| Reflections
on the World Youth Meeting 2000 |
| Karen Thomsen |
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00/08/12
1. Introduction
Only in April 2000 I was informed about this
year's WYM in Nagoya and asked to come with a student. In 1998 first contacts
had been established between the Seiryo Commercial High School and the Midori-High-School
in Nagoya and our vocational school in Kappeln/Schleswig in the north of
Germany. In April 1999 I had the chance to visit
Midori-High School and ever since Ms Kuga and
her students and my students and I have exchanged E-mails and digital pictures
on a more or less regular basis.
When I was informed about a possible
participation in this year's WYM I had the following expectations:
Students and teachers from Korea, Japan,
Taiwan, the US and Germany had all worked very hard in the previous weeks of
the conference. Most of us had only got to know each other via E-mail,
questionnaires and digital pictures and some groups had managed to organise
videoconferencing in advance.
After an intense working phase in spring /
summer I was curious about a face-to-face meeting with all those great people I
had got hundreds of E-mails from.
I had an image of many participants and
expected somehow that this image would be confirmed. I wanted to learn about
the work of other groups and I thought that there would be time to plan our
future work and maybe to make new contacts to people and schools.
2. Our preparations, presentation and some
personal reflections
I must admit that our common presentation with
Midori-High School students and my student Melanie had not been finished when
we left Germany on 17 July due to other commitments at my school. But luckily
Ms Kuga and I had agreed on a draft, we had taken digital pictures and there
were a few days left before the conference. It was new for Melanie and me to
see how many students and teachers spend time at Japanese schools with various
activities during the summer break. In Germany our schools are usually only
visited by some very eager teachers who need to get some preparations done, but
you will hardly find any students!
Anyhow, thus it was quite "normal" to
meet on a couple of days with the students at school to finish off our
preparations for the presentation.
Despite language problems between our students,
it was good to see that they grew closer very quickly and that they eagerly
tried to find all sorts of communication to make themselves understood. Melanie
had a chance to experience homestay
with Yukari's family and I bet that this experience was one of the very
special and most wonderful experiences she had.
The final touches on the presentation were done
at the hotel on the night before 23 July.
The college students were excellent support for
us, because we had some trouble with different software versions on our
computers.
In my opinion the conference as such was very
successful. The careful planning and all the work that had been put into the
preparations turned out to be a perfect mosaic! - I suppose the structure of
the conference - first day getting to know each other with the help of the rope
activity, get together in the evening
and second day presentations, speeches and get together - was the key
for the success.
The rope activity broke the ice and it was
wonderful to see that students got along so well despite very different
cultures, experiences they had so far in their lives and personal environments.
My main expectation to contribute to a
successful conference and to learn from other contributions was fully met. On
top we had the great opportunity to take part in the trip to Ise - ideal to
learn more about Japanese culture and to spend time with each other.
Participating in the conference with Melanie
encouraged me to go on with our work and even to improve our work.. Ms Kuga and
I reflected that our students improved their English language skills a lot and
that they really enjoy writing and getting E-mails. They suddenly see
that there is a point of learning languages if
they want to share experiences with somebody from another country than their
own. It was fantastic to see how hard the Japanese students wanted Melanie to
have a really good time. They saw that they must do something against language
barriers, and I think that our students got really convinced how fantastic it
is to learn and speak other languages and to use the Internet as a basic means
of communication because we can only have a limited number of face-to-face
meetings.
On top Ms Kuga from Midori-High School and I
applied for a project initiated by the companies Oberon in Dusseldorf and
Uchida in Tokyo/Nagoya in which interpreters will support us to overcome
language barriers.
I would like to thank everybody who made it
possible for us to come and to participate in this great venue also on behalf
of my student Melanie. I am looking forward to our future work and hope to
welcome Japanese visitors in Germany in the near future.
Schleswig, 11 August 2000 Karen Thomsen
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