Week 7

Personal Development

This week has gone very quickly for me. Due to my busy schedule, I feel I have only just completed week 6’s blog, nonetheless we have got to my seventh Thursday and it is again time to take a deep breath and reflect back on what I have been up to.

I’m not going to lie – this week has been my favourite. I had a very special delivery on Thursday morning, which meant getting up early, getting all my work completed, and travelling all the way across the city to Copenhagen Airport. The arrival of my first visitor from home (my boyfriend, Ashley) was definitely worth the early start and what felt like the longest metro journey ever! He spent four days here and I loved showing him around the city, favourite places that I have talked about endlessly, and where I live. Usually when we go on a trip, Ashley is the one who is in charge of the map, and consequently in charge of making sure we don’t get lost, so it was such a great feeling to be responsible and not need a map… well we only needed a map once. Of course four days goes very quickly when you’re enjoying the company of someone you haven’t seen in six weeks. Before I knew it, I was back in Copenhagen Airport. It was sad to have to say goodbye, and strange not leaving the airport on an aeroplane. Instead I was going ‘home’ in Denmark. Before leaving the airport, I got my first Starbucks in a month and a half. To make me feel less guilty about the ridiculous price I had just paid for a small coffee (£5), I thought about how I have been able to make it six weeks away from home and I have been enjoying my time here so much. With Spring in the air, there is a lot more to do, and I am excited about explorations in the next part of my time here.

Our classes at university end before the Easter holidays, so we have been very busy with assignments and projects this week. I am not sure if it was planned with Ireland in mind, but our class on Wednesday (St Patrick’s Day) was cancelled, so we organised to go into Copenhagen with our Erasmus class. Some of us painted our faces, of course, and made sure we were dressed appropriately in green. The weather has been great this week, and so we were able to have a picnic in the park, before going to the St Patrick’s Day Event at the City Hall which consisted of Irish Dancing and Music. There was then a parade through the city before more music and dancing. I was really shocked to discover that the event is in its sixth year and very popular – there were so many people from all over the world celebrating the day. I thought being out of Northern Ireland for the 17th March was going to be strange, but Copenhagen made me feel very at home!

Cultural Development

As I have mentioned, this week we have had a lot of university work to get organised. For our Visual Culture class, our group was given the task of going to Gefionspringvandet (The Gefion Fountain) and Kunstindustrimuseet (The Danish Art and Design Museum). On our trip, we were asked to note our feelings towards both places, and the importance of them with Danish Culture. I had visited the fountain before, on the way to The Little Mermaid, and remembered how fascinated I was with the size of the fountain (the largest monument in Copenhagen). The story behind it is also interesting – the Goddess, Gefion was told by the Swedish King, Gylfe, that she could have as much land as she could plough in one evening. Gefion transformed her four sons into strong oxen and ploughed through the land. The oxen were so powerful they pulled the land out of the water and made the island of Zealand, where Copenhagen is situated today. The magical story is very apt for such a picturesque setting, and I am looking forward to returning to the fountain in the summer time when the water is not frozen and I can make a wish!

When I was first told about visiting the Kunstindustrimuseet, I was a little disappointed, to be honest. It is not the kind of place I would choose to go to, and I was unsure of what the museum would hold. To my surprise, the exhibition that we were investigating – Utopias and Reality was actually very good! It reminded me of going to IKEA, with all the furniture and fashionable design! The types of collections on display were very similar to my taste in art and design so I really enjoyed taking pictures of all the colours and patterns. From walking through the exhibition, I felt that I was getting a good indication of the Danish design and architecture that I have seen in houses, university and cafés. The main thing that stuck out for me, apart from the creativity, was the practicality of the furniture. Everything seems efficient, well thought out, and a true reflection of the great design and architecture around the city. We were instantly drawn to the Poul Henningsen room. A key figure in Danish design, Poul hennignsen (1894 - 1967), was an enthusiastic supporter of functionalism. His design was focused on new technological progress, social awareness, cheap everyday objects, light and enlightenment...

"We do not regard it as sufficient that an object fits the times; it must perforce comprise an ideal shining that goes beyond time, one attempt at cultural advancement."

- Poul Henningsen

I feel quite culturally awakened this week, as on Thursday I went to the Concert House, ‘Koncert Huset ‘ - a newly built building with a huge main hall and four smaller halls. The building, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, is so striking, both inside and outside. It was not hard to miss it when we came off the metro and saw this huge blue cube! We went to the classical concert ‘Great Dance’ which featured a Youth Ensemble and a Cuban act. I have only been to a few classical concerts in my lifetime, so the experience was still quite new to me - I had a really enjoyable evening taking in the beautiful hall and the great music.

Professional Development

Our pre-reading for Multicultural Education this week was a webpage on the ‘Storyline Method.’ We have worked a little with such a method in Stranmillis, so it was really interesting discussing the experiences of the Erasmus class. It was really good to talk about a familiar topic that everyone had an opinion on. We broke up into our practise groups for the second half of the class and were given our tasks for the presentation on Monday. Our task is to prepare a model school for multicultural teaching using modern principles. The presentation is to include a school ethos, core teaching principles, plans for the classroom and activities, a job advertisement, and any other relevant information. We have been meeting up during this week to produce our presentation, and it has been very interesting. I am in a group with Greg and two girls from Austria. We are all studying secondary education, and some of our subjects are similar. Apart from that, I was very aware that we all have very different experiences in schools. Saying this, I have been pleasantly surprised at how easy I find it working together on the project, and I am learning a lot about ideas for multicultural education as well as general classroom principles. We also had great fun preparing our classroom out of Duplo for the presentation!

We were again divided into our practise groups for Comparative Education. We are working towards a project question which we will be able to investigate once we are out on school placement next month. The overall theme of the project is ‘What makes a good school,’ which is a very broad topic. Within this, we have thought about ideas for our specific question – it was nice to realise that we all had similar ideas in mind, and finally came up with a question: ‘how we can teach more than just words.’ Even at this point of our planning, the question is very broad, and we all have ideas on how we could go about investigating this within a school. We have decided to concentrate on the more social side of education, to see how it compares to our home education systems. I think we will be very busy with the differences and similarities, as there is a lot to observe!