Week Five - Cultural

Week 5 – Cultural

‘No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive’, (M.Gandhi, 1931). 

An important factor of going on these trips and schools visits is becoming aware of the different cultures and schooling types. The knowledge and understanding will give us the insight into the different cultures in which we need, which will become useful when teaching foreign pupils when we progress into the teaching world. It will professionally and personally benefit us also as we will feel more at ease, comfortable and understanding when teaching pupils whom do not have English as their mother tongue.

During an information day we attended there were a few guest speakers of different primary schools explaining information on their school, the ways of teaching and the pupils. One teacher, Mister Ben, stood out to me a lot. He was a male teacher teaching in primary school and had a very interesting powerpoint, which the health and safety officers in Ireland would hate to see.

It clearly is a different culture from being at home as pupils as young as the age of 6 years old were building projects using hammers, nails and small saws. One little boy in particular loved hammering nails into pieces of wood, so Mister Ben would let him do this, at certain parts of the day, in the corner while he was explaining other tasks. As a class group, the pupils made a large structural projects such as a wooden castle, the powerpoint developed into showing pupils up ladders at ceiling height building by themselves! Although as I come from a technology and design background I love the way the subject is being incorporated into the primary schools here, especially for the boys as it is vital I think especially at primary schools to get more of a ‘male emphasis’ on things but the extent of this is far too much in my opinion. 

When quizzing Mister Ben on the safety side of things regarding these projects he continued in saying that the pupils are ‘mature’ and ‘aware of the dangers’ which I find it hard to believe for most 16 year olds never mind 6 year olds. From having the experience of little cousins the same ages as these pupils I can assure you they are not mature enough to climb up a 10 foot ladder to hammer nails into wood! At home we do not have any technology and design aspect in the primary school environment which personally I hope your culture will change to include this, within reason, for the pupils to get an insight into technology and design before reaching secondary level.

After visiting numerous primary schools on our Erasmus trip we were very excited to eventually visit our first secondary school – even if we had to attend on a Sunday while the rest of our class were sleeping! We visited the Maasmechelen Secondary School which was one of the most enjoyable visited we have attended. The school focussed upon ‘learning through technology for the world’ meaning they were a specialist school of technology and design with extra vocational subjects in which can be studied also such as welding, car mechanic, lorry driving and many more. From the first viewing of the main building it looks like your regular school having language classes, science classes, geography etc. until we continue out the back of the school where there are large workshops for technology and design with hundreds of machines.

A few of the many machines in the Maasmechelen School

A 13 year old pupil working with metal

Talking to a few of the different pupils in the school we realised a lot were Turkish, not having English as their mother tongue, which were attracted before 1980 to the coalmines (75% of the pupils in the school are children of immigrants). Nadir, a Turkish pupil, was using a £50,000 machine to manufacture his project which was astonishing to watch. He made me a small token to keep featuring his favourite Belgium football team, Genk.

The Genk football team souvenir Nadir manufactured