I have been back for a week from the residential element of our pilot teacher training course. It is billed as an intensive week and that it certainly was. The teaching culture project is piloting a blended learning course for European teachers in adult education which seeks to raise awareness of inter-cultural issues in the classroom. We ran the first pilot last year and adpated the second round in the light of feedback from the first round.
This second residential took place in León in northern Spain. This is an attractive old town sufficiently off the beaten tourist track to provide a real inter-cultural experience for our participants. The idea is to schedule class based activities in the morning and external activities in the afternoon during which the participants can get a taste of what life in León is really like. These included introductory lessons in Spanish or Leonnaise for those who knew some Spanish and a treasure hunt through the town where participants were expected to consult locals if they got stuck. One of these activities was a job shadowing afternoon which went down very well. This was partly due to the fact that the organisers chose the people to be shadowed very carefully to match the interests of the participants.
For once I took my family with me and even my two daughters had an inter-cultural experience by spending a couple of hours in one of the Spanish schools where the pupils practised their English by interviewing them about Denmark. My elder daughter found the Spanish class just as noisy as her class in Denmark so no improvement there!
The second round has led to much more discussion among the participants than the first round and the dilemma now is to try and attribute some reasons for this.
Was it because we made some changes, avoiding the long European summer holiday period for example and giving the online module a story metaphor so that participants could see more easily how the different units connected to each other?
Could it be that we tutors were more familiar with the course tools and that that confidence communicated itself to the participants?
Could the first group of language teachers have been less willing to discuss things online than a group of teachers of other subjects? (I find this one difficult to believe).
Or is it simply due to the different personalities of the participants in each round?
The problem is that the funding allowed us to try two rounds and we will not have the opportunity to make more trials unless we offer the course on a fully commercial basis. It would be nice to believe that there is a causal relationship between the observed improvements and the adjustments we made though.
Parallel to the teaching sessions the project partners held project meetings to assess progress and make future plans.
Keywords: course teachers of adults, European, inter-cultural, project, Teaching Culture!
