Goethe Institute Organizes Teaching Seminars
On October 24-30, the Goethe Institute organized teaching-methodological seminars for Georgian, Armenian, Ukrainian and Russian pedagogues in Borjomi, a resort town in south-central Georgia.
Renowned expert Sabine Quenot met with teachers to discuss topics including environmental protection, green pedagogy and sustainable development. Each seminar lasted 6 hours and was held in the framework of the large-scale project of Goethe Institute named ‘Unite for a Sustainable Future,’ being carried out with the support of the Georgian Ministry of Education and Science and the Georgian Ministry of Environmental Protection.
The seminars, as well as the project itself introduce the implementation of the new method of teaching German language in German language schools of Georgia in the direction of sustainable development. Namely, it comprises the integration of environmental protection, green pedagogy and topics of sustainable development into the German language lessons, which is included in the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) method.
Sabine Quenot is actively involved in the international projects of Goethe Institute, holding seminars in Germany, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Russia. Therefore, there was great interest among the Georgian teaching populace. “It was a seminar for 22 persons and they came from 4 countries and nearly half could not speak German- but they worked together to help each other understand,” she said. “CLIL comes from the American system now very popular in Germany. The teachers were very interested and had many ideas to work with students and make projects. For example, they had ideas to make costumes from video cassettes as a part of up-cycling. They also suggested walking more and using cars less often. Where normally we teach the names of objects, at CLIL we teach what these objects are made of, where they come from, meaning the environment, how the colors are produced, etc. I can say that the communication was very good. The teachers here are very open, friendly and motivated. They understand very quickly what the matter is, too,” Quenot said.
GEORGIA TODAY also spoke to Georgian teacher of German language, Lali Gabitashvili from Tbilisi school 52: “This is an extremely interesting project. It shows that we also should have outdoor lessons, integrated into other subjects. I am eager to hold such lessons twice or thrice a semester. Pupils were very happy as it is very interactive and creative and no longer resembles a monologue- requiring more involvement, which means that they are learning to put what they have learnt into practice.”
Eike Pockrandt, lesson expert in Georgia and Azerbaijan from Goethe Institute, said: “Goethe Institute promotes the CLIL method in many countries. This is a totally innovative thing for this region. Our expectations were more than fulfilled. This project has such a dynamic; we never expected it would connect so many people. There were a lot of local initiatives. We opened the view for teachers of different subjects to integrate their methods into German language lessons. Now we will focus on German again and we want to ensure that the quality of German is really good.”
All participant teachers were presented a Teaching-Methodological Book created on the basis of CLIL, which was published on the initiative of Goethe Institute and with the support of the Vienna University of Agriculture and Environment.
Maka Lomadze