orange, in the eye of the beholder

The day that everything colours orange, Queens's day.
It's the day after .... yesterday the international class had its so-called graduation ceremony in the grand board room of our Museumpark location. After all the hard work on the final assignments and presentations, it was time to relax and enjoy the final get together and to receive the certificates and savour the goodbye lunch at Dudok. Cameras kept flashing,loads of pictures were taken, again and again students and lecturers were called to pose in front of cameras which were lined up for the photographers.
It turned out to be an emotional moment too, as many realised that it was not only the course that had come to an end; it also meant that the time had come for departures back home. With the ash clouds having lifted and air traffic back into its regular business, there would be no reason forcing them to stay any longer, however much they would have liked too.
A small number of students is staying on, prolonging their studies with one or two months. Those are the ones who must have had the opportunity to see the Netherlands colouring orange today. Here's just a small selection of the orange madness hitting NL on April 30th.

Queen's day impressions from Jane Traveller on Vimeo.

organise a work field visit

Two small groups of students were asked to organise a morning or afternoon work field visit for the international students. Chance would have it that both chose Humanitas on the same day, but at two different locations.
Humanitas is a large social work foundation, operating at a national and local level. The Rotterdam branch is one of the largest in the country and from their head office on Pieter de Hoochweg they run quite a few social programmes.
It may have been the YES-culture of Humanitas that made these visits possible, as students had in fact little time to find and approach social work organisations in their respective boroughs. Unfortunately, not much English language information is available about Humanitas, which considers itself above all as a Dutch organisation meant for Rotterdam people. However, this page explains the basic principles and refers to the YES-culture as one of the core values of Humanitas.
It could also have been the many worthwhile programmes that Humanitas Rotterdam runs in many of its boroughs that prompted the students to visit Humanitas.
New Perspectives is one example, a project that aims at providing new perspectives for young people (aged 12 to 24) who are at risk of slipping into criminal activities. One group had chosen to take the international students to hear and talk about this project in Noord. The other group had decided on the Humanitas head office to hear from a communications officer an overview of the many projects Humanitas is involved in and the way they work with experienced volunteers in a project such as Home-start. Both visits were informative and gave a good picture of how social work is done via Humanitas and its network in Rotterdam.
But it was the actual meeting between the international social work students and the Dutch students that made all the difference.
In many ways the International Class is very much an international affair. They are a separate group attending lectures and lessons in English without mixing with Dutch students in class. As this is quite an intensive programme, special efforts have to be made to organise moments where they can meet Dutch students. Previous groups of international students had mentioned a few times during evaluation sessions at the very end that they would have preferred more encounters with Dutch students. Apart from the MUN and the occasional get-togethers , having students organise work field visits has appeared to be another stimulating experience to mingle, with benefits and fun on both sides, see for yourself:

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a cordial welcome at Pluspunt

Yesterday we went on another workfield visit with the international students from social work and what a wonderful visit it became!
Everything had been arranged from the start by a CMV student on an internship there. This was the amazing result of a positive answer to a tentative question from my side: are you willing to receive some international students studying here at our university? and tell them how your internship organisation operates.
All the people at Pluspunt had really done their best to turn the visit into a valuable experience by also inviting some volunteers to talk to us. After Marian had presented a general overview of Pluspunt and the projects they had put in place these last few years, Liesbeth gave an illustration of the way they work in a project with triggers to get communication among the participants going (see visuals).
Then volunteer Magda described in detail how she led participants to take part in a game called the WAVE and Piet demonstrated his storyteller's skills by treating us to a true story that had taken place at the end of the 19th century.
The story that fascinated me most was the one we heard from Magda about how she had become a volunteer for Pluspunt, a truly inspiring story for many, especially when I have our CMV students in mind. Participation, and working on participation issues, is such a central theme within the CMV study programme that collecting stories from people like Magda are bound to give students beneficial insights.
Pluspunt is an organisation that can best be described as an expertise centre for seniors and participation. However, non-Dutch people will easily miss the dual meaning of the word "pluspunt", which is on the one hand an (information and support) point for 55 + people but also translates into "advantage", stressing the fact that being older has its benefits (balancing some of the more negative associations that people often have when it comes to seniors).
And when it was time to say goodbye we even got a friendly surprise in the shape of a packet of chocolate Easter eggs, a cordial end to a heartwarming visit !

Visit to Pluspunt Rotterdam from Jane Traveller on Vimeo.

an international flavour to the MUN this year

The 4th Model United Nations in a row is just behind us and again it was a lively educational activity. Model United Nations is a worldwide educational effort to introduce students to the activities of the United Nations through a simulated environment of meetings in which participants take on the roles of country representatives to the UN committees.
This year we had a more social work oriented resolution on the agenda, namely DREAM centres. But an even bigger difference was the fact that for the first time ever we had international students joining the CMV students in the MUN delegations.
As it is in this current semester that we run an international class within our university, we made a switch with another conference and moved the dates from June to March in order to create the opportunity to invite the international students to our UN simulation. And as it turned out, it was again much fun but this time more true to life due to the diversity among the students.
After a short introduction about MUN procedures and an introductory talk about the purpose and ways of lobbying, the student delegates took up the tips as ducks to water. It was especially the Iraqi delegate that got the award for being best at this, we heard at the end of the session.
Other countries that got special attention (and were pleasantly surprised by that) were Poland for being the best team and Kenya for having the best content input in the debate: examples of stimulating additions to the MUN concept that were suggested by our secretary general and policy advisor.
We were fortunate again to have Mirjam de Bruin chairing the session as secretary general together with Maria Ibrahim Hassan as policy advisor: a team that skilfully led the 55 or so students during this conference to experience the workings and decision-making process of the United Nations. The driving factor for choosing to have a MUN for us is that through role-playing in one of the UN organs (in our case the Third Committee, Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs) participants gain a multilateral view of world affairs and develop their public speaking and debating skills, even though it puts a heavy demand on their English language skills.
All in all we can look back on yet another gratifying MUN experience. Here's a visual impression of that experience.

CLIL course in retrospect

“Using languages to learn and learning to use languages” : it all sounded so promising and intriguing and right up my street ! So how did the overall experience turn out to be a disappointing one?

We arrived as a diverse group from at least 9 different European countries and from different educational settings. All of the 10 Comenius group members and Valencian participants had come with hopes and expectations to learn, some a little unsure of what to expect, others having already had some exposure to CLIL ideas and practices.
I turned out to be the only participant from higher education. This was something I had sort of anticipated when I selected the course from the Grundtvig training database as it fell under Comenius. This would still be interesting for me however, I’d been assured by the course organiser, when I asked for advice: CLIL was definitely also appropriate in higher education. Yet it took 5 days to hear in the final session from the course leader that in fact CLIL was not really a thing for higher education, in contrast to primary and secondary schools.
On the plus side, what I took away from the course was better insights in the different educational settings from the other participants (esp. the Spanish), in other words a wider understanding of (lifelong) learning in Europe. The wonderful cooperative work in the mixed groups, the passion with which most participants spoke about education, the intercultural / international experience, the creative ideas that came up by free association of all present, the insightful presentations of the primary and secondary school teachers that shared their hands-on experiences with us, the Favara school visit: these were all positive and stimulating aspects in the course.
I often learn best when I actively participate and contribute, I try to be constructive to make a course a success and I share what I know, because I realise time and again that there is so much you get in return. That worked best when we got the assignment to design a model and apply the 4 C model (communication, culture, content and cognition) to work out the theme of Global Citizenship.
On the whole, the course group assignments were not bad. However, the feedback on them was: after reporting back or presenting results of the group work, the course leader often quickly went on to press a message on us that had already been in his mind before anyone said anything and then steered us into another direction. The same thing happened when a participant answered a question: a superficial response, hardly any real, content based dialogue in getting to grips with some of the real CLIL issues. That's why a feeling of being ignored arose. Others started complaining in the breaks about the lack of input and materials.
Outright critical were the participants who had seen our course leader working on his computer and replying to mails during the sessions, even when participants were presenting their CLIL lesson plans e.g.
It was interesting for me to see that some had decided to be as indifferent as our course leader and started working on their everyday tasks as well or playing games on a notebook, as a sign of silent protest. This kind of passive resistance was a cultural lesson to me from Greece. Another one was the hesitation on the part of the Spanish participants to voice their opinions when some Comenius group participants invited them to express their views on the course and its contents at the end of the day.
The Valencian Board of Education, the Conselleria d’ Educació Generalitat Valenciana, is an important governmental organisation with a lot of power. In order not to jeopardise their careers or to face future negative measures the Valencian participants refrained from openly commenting on the way the 5 day course was run.
As for the 5 day programme, it had undergone some changes by the time we got our folders at the start of the week. In itself that’s not a problem. However, the actual programme was definitely a downgraded version of the provisional one, having deleted 2 speakers / CLIL experts. Not only that, but the course facilitator didn’t really adhere to the updated programme either. We never had the review of the day for example.
Anticipating a final evaluation on the last day we were dumbstruck (again) by seeing the course end without reviewing it and / or discussing our individual experiences and learning results. We did get a compliment however! We’d been the most active and best CLIL group so far. Now why didn’t that produce any smiles on our faces, hmm? Was there an evaluative questionnaire then??? No chance.
And then there was the issue of the course costs… another intensively debated issue in our Comenius group. No one really understood why the rate for accommodation costs had been set at the price of 650 euros when hotel accommodation (incl. 5 breakfasts) was only 275 euros and lunches around 75 euros all in all. Our morning coffee with delicacies (and possibly other catering provisions) can hardly have amounted to 300 euros per person. In a discussion with the two people in charge, these costs could not satisfactorily be accounted for on the spot.
To sum it up: CLIL is an interesting, promising, innovative educational approach, well worth exploring and implementing. However, if you decide to take a State-of the-Art CLIL course, just make sure (or hope and pray) that it is not the pompous David Marsh who is the course facilitator. Here's the result of the photos I took.

This course has been funded with support from the European Commission.
This blog post reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.