Student teachers help young asylum-seekers

A group of students from the Zug Teacher Training College (PHZ) has recently been involved in a project with asylum-seekers to help them on their long road towards integration.
 
Three student teachers, Dave Arnold, Nadine Regli and Diana Zülle, were involved in a college project relating to “Cultural Diversity” and helped out at a project set up by the IBA organisation, which provides help to youngsters of foreign background between the ages of 14 and 21 in the city to integrate. In fact it has been doing this for 25 years now.

The three students helped the asylum-seekers in a project relating to growing vegetables. Fortunately, Arnold himself had worked in this area prior to embarking on his training to be a teacher, so expert advice was available for the ten asylum-seekers present. They were duly taught about all aspects to do with growing tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and strawberries, learning the appropriate German at the same time, too. IBA teacher Felicitas Bürgi said how pleased she was by how well the young refugees began to communicate in this non-classroom environment.
 
On the first day of the three-day project, the student teachers and asylum-seekers got to know each other by taking a long walk in the Heuboden allotment area, before watching the film “My Garden of Eden” together.
This period of acclimatisation in totally new surroundings is not easy for the young refugees, who are suddenly confronted with a foreign language, new school system and different cultural values, and all this after the dreadful time many of them have experienced to get here. It is also a challenge for the student teachers, too, having to instruct pupils who may be illiterate or who know only Arabic script. In addition to this, the refugees come from all sorts of different home backgrounds in relation to education; some where it only played a peripheral role, whereas other young refuggess are the children of doctors and lawyers.
 
Student teacher Eileen Marcionetti, who was leading a group of 13 asylum-seekers on a “Theatre and Dialect” course, mentioned how, unlike in the past, it was very rare to have solely Swiss young people taking part now. “Some of the asylum-seekers I taught had never even heard of Harry Potter,” she said, as she explained how she tried to get pupils to express themselves through taking part in sketches and musical improvisation and such like.
 
What was encouraging was that as many as 66 pupils from the IBA, i.e. three-quarters of all of them, took part in this Cultural Diversity project, which came about as a result of students of the PHZ going along to see IBA in action last March. Other projects were on the subjects of “Music and Homeland”, “Woodland” and “Getting to know one’s way around the city of Zug”.
 
It is hoped that the students, once qualified, will be now be better prepared to cope with pupils of so many different backgrounds they can expect to find in their classrooms.
 
Mireille Gugolz and Andreas Gwerder of the PHZ, along with the leaders of the IBA, Jules Marti and Martin Bregy, all agreed that great benefit had been derived from the cooperation between the two institutions over the years, not least in relation to everyday practice and research.