Minority Children

The Intercultural Centre Dornbirn

In 1987 the course Intercultural Learning was created as an option at the Teacher Training College Feldkirch. This course was repeated every year until 1995 when it was reorganised and renamed Learning from each other. The inservice teacher training institute of the province also organised two courses on Intercultural learning, but these courses were stopped in 1989.

Generally teachers and politicians began to see the importance of the right way of dealing with foreign children in our schools. They also realised that measures would have to be taken to meet this aim. In order to create the possibility for the teachers to get information on how to deal with foreign children inside and outside the classroom, the Intercultural Centre was founded in 1991 and financed by the regional board of education.

Objectives

The Centre should be

A centre of information and a place where teaching materials focussing on foreigner pedagogy and intercultural learning are collected and made available. (Literature, educational games, transparencies, films, slides, videos etc.)

Inservice training centre for teachers with migrant children in their classrooms, offering advice, help, and materials: additional German classes, German for guest workers, Intensive German courses, Intercultural learning.

A place collecting and developing ideas and materials concerning new and alternative ways of learning and teaching.

A place for pedagogical meetings and training workshops on topics such as "Guest worker pedagogy" and "Intercultural learning".

A place that establishes contacts with political bodies concerned with guest workers, intercultural societies and embassies.

Offer

The Centre will be

A meeting place for teachers who work with children of non-German mother tongue or those who are interested in this kind of work.

Meeting place for mother tongue teachers (e.g. Turkish)

The Centre will offer

Audiovisual media for intercultural learning - for the classroom or for parents' meetings

Bilingual learning materials for various topics in science, biology, geography in German and Turkish (workbooks, cassettes, transparencies)

Organisation and/or advice on the preparation of learning materials

Production of educational games for language learning and for free learning phases in the classroom

Photocopying machine, cutter, binding machine for the production of learning materials

Principles and methods

The IC wants to help teachers to be able to support children with German as a Second Language better. Firstly, didactic materials will be explained in the Centre and then self-produced. Secondly, the IC wants to sensitize teachers to the problems of guest worker children. It is important to take all aspects of life into consideration: German as a second language, a different religion, differences in housing, the employment situation of the family, and social background. Thirdly, the Centre wants to propagate a holistic approach to this bundle of problems.

The pictures show a foreign worker in one of our factories

and an Austrian mother supervising homework of a non-native child and her own child