkmann studied Spanish, as well as Linguistics and Phonetics in Bachelor and a Master in Intercultural Communication and Education at the University of Cologne. Afterwards he acquired an additional qualification as a consultant for companies and organizations oriented to the common good at the University of Valencia. He worked as a German teacher in Germany and abroad, and as an education consultant for topics of "global learning" for various organizations in the civil society sector. Today, he works at the Mercator Institute and he is responsible for consulting and networks in the initiative “Transfer of Language Education, Reading and Writing Promotion” (BiSS-Transfer) and is the contact person for the state and network coordinators in the project.

What is this workshop about?

As emergent technologies become increasingly integrated into formal learning environments, a new kind of classroom emerge: CrossActionSpaces (published in Jahnke, 2015) that combines offline and online, synchronous and asynchronous settings for example. Obviously, such CrossActionSpaces are now the new normal in the Covid-19 year. In the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies (SISLT department at the University of Missouri-Columbia/USA), online courses are not new. Instead, SISLT’s programme “Technology in Schools”, that is part of teacher education, went completely online in 2003. Prof. Dr. Jahnke will share experience from this programme. The programme grounds its course designs on active learning. Studies have shown that active learning promotes and improves student performance (e.g., Freeman et al., 2014). The presentation addresses the question of how active learning can be used in online courses to enhance student-centered learning. The model of active-meaningful learning will be described including the Digital Didactical Design framework that guides the design of technology-enhanced teaching and learning processes. One online course will be introduced that shows how active learning strategies can be implemented in practice.

Our guest

Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke is Director of the Information Experience Lab , a usability and user experience laboratory, and a professor in the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies (SISLT) at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. She was Professor of Interactive Media and Learning at Umeå University, Sweden (2011-201) and Assistant Professor at TU Dortmund, Center for Research on Higher Education (2008-2011). She has over 145 publications. Her research focuses on sociotechnical-pedagogical design for human-centered work and learning. Prof. Dr. Isa Jahnke has been teaching in blended learning settings for 20 years, and in online courses for 5 years in Germany, Sweden and the USA, and in different fields such as Informatics, Learning Design & Technologies, Teacher Education and Educational Science. Click here for further information.

What is the workshop about?

The year 2020 has been challenging for teachers all over the world: At the height of the first wave of the pandemic, almost 200 countries had closed their schools, with most teachers trying to switch to some form of distant learning. Since then, schools have reopened, and closed again, schoolchildren have been quarantined, new concepts have been introduced. How have teachers been dealing with the coronavirus situation? How has teaching changed in the course of the last few months? What kind of challenges have teachers been facing? In this Question&Answer session, teachers from different countries tell us about their experiences of being a teacher in their country during a global pandemic.

Our guests

Laura Dzemski teaches English, German, and French at Drottning Blankas Gymnasieskola in Kungsbacka, Sweden (ages 15-18).

Nigel Matthias is associate headteacher at Bay House School and Sixth Form in Gosport, UK (ages 11-17).

Kathryn Polyack teaches elementary music at Sherwood School in Highland Park, Illinois, USA, to students in kindergarten through grade five (ages 5-12).

Vanita Uppal OBE is director at the British School New Delhi, India, a private international school (from nursery up to international baccalaureat).

What is this workshop about?

Multilingualism, a familiar notion and one that has become quite commonplace, may often remain surprisingly far from the public eye. Due to the strong influence of the twin pair standard language and education, in schools, universities, and the media it may easily seem like there exists only one single language, namely that used in these contexts. In her talk Prof. Bongartz will address why we easily suffer from this illusion. There will be things to look at, some shop talk, and an open invitation to make up your own mind about monolingualism and its accessories.

Our guest

Professor Christiane M. Bongartz: I am an advocate of 'compassionate linguistics': for me, this involves efforts to move away from linguistics as a means to categorize (standard vs. non-standard, grammatical vs. non-grammatical, monolingual vs. bilingual) towards making use of linguistics to support a heterogeneous and inclusive society.  In our research and teaching, my team members and I investigate multilingualism with respect to language development, literacy/ies, and socio-economic conditioning. Language use by soccer fans, reading development, learner biographies in Cologne schools or the high Atlas Mountains - our wide range of linguistic interests is motivated by calling into question traditional epistemes about descriptivism and separateness of languages in the individual mind.

What is the workshop about?

Challenging participants to engage with new dimensions of diversity, student exchanges offer a broad range of opportunities for learning. Communication is considered to play a central role in the facilitation of these learning processes. On examples of real-life settings from Tanzania to Poland, today's talk explores the role of dialogues in and around student exchanges, investigates interactional strategies and goals of intercultural communication, and discusses implications of all this for teacher education. The presentation will also look at how exchanges can be put into practice even when travel opportunities are restricted.

Our guest

Katharina Beuter holds a PhD in English linguistics from the University of Bamberg as well as a Master’s degree in African linguistics from the University of Cologne. Apart from being a linguist, she has worked as a secondary school teacher in Fulda and Bamberg and as a researcher in the “WegE” project, part of the federal ministry’s "Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung" programme, which aims at improving the quality of teacher education. Her research interests include, among others, transcultural pragmatics in English as a Lingua Franca and its implications for school contexts, multilingualism, CLIL, and languages in Africa.

What is workshop about?

This workshop explores the rationale for and the effect of internationalising teacher education drawing on the experiences gained in the University of Wuppertal’s long-standing PrimA (Praktikum im Ausland = school placement abroad) programme. Like so many other projects PrimA came to an abrupt halt in March 2020, when the corona pandemic forced some 50 students to cancel their three-month school placement in the UK. Stranded in an online semester at home, they had to adapt quickly to new challenges. Their lecturers, who – under normal circumstances – would have supervised the students’ school placements via digital media, but also through a personal mid-term visit, decided to design an alternative class overnight that would allow students to experience internationalisation at home and gain credits for their course. The main aim was to encourage the student teachers to go on virtual tours of interesting sites, such as museums and galleries all across the globe, where they would encounter inspiring cultural phenomena and fascinating linguistic input. To obtain credit points they were tasked to design an EFL teaching unit based on a virtual tour of their own choice. To this end they were provided with a model unit and asked to look at a 17th century Dutch painting and listen to the local curator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam talk about one of his favourite paintings. Towards the end of this workshop we shall reflect upon the insights gleaned from this online experience and enquire about the benefits of internationalisation at home compared to the stay abroad as we knew it.

Our guests

Prof. Dr. Bärbel Diehr worked as an EFL teacher at a German grammar school, as a teacher trainer at a teacher training college and as a professor of TEFL at the University of Wuppertal. Her research interests include language learning with electronic dictionaries, embedding political education as well as education for sustainable development in the EFL class to develop critical literacy in young people.

Lisa Fischer took part in the PrimA Programme in 2016, when she worked at a school in rural Wales for three months. Since 2017, she has been a member of the PrimA team working as the coordinator of the programme. She aims to begin her teacher training in November 2021.

Lea Uhlmann participated in the PrimA Programme in 2017, which she completed at a school in the Midlands. She became a member of the PrimA team in 2018, supporting the student assistants and helping with the organisation of the programme. Additionally, she is working as a substitute teacher at a secondary school and aims to start her teacher training in November 2021.

What is workshop about?

This talk will focus on the experience of the Raya School, a progressive school in the Philippines that prides itself in instilling a sense of country in its students. The Raya School is unique not only in its educational philosophy, but also in the way it ensures that its students are made aware of events in Philippine history, including the Marcos martial law years, that are usually not discussed in the classroom. By doing so, the school hopes to reach its goals of a more enlightened generation of Filipinos, who can help the country end its history of oppression and dictatorship.

Our guest

Ani Rosa Almario is the Co-Founder and Director of The Raya School, a progressive school in Quezon City, Philippines. She obtained her Master’s degree in Education from Stanford University and her PhD in Curriculum Studies from the University of the Philippines Diliman. Her research interests include progressivism, cultural literacy and children’s literature.

What is the workshop about?

Inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this impulse is an international project on approaches to refugee issues in schools in Liverpool and Cologne schools. Trainee teachers acquire skills that help them to work with children with refugee backgrounds as part of their studies. In both countries and cities, the educational situation of refugee children and adolescents is particularly precarious, as they are often not subject to compulsory schooling, depending on the federal state. Support is therefore needed in both refugee shelters and schools. One major question was and still is whether an international dimension offers students more than simply dealing with the issue at a local level.

Our guests

After finishing her Bachelor degree in International Business, Barbara Schön first gained international educational experience during her work at a language school in Bournemouth, UK. Elevating her desire to stay in the educational sector, she decided to achieve a master degree in Economic Education. During that time she started working at the Center for Teacher Education as a scientific assistant which finally let her to become a part of the project PROMPT!. In 2018 she took over the project’s management.

Chris Keelan began working as a modern languages teacher in British comprehensive schools in the late 1980s and also spent a number of years teaching English at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe. He returned to the UK and secondary education in 2008 and has spent the last six years working in teacher training at Liverpool Hope University. His recent research interests include preparing new teachers to support disadvantaged children in closing the widening attainment gap between themselves and their more fortunate peers.

What is the workshop about?

Denmark is world famous for the use of ICT across the education sector. The covid-19 pandemic showed that Danish schools and teachers quickly adapted to online education in both primary, secondary and higher education. However the role of technology among Danish teachers has just recently begun to evolve on a larger scale. In this guest lecture Jakob Harder, dean at University College Copenhagen and chairman of a joint coalition among all Danish universities and university colleges about technology in the Danish educational system, will talk about the ongoing development of “technological comprehension” as an expected new subject in Danish schools. The focus being not at the technology itself but a purpose of enabling all Danish kids to navigate freely and safely in a world surrounded by digital technologies. The challenge for Danish teachers and teacher students is to adapt the strong tradition for “dannelse” (“bildung”) to the modern world. It is this challenge that Danish universities and university colleges have set a common ambition to fulfill.

Our guest

Dean of the Faculty of Teacher Education at University College Copenhagen, Jakob Harder is in charge of the organizational and strategic management of the faculty´s educational, research and development activities across University College Copenhagen. His previous positions in the fields of technology, IT and digitization with the Local Government Denmark and as a Deputy Director of the Danish Agency for IT and Learning make him a specialist in digitalization and the role of technology and data, especially in the public sector. Jakob is inspired by the important task of improving the Danish education sector.

What is the workshop about?

The benefits of bilingual education are sufficiently researched and remain undisputed. Proficiency standard systems define effective instruction. Conventions on best practices are well established as are lesson plan adaptations. The connections between content and language acquisitions are broadly understood. Typical language deficits have also been documented along with general correction strategies. Still missing are research-based concepts that lay out a cohesive, curricular articulation for a balanced language acquisition process in bilingual instruction. From a teacher’s perspective, such a vertically oriented concept would lead from reactive correction strategies to a proactive anticipation of developmental language issues. From a student’s perspective, the concept would consistently guide learners to self-reflective language awareness and to self-guided language growth competencies.This all-encompassing vision of a vertical articulation is based on practical experiences and data collections in a multilingual immersion program in the USA. Experimentations with instructional planning and teaching strategies aim to implement a more purposeful, enduring language acquisition process.

The value of this vision and the transferability to German bilingual programs will be open to discussion at the end of the session.

Our guest

Dr. Bernd Nuss has been teaching for almost a quarter century in bilingual programmes in South, Central, and North America. For the past 10 years, he has been working as the immersion facilitator at the E.E. Waddell Language Academy, an award-winning and internationally recognized K-8 school, which offers instruction in four different immersion languages. His scholar work is rooted in the real-life needs of an ever-evolving bilingual programme. It focuses mainly on language development and early reading instruction in foreign languages.

What is the workshop about?

This paper offers an insight into the reality of the Czech education system based on personal experiences. A mother of four children of Romani origin; a mother who came from Eastern Europe and lives in the Czech Republic with her husband from the Middle East; parents raising a son with autism spectrum disorder; and finally a woman who wanted her children to encounter Christianity in the school environment.
What from their experience is of general validity? What specific educational challenges do their experiences offer?

Our guest

Dr. theol. Tomáš Cyril Havel, University of South Bohemia České Budějovice, is assistant Professor for Religious Education Studies at the University of South Bohemia České Budějovice as well as a priest. Dr. Tomáš C. Havel is interested in diversity and its contribution to educational processes, the contribution of religious education studies to the educational discussion in the Czech Republic, spiritual dimensions of education and schooling, and the question of truth in the context of religious education.

What is the workshop about?

According to Sir E. B. Tylor’s (1832-1917) culture can be defined as being that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. And we should admit the fact that this “complex whole” differ from one society to another. Whether it is Germany or Senegal, this difference should be taken into account during the teaching and learning process, considered not as a blockade but as an advantage. Hence we feel the need of exchanges, since the forms and the contents aren’t the same, we should harmonize so as to enrich each other. “Culture is also a learnt behavior of a society or sub-group”, if we refer to Margaret Mead (1901-1978); Meaning that, individuals from different ethnic groups have various behaviors, with that variety of behaviors depending on the origins, teachers and students need the understanding of those cultural facts that can be outstanding in the project of teaching/learning foreign languages.

In this globalised world, increased mobility, travel, trade, communication and information technology have made interaction between cultural groups almost inevitable. Even small, previously isolated cultural communities are now experiencing the impact of contact with other cultures. Whereas teachers in the past could be comfortable with a traditional curriculum with ancient methods only based on contents, structures and teacher-centeredness,  they are now expected to consider the methods, procedures and techniques used for a successful teaching/learning process so as to reach their goals which are to enable the learners to be at ease while communicating in the target languages (German, English), all of this should be based on communicative language teaching (CLT). Since it’s difficult to find an area of human organization that’s not affected by cultural difference, it is important for professionals to know how to work in intercultural environments.

Centered on the way our school is functioning: Willing to be deeply rooted in our African, Senegalese values that can be Wolof, serer, Diola, Fulani; in agreement with the open-mindedness in which we believe, this survey is supposed to cover up twelve points specific on which our cultural values are based.

Our guests

Amadou Sow and Adboulaye Diouf (Senegal)