Life Stories

The seminar by Claudia Finkbeiner and Regina Kaminski, funded by the Quality Pact for Teaching (QPL), is an interdisciplinary course as part of the PRONET projects P9 and P5 as well as BIKA Kassel (Bilingual Kassel), which systematically combines and advances the content contained therein. PRONET is part of the "Quality Offensive Teacher Training". Funding is provided by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

The service learning seminar focuses on action-oriented implementation options for bilingual teaching focusing on identity construction in the target language English and in the subject of history, which have been tested in P5. In addition, one of the main concerns is to expand the concept of "culture" of future teacher candidates to include the dimensions of age as well as individual, family and collective historical dimensions. A particular interest of the seminar lies in the construction of one's own life stories, both in the present and in the past. In order to implement the approach, the "ABCs of Cultural Understanding and Communication" (Schmidt, 1998; Schmidt & Finkbeiner, 2006; Finkbeiner & Lazar, 2015) will be used as a model and vehicle. Intergenerational tandems between students and senior citizens are formed and a joint "intergenerational conference" is held.

This project is embedded in PRONET (professionalization through networking) which is part of the “Teacher Training Quality Campaign” funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It is in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Christine Pflüger.

In this project a learning environment is developed in which students learn about the principles and implementation of the ABC’s of Cultural Understanding and Communication. This model was developed by Prof. Dr. Patricia R. Schmidt and adapted by Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner and facilitates understanding of the self and of the other. The special focus of this particular project in the CLIL context is on history.

After writing their autobiography (Step A), the students interview someone who is different from them with respect to age. Other characteristics can be language, ethnicity, gender etc.. Student-senior pairs are formed in order to cooperate within the frame of the ABCs-Model. Each student interviews one senior and writes the person’s biography (Step B). In a third step, the students compare their own autobiography with the biography of their partner in order to find and analyze similarities and differences (Step C). In addition, students receive the chance to think about implementations for learner groups such as in schools during a third step (Step Cs).  In one cycle (winter semester 18/19), a student–senior conference was held in which the stories were presented. The project aim is to contribute to an inter-generational understanding as well as to raise the participants’ language awareness, especially regarding the rhetoric of age. Another aim of the project is to develop a deeper understanding for the significance of historical events by comparing one’s own perspective to the perspective of others and thereby changing perspective.  In order to measure the impact of the learning environment a pre- and post-survey is administered to all participants and in–process data will be collected.