When I first started working on this project I did know that I wanted to offer my students contact and learning with their peers in another country. But other than that I didn’t really know how to start or how to get the project in motion.
After some initial contact via e-mail with my colleagues in Kassel I think we knew that we had the same goals and similar thoughts about how to progress the work. We thought we should use whatever theme in our history courses that we were examining and try use that as a stepping stone for our students. But together with work in general, working with Digital Bridges proved a bit to challenging and we temporarily put the project on ice.
In mid or end of March we resumed our contact. Now we had a pretty good understanding of which pupils in our classes that might be interesting for the project. My thinking was that I should approach students who are good at understanding history, have a high level of motivation and are able to plan and execute work autonomously. I settled with my colleagues that our common ground would be the time surrounding the enlightenment. I also received a list with a number of interested pupils from one of my two colleagues in Kassel. Now I had something to really work with!
I singled out a list for myself with the exact number of students corresponding to the e-mail by my colleagues in one of my groups. I approached them together but outside of class and presented the project in broad terms. They were really interested in it but also a bit anxious since some of the details remained somewhat unclear. From the e-mail with my colleagues I’ve got phone numbers for their students which I promptly handed to my students, asking them to set up a group chat in the app WhatsApp. Days later I shared a document with them [swedish] where I outlined the setting, goal and means to reach this goal for them.
My task for my students were in short terms to have them describe the French revolution of 1789. After they’d done this I wanted them to study some of its consequences for Sweden and in Germany in the 19th century. Here I urged my students to use the contact with their peers in Kassel to get ideas for how to tackle this somewhat pioneering type of layout for this exam. Rest of the class that the students worked with were progressing as normal with a standard test on the horizon.
During the coming weeks my project students grew with two more students in my other history class since I got two more names from my other colleague in Kassel. They were given the same task and I worked in pretty much the exact same fashion with them aside from them having a couple of weeks less to work with. I tried following up on my students work during class but they were, as intended of sorts, very self-reliant and seemed to thrive from the help from their peers in both Sollentuna and Kassel.
For the exam I wanted my students to both prepare a short paper with their findings and have an hour-long seminar with their class mates who’s involved in the project. The seminar was partly a chance for my students to orally explain facts about the period, ask questions about their peers papers. But it was partly a way of them getting to (orally) evaluate what they think of the project, how they benefited from it and so forth.
Generally speaking my students liked the project. A couple of them are interested in doing their “gymnasie arbete” (~ facharbeit) and the learning trip to Kassel and so forth. However they were hesitant on how well my task I gave them corresponding with what the students in Kassel were working on. They experienced a slight gap between what they thought they were “supposed” to work on and what they’ve gathered that the pupils in Kassel were expected to work with. Despite this, all students who took part in the seminar thought the work was endearing, interesting, thought-provoking and a bit hard! 🙂
Student texts (anonymized) A & B.
I’ll follow-up with thoughts on how to progress this work further down the line.
Have a great summer!
Christian.