Week Six

Cultural

Eimear and me in Eindhoven

On Monday I had the opportunity to teach the children a little about where I come from, I made a PowerPoint and talked through the pictures outlining the different aspects of life in Belfast, it was received well and the children could understand most of what I was saying, they asked really well thought out questions and were genuinely interested in the topic. It was lovely to be able to show them a little of my culture and for them to see the similarities and differences between Northern Ireland and the Netherlands. I find the children in my class are growing more confident in speaking to me and Silvia, they will have longer conversations with us in English and will tell us more about themselves, they have been teaching me the Dutch names for animals and  ‘jeukende’ which means itchy.

St Cathatina's church

On Thursday we had to talk about the political systems of our countries and found that a lot of them are very similar it was interesting but not as interesting as learning about different parts of Dutch culture from the comedian John Fealey, an English comedian who had spent sometime in the Netherlands. We watched a video where he introduced us to the celebration of Koninginnedag (Queen’s day) it is the celebration of the Queen’s birthday, which occurs on the 30^th of April however next year it will be called Koningsdag (King’s day) and will be celebrated on 27^th of April. There will be a type of flea market and everyone will dress in orange, I am very excited to see this and I hope it will be just as fun as carnival was. I think I will teach children about the celebrations of the Netherlands instead of just the usual world celebrations that are outlined in ‘Celebrations and good times’ thematic unit, I knew nothing about the festivals and it is such as shame and they are very rich in culture and children would find them extremely interesting .In this the children will be covering a wide range of thinking skills and personal capabilities and well as cross-curricular skills, Children have opportunities to have experiences with all the senses ,enjoy the unexpected, unusual and surprising and also make connections between their own culture and others. CCEA (2007)

Interesting looking shop

Visitor from home

This weekend my friend from Belfast came to visit me in Nijmegen it was brilliant to see her again and to show her around the city and she also brought me Tayto crisps and tea bags from home which is wonderful because it’s like a little reminder of home.  She arrived in Eindhoven so we decided to take the opportunity to visit another city and to pick her up from the airport. Eindhoven is a lot more modern than Nijmegen, it has more shops and will also be getting a Primark very soon, we also visited St Catharina’s Church which is absolutely stunning, it is interesting to be able to compare the different cities,  I find Eindhoven beautiful in a very different way to Amsterdam and Nijmegen. 

Of course the week rounded off with a celebration of St Patrick’s Day, everyone became Irish for the day we painted our fellow Erasmus student’s faces and decorated ourselves in various shades of green in the flat before heading out into the centre to find the Irish pub, aptly named the Shamrock. In the pub we had Guinness and sang the usual songs to sing on St Patrick’s Day at the top of our lungs, I think we scared a good few of the locals and they probably though we were mad, but it was a great experience to bring a little bit of our culture to the Netherlands. Everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves and we really lived up to the Irish stereotype, so the next few weeks we shall have to focus on work rather than fun.

 St Patrick's day!

 CCEA, (2007) Celebrations and Good Times! Thematic Unit, Northern Ireland Curriculum, CCEA, Belfast.

Week Five

Professional

 This week marked the start of my 4 month placement in a Dutch school. For the rest of my time here I will spend two days a week in a school to the south west of Nijmegen in a village called Cuijk. I think it is going to be such a wonderful and exciting experience, it will definitely be hard  but I know I will learn a great deal and take so much away from it.

Our new friend

Cycling to school

Myself and a girl from Austria named Silvia decided to try on Sunday   to find our school. The journey took us alongside the canal,  to my utter delight it brought us past an orchard with Shetland ponies,and finally  past a beach.  When we finally arrive at our destination an hour later, we were very tired but excited at what the next day would bring.

Monday morning arrived far too early as we set off at 7:00 , at 8:00 we arrived at  Obs 't Startblok (our school),  where we meet our mentor Koen and were then taken to the groep 7 class who are aged 10 to 11, very like our primary sevens back home. There are sixteen children in the class altogether, seven boys and nine girls. 
The first thing I noticed was the children's lack of uniform, for me it was strange to see their various outfits and to know that it wasn't just a non-uniform day. The teachers in the Netherlands are very laid back in the way they dress, I wore jeans to school and didn't feel out of place.

Our classroom

hallway in the school

The classroom itself was quite big, it was an open environment with large windows and had some of the children's work displayed upon the walls.The building has a very similar layout to some of the schools you would find at home, there are trophies displayed in the hallway and the children's work placed upon the walls, it is bright ,colourful and welcoming.

The language barrier is very difficult, I can understand some words and then get a feel of what is going on but most of the time I find myself completely lost, I now know how it feels for a lot of children coming to Northern Ireland without any English. However our mentor very kindly explains to us what is going on and the children will come and ask us questions in English, they can understand a lot of what I say even with an Irish accent and if not they translate to each other.

 A lot of the work the children do is independent, they are responsible for achieving a set amount of work each week, they will plan out on Monday what they will do each day and an hour is set aside each day for them to do this, they work at their own pace and speed. It is an idea which I hope I can use in my future teaching as the NI Curriculum(2007) pushes for self management and exploration of the child's own ideas.

Me and Silvia with our class

The atmosphere in the classroom is very relaxed the children are very settled and interact well with each other. The day is well organised and planned out in topics, although the Netherlands do not have a specific curriculum they have to follow, they have guidelines for what the children have to learn and this varies from school to school.

The children have a great deal of respect for their teacher and he has a wonderful relationship with the children, for example the teacher will cycle with the children to the gym and back, not one of them misbehaves.  He also gave one of the children in the class the opportunity to teach an art lesson, the pupil explained to the class how to make a mask and used his own skills in art to demonstrate. I think this is a wonderful idea as it builds on a child's confidence and self esteem, it's something which I will also try to use in my future teaching as this applies to children's thinking skills a personal capabilities, the children are learning to work with others, use their initiative,apply ideas ,create and design something new and monitor and evaluate their own progress. (CCEA, 2007) I have learnt so much from my mentor this week and know in the weeks to come I will continue to see new ideas and experience a different way of teaching.

Although it is very frustrating not to be able to communicate with the children and help them out with work, like I would when teaching back home, I am going to make more of an effort to ask them to tell me the names of things in Dutch, I am also going to try to find different ways to communicate without speaking as Jim Henderson once said “[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”  With this in mind I hope I can leave a lasting impression on such a brilliant class.

Part of our route to school

CCEA(2007) NI curriculum, CCEA,Belfast.

Week Four

Personal

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. Maya Angelou (1993)

The windmill

I feel this quote really sums up my week as I really got to know the fellow Erasmus students better, I don’t just know their names, I now know more about their homes, families and a bit about what makes them who they are, I also know who will go get burgers with me and who likes to drink hot chocolate, I've made some wonderful friends here and as the quote states we have all laughed, cried, worried and eaten dinner together like one huge family. Vossenveld is starting to feel a lot more like home and I can navigate my way around Nijmegen on a bicycle quite well. The building were we have classes (the Pabo) is no longer a daunting space with a maze of rooms. I cannot properly express the joy and relief every morning seeing the windmill when cycling to class, because I know I am nearly at my destination and my legs will get a welcome break.

I am not cut out for this amount of physical activity which is only going to increase as I have to cycle an hour to my placement school. I know it has been said that the Netherlands are flat but I could swear that we are cycling up an incline to get to University.  I feel a lot more confident on my bike, although I have broken the breaks and the lights on it; I think it will be strange returning to Belfast and not being able to cycle everywhere.

Socializing in one of many pubs in Nijmegen

Over the week we have had dinner cooked for us by fellow Erasmus students, baked a lovely chocolate cake, spent many nights playing different card games and enjoyed a few social drink out in the centre of Nijmegen. They have a lot of clubs which stay open until five o’clock in the morning which is a far cry from Belfast when you have to come home at two. All of the places have interesting people who are very excited to chat to you about where you come from and how you have found yourself in the Netherlands. It is wonderful to get the whole group together and go out and dance all night at spinning bars which play music that we all haven’t heard in years (some of us not at all).  I feel that it is good to interact with so many diverse people, learning different card games and getting used to people talking different languages to each other. We are picking up lots of phrases mainly from French and Dutch, some useful and some not so much or so polite.

The GTNCI competence eight suggests that teachers should have a knowledge and understanding of the need to take account of the significant features of pupils’ cultures, languages and faith and to address the implications for learning arising from these. I feel that my time here on Erasmus will develop my skills in this competence, I will be more perceptive to children’s cultures, especially children with English as an additional language I will be more understanding of the difficulties that arise in not knowing the language of a country in great depth. I find myself thinking more before I speak so that people can understand me better; I use more hand gestures to put across my meaning and am more aware of my  pronunciation of some words, I feel this will aid me when teaching phonic work. I will also make a point from now on of improving how I construct sentences and be more aware of my grammar.

Angelou,M.(1993) Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Random House, New York.

General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland (GTCNI) Teaching: the Reflective Profession, Belfast, GTCNI. (Available through www.gtcni.org.uk)

Week Three

Professional

The excitement is increasing this week as we prepare for our two day placement in practice school, we will find out the name of the school this week and the partner who we are to work with. I myself am very nervous about what to expect and what differences I will see within the school environment, however I am put at ease by the Americans who have already been placed in a school. They have given glowing reports about their mentors and the students; our Irish friends Ciara and Michelle have also been in practice schools from September and they also have a lot of positive things to say about the children and teaching environment.

My picture for class

A lot of what we are learning in class focuses in on other cultures within the Erasmus group, this week we had to pick a picture that represent our country and then present it to the group. I choose to focus on the city of Belfast and the titanic, the past of northern Ireland has been asked by different people and I find sometimes it’s very hard to explain to people, but it puts us in better stead for the future when trying to explain something so deep routed in our past and present to children we will be teaching. Thankfully we found out that our fellow Erasmus don’t have to harsh an opinion of Northern Ireland as we originally thought.

Austrian castle

I found out a lot of interesting information about other people’s cultures, for example the people from Finland use saunas quite often and are missing them a lot when studying here. Latvia has a huge music festival every five years with around 13 thousand people in attendance. Austria has a lot of lakes, castles and mountains; from the pictures we were shown it is a truly beautiful country. Most interesting is the political situation in Belgium between the Dutch and French side, something that I was completely unaware of until I came here.

What I have learnt this week has sparked some creative thinking in how I would apply these types of discussions to a classroom, the NI Curriculum(2007) suggests that children should learn about some positive and negative changes in the locality caused by human/natural events and that some human events in the past impacted globally. Within the topic of children’s place within the world I think that it is very important to teach children about many different places and cultures as I myself has been inspired by other people’s cultures and greetings ( i.e. kissing on the cheek when greeting people or saying goodbye) and had the ability to compare them to my own culture and learning, I find that children would find it equally as interesting and beneficial. It is important that a child learns to find their own sense of place in the world, Owen and Ryan (2001) highlights that children when developing a sense of place, will start by showing an interest in the world in which they live ad then begin to notice differences and ask questions discussing what they like and dislike and how they can compare it to their own culture. The ability to compare and contrast cultures and environments is an important skill for children to learn.

CCEA (2007) Northern Ireland Curriculum, Belfast, CCEA.

Owen,D. Ryan,A.(2001)Teaching Geography 3-11,The Essential Guide ,London,Continuum.

Week Two

Cultural

So after only a few days of classes I got a whole week off to celebrate carnival; it’s a festival mostly celebrated in the south of the Netherlands. Due to this holiday a lot of the Erasmus group decided to take this time to return home or to visit different places around the Netherlands and alas Eimear and I were left to fend for ourselves for a while.

Venray parade

Eimear and I were very lucky to be invited by an Erasmus student from last semester Joyce, to visit her in Venray where we received a very warm welcome and were looked after so well by her and her parents .  There is nothing I can really compare carnival to from back home, it's a wonderful cultural difference. Everyone comes together to celebrate, the young and the old dress up in costumes, houses are decorated and the village all comes together with a sense of community that is breath-taking to celebrate. We watched the parade as it made its way through the town of Venray; each village had made a massive float, some were more intricately designed than others, with moving parts, on top of these floats were the prince and princesses that each village had elected, they had a lot of people joining them as well in special costumes dancing and rocking to the carnival music. Even though I don’t know the Dutch language I could still appreciate the music and recognize some of the themes they had chosen for their float. The day ended with a few drinks in the tent were the band was playing, it was packed with people all in costume enjoying the music and fun, in the Netherlands it is legal to drink from the age of sixteen, I found this very strange but they do not have the binge drinking problems that we have back in the UK.

Fieke and I 

The next day we met another former Erasmus student Fieke who still maintains a slight Belfast accent, it was great to see her again after so long and to spend the day exploring the town of Nijmegen. We walked across the Waalbrug and took in the views of the city and then had a catch up over coffee, I hope to visit her again soon in her home village.

Amsterdam

The week ended with a two day trip to Amsterdam, I have been dying to go from the moment we arrived. The first day we settled into our hostel near the dams square and then began exploring the sights to see. It is such a beautiful city; I love the mix of old and new architecture and the canals that flow throughout. On one bridge I found locks with couple’s names on it, and I can understand exactly when walking through the streets and over bridges why people say it is romantic. On the second day after 10 years of waiting I finally got to see the Anne Frank museum, it was a heart wrenching and sobering experience to be in the place where she spent two years hiding from people who wanted to take her life because of her religion. There are a lot of lesson we can learn from the past and this museum brings a lot of those to mind. Her father Otto Frank the only one to survive after their betrayal dedicated the rest of his life to publishing Anne’s diary and to the museum to educate the future generations,I leave you with a quote from Otto.

We cannot change what happened anymore. The only thing we can do is to learn from the past and to realize what discrimination and persecution of innocent people means. I believe that it’s everyone’s responsibility to fight prejudice. Otto Frank, 1970.

Week One

Personal

"If you're twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them - wherever you go" Anthony Bourdain (2010)

Darren and I on the plane

I had this quote in mind when I boarded the plane to start my journey to the Netherlands to start Erasmus and what a journey it was, it’s hard to believe that I've only been here for one week. The journey started In Belfast international airport with the surprise of our lovely friends meeting us at the airport with a poster to wish us well, it was an emotional goodbye but that was quickly followed by excitement when we arrived at Schiphol airport. Apart from a certain incident with an escalator were I lost one of my bags and had to run back up the downward moving stairs to get it the journey was very easy.

The  'Family room'

When we arrived at halls we didn't have any buddies like we would have expected from Stranmillis, we felt a little bit lost and the feeling only got worse when we discovered that there was no Wi-Fi. Then we heard the welcome sound of other voices apart from our own and ran out to meet our flatmates, two lovely people from Belgium, I have not spent a day so far without laughing so much my ribs hurt.

We met the rest of the Erasmus group and the people who would be looking after us, Magda and Ben, on Friday and it was such a warm welcome. There are people from all over Europe; we were introduced to two girls from Dublin who have been here from September and were very excited to have some other ‘Irish’ people arriving, so they have been showing us around and helping us get our footing in this wonderful diverse and beautiful city.

Our welcome at pabo

Our classes started on Monday and unfortunately we didn't have bikes then so we were a bit late as we got lost by walking in the wrong direction, I showed a new found skill in map reading and we arrived eventually.We had a brief introduction to the Dutch education system; I would say that it is similar to our own in some ways but very different to ours in others. For example Dutch children take a test at the age of 11/12 to decide what secondary education they fall into, however there are three different routes that they can take, they are all trained to have a career regardless of how socially desirable that career may be, all students must stay in education until they have gained qualification.

My beautiful bike

We finally bought bikes on Tuesday and have been cycling around the town ever since, we have to cycle about 25 minutes to the university everyday so we may come back to Northern Ireland a lot more healthy than we left. I enjoy the freedom of having a bike and being able to take trips into the town to have coffee and not feel bad eating a huge chocolate muffin.

Shopping in Nijmegen

Overall the first week has been one to remember, I've made friends in one week which I know I will have for the rest of my life and am looking forward to the rest of my time here, learning about other cultures and learning more about myself along the way.


A,Bourdain. (2010) Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook,Bloomsbury Publishing, Great Britain.