Setmana educativa blanquerna

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Games and dances around the world and representative schools

On Friday morning we did 3 different activities. First we assisted to a presentation about a school called “Escola Baliri i Reixach”. It was a very interesting presentation because it was a different school that we were used to know. This school is situated in a poor neighbour of Badalona. The teacher who was making the presentation could tell us that most of the students in his school are immigrants. He explained us how they deal with all the problems, the family, the language, the lack of interest, the different cultures… Always it is great to see different types of schools and how they face problems. Something that we liked and surprised us is that they managed to meet  one day all the families of the school and also the school in order to do more group cohesion.The second activity was games around the world. In this activity Oriol Ripoll showed us different games and their meaning. It was funny because we realized that we could play games that dealt with thinking skills and others which dealt with team work . So we took a conclusion, by playing games that maybe have a different origen from our country we can improve our basic skills.Finally, the last activity was dances around the world. In this activity we started doing a polish dance just by following what the instructor was doing. Then we had to introuced our self by singing and dancing. And finally we said goodbye to the activity with a canon of a Taiwan song in which we had to coordinate xylophones, sticks and people dancing at the same time. We found interesting a sentence that said the instructor: “If you wanna be teachers you will have to use music in your classroom”.

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Visit to the CCCB. (World Press Photo)

In this activity we went to the CCCB ( Centre Cultural Contemporani de Barcelona). There was an exposition of lots of pictures which some of them shown the stories of the refugees, or the countries who were in war. These photos transmitted us lots of emotions such as solitude, indignation, injustice,… It has been a great experience because these pictures has shown us the reality that sometimes the media hides.

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Xavier Bosch talk ( Direcció General de la immigració)

In this talk Xavier Bosch has explained us what immigration is and also the situation of the Syrian refugees in Europe.

According to Xavier immigration is the human mobility and it exists since the firsts humans appeared. Nowadays globalization has caused a rise in this mobilization.

The immigration that receives a country means people who come there to work. Those people can provide lots of things such as knowledge or cultural links between different cultures ( in this way it helps to see the world different and see further.) So the countries which receives immigration also has some challenges:

   - Keep the social cohesion.

   - Not to put in danger the country identity.

   - They have to guarantee immigration to be ordered and also guarantee the           human rights.

   - Society has to guarantee the interrelation and facilitate the mixture.

   - Avoid the social exclusion and build a unique society.

Xavier Bosch also has talk about the “ Unitat de Direcció política d’immigracio”  and his basic conceps ( Continuity and mainstreaming). Their job consists on facilitate several things to immigrants :

   - Give a warm welcome, and facilitate tools to fit.

   - Facilitate  the equal opportunity.

   - Facilitate health.

   - Facilitate the acces to education.

   - Facilitate the integration ( create a common culture).

Xavier Bosch has explained what is going on nowadays with all the syrian refugees. The refugeesare helped by ONG and several administrations during 6 months. He also said that the responsable of the refugees in a country is the Interior minister. The situation is that the State doesn’t come to an agreement with the number of the refugees, the UE doesn’t allowed them to enter, they don’t know what to do with those who are already there, and in Catalonia there are trying  someway to host refugees.

There are some countries which accept refugees, Germany, Austria, Suecia. However there’re some which don’t have the same solidarity but they have refugees anyway, Spain, Grece, Italy. Finally countries such as GB, Polska, Eslovaquia don’t accept any refugee.

Catalunya, in a future wants to be an opened country, conciliatory and solidar.

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Visiting the 3rd student in his/her practice school, Marta Molina

On Tuesday and Wenesday I went to Esparraguera with  my padrina. We were in Pau Vilà school.

TUESDSAY

When we arrived at the class the teacher called Sarai introduced me to the her students. In the first two hours they did something that surprised me a lot. The teacher said during this two hours they would do 2 things, one thing would be dealing with the project of the whole class and the other thing would  be working with de divisions. After explaining that the class divided in two groups. On the one hand, during the first hour the group who was working on the project had to do an investigation to found out an specific teacher in school who knew a lot about "mandarines", so they took the blackboard and they started to do a brainstorm of lots of question that they could do, and finally they choose 3 question, and went out of the class and started to ask to all teachers of school. On the other hand, the other part of the class started to practise division in pairs with a mini whiteboard and if they had any doubt they asked to us ( I liked because they saw me as another teacher and they also asked me a lots of things and that made me feel like a teacher in some way). During the second hour they changed the activity. Then had the chance to assist to english class in which I could see that they do lots of dinamic activities and they don't use books at all, only a notebook.

In the afternoon they had two hours to organize they folder and their "arxivador", I helped kids to organize and to correct some " fitxes" (I found interesting that if the kid wanted to do it on the floor or in another sit they were allowed).

WEDNESDAY

On Wednesday morning they did a dictation, in which the teacher told me to wrtie it on the blackborad so they could correct. After that they did P.E, where I could see that despite being a quiet and calm class, in P.E they were not able to solve the problems by themselves, they were always complaining to the teacher. To finish the morning they got Spanish class, in which they did a reading comprension (and as in the dictation the teacher let me write on the blackborad the answers).

In the afternoon I assisted to the most interesting and funny class, it was English. They had to do as if they were in a restaurant kids were the costumers and the teacher and I were the waiters. It was a kind of play beacuse then, after practising it, teacher reacorded that play.

These two days have been really useful for me as a future teacher because I have had the chance to see a very diferent way of teaching, in this case a very liberal way in which teacher allowed students to do lots of things. I learnt that I will have to train the patient with kids in class.

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Visiting the 3rd student in his/her practice school, Marta Barceló

On tuesday and wednesday I went to the school called Alexandre Gal·lí with the student from Blanquerna Laura Aprici. This school is situated in the Passeig marítim of Barcelona city, it was a beautiful place because you had the beach just in front of the school, you could see the sea from the classroom. The teachers in general were very nice with us and they explained lots of things about how they do their classes and about how the students are. They also let us do lots things for helping them during the class. The students of this school were very different between them, they came from different cultures and in general from poor families. That explains why some of them had a difficult situation at home and then they didn’t behave very well in class. For example there was that kid named Brahim whose mum had been mistreat by his father and she even tried to kill herself. Another case was a girl named Flora that was living here in Spain only for some years, she had came with her mother leaving all their family from Xile. The reason why they came here was that the mother was studying a grade here. Abril was a girl that explained to me that her parents had divorced because her father cheated on her mother with another women. Now she is living with her mother but his father wants her to go to another country to live with him and she doesn’t know what will happen with her. There was another kid called Dani who had a mental disease and sometimes he didn’t control himself and did violent actions, he also had difficulties for sleeping at night and thats why he was very tired in class. Finally I would like to remark the case of Paul, a kid whose parents didn’t pay any type of attention to him and in class always tried to draw the others attention. It was also usual that some of the students fought during the leisure time or sometimes during class. Because all of that for teachers was difficult to control the class and that is why they had a specialist that came to control the more conflictive kids and make them behave.

During this two days I learned a lot of things about how to deal with students that don’t behave very well and some strategies to keep the students focused in the activity that you want to develop in class. One day they used ipads in maths class for practicing calculation. With the ipads they were more motivated and in general the activity went well from one little exception of one student who tried to play to a different game with the ipad.

We, as all the teachers from the school, had two hours for having lunch and we did it with two other students from Blanquerna that were doing the same as us. During lunch we all shared our experiences in class.

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CINEFORUM, “La professora d’història”

The last activity we did on monday was a cineforum of the film called “La professora d’història” which is a french film from 2014 made by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar.

This film talks about a teacher called Anne Gueguen who is a school teacher of history and that she cares about her students problems. In the film we see that she has to do classes in a very difficult group of very different students (from different origins and religion) which aren’t motivated at all. So that is the reason why she decides to make them participate in a national competition about what mens to be an adolescent in a nazi camp. Anne uses all her energy and creativity to draw her students attention and motivate them. During the course students star to be more open between them and they start to believe in themselves.

After watching the movie we discussed about the more rellevant things about the film. We splited up in groups and each one had to talk and discuss about a determinated question. After that each group had to resume their answer to the question with three words and we wrote all the words on the whiteboard and we explained why we had chosed that specific words.

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COLOQUIUM, “A peu de Guerra amb els refugiats”

The first activity we did on monday was a coloquium called “En peu de Guerra amb els refugiats”. Two journalists came to give us a talk: Toni Muñoz and Gemma Parellada.

Toni Muñoz has been a special envoy to the earthquake in L'Aquila (Italy), in Bamako (Mali) for the coverage of the kidnapping of AlQaeda of the catalan aid workers and in Libya during the Arab revolts.

He explained us how hard it was to see people who had losed it all during the earthquake in L’Aquila, it was his first time living something like that and it really afected him to see people in this situation. For the coverage of the kidnapping of AlQaeda he saw a very low live level, even lower from the one he saw during his stay in L’Aquila. The arab revolts or how it is also called: Arab Spring he explains that people was very afraid of the war because they were in danger all the time, they could be killed anywhere and anytime. That is the reason why people tried to escape from there and the number of refugees raised. Finally, he told us the definition of refugee which is essential for understanding everything we do during the week. A refugee is a person who is very afraid because he has to go from where he doesn’t want, he has lived the death from very close, he doesn’t see a very clear future, he has losed it all, he lives in bad conditions in refugee camps and usually they are asylum from other countries is bad.

Gemma Parellada works basically in Africa doing complain reports and she is a freelance. She has been in El Congo, Burundi, Burkina Faso, and other places from where she explains the hard reality lived there.

She says that she is a freelance because media is not very interested in Africa. Nowadays we are living a refugee crisis, in which most of the refugees basically come from Siria, it’s like a new wave of refugees, but in Africa this happens from many years ago. She says that in many cases poor countries also asylum lots of refugees, so this is not a probleblem only for the rich countries. For example, in Kenya ther is the biggest refugee camp in the world, called Daddab. In Africa there are lots of conflicts and wars in which media doesn’t pay much attention and they are the cause for a lot of people to leave their countre and become a refugee. For example this would be the case of Central African Republic, where they are living a very big war.

But how does this affect to education? The most important for this people is to survive so they need to have their basic needs covered in the frist place. Children learn basically by oral tradition. So, because education is not a priority it has been very afected. In some refugee camps they organize some improvised structures that pretend to cover the function of educating the children.

[mbarcelomolina-blog]

Hello, we are Marta Molina and Marta Barceló, two students from Blanquerna. In this tumblr we are going to post all about the different activities we have done during the  Educational practice and reflection week (SPRE) and also our own experience and the reflexions we have made during the week.

SPRE goes from the monday 9th to the friday 13th of this november 2015. It is scheduled in the studies of first grade of Primary Education in English from Blanquerna.

SPRE consists in a set of practical activities to learn, work and delve into a subject of special social interest , and particularly for the teaching profession.

This is a week of reflective practice while raising awareness. As recent events that have occurred, especially in Europe, this year the focus through which the activities of the week are articulated is "Asylum : immigrants and refugees."