Inclusive Internalization - for teachers!

For a couple of years now our school, and perhaps most of all me, has been collaborating with a school in Denmark, Nordagerskolen. We were there with students for the first time in January and you can read at least a bit about that in a former post. Since the first time I came to Ringe, the village where the school is located, I have felt very much at home. The school is a very calm place and in inhabited by very hard working and inspired teachers and pupils. One of the profiles the pupils can choose is the international one, and that profile is the reason that we first came in contact. There are many reasons to collaborate with this school, and I would have liked to wherever it was located. However, there are also great benefits in the fairly nearby location.

Denmark and Sweden are neighbours, sister states, and have a lot in common. It is possible to understand at least some of the content in a conversation with the help of the other language. In the south of Sweden nature is very similar to the Danish nature. However, everything is not the same in the two countries. Our curriculas are quite different and so is the recent history of the countries. The similarities and differences makes a comparing collaboration very interesting.

Ringe is a village outside Odense, a city in Fyn that is possible to reach by train in an hour and a half from Copenhagen. Lund is quite near the bridge to Denmark, and the whole trip takes about three hours, Compared to the other exchanges we have this is a short and cheap travel, and that made it possible to go there in January without the pupils paying for it.

In August this same distance will make it possible for all the staff to go to Odense and have a conference there. The first afternoon we will all visit Nordagerskolen. This makes me very happy and extremely proud. The big drawback with the International projects we start can be that some of the staff and the pupils feel excluded and that the trips are considered exclusive. Therefore it is with great joy I will invite all of my colleagues to collaborate with a colleague abroad, a person that they will actually meet in first person in August. We will be in Ringe for three hours just to talk to someone with the same subjects about similarities and differences in how we work, be inspired and perhaps start to collaborate. Nordagerskolen is a school that work with Google in a similar way that we do. I am very much looking forward to this!