Reflections on the World Youth Meeting 2000
Karen Thomsen

 


00/08/12

 

1. Introduction

Only in April 2000 I was informed about this year's WYM in Nagoya and asked to come with a student. In 1998 first contacts had been established between the Seiryo Commercial High School and the Midori-High-School in Nagoya and our vocational school in Kappeln/Schleswig in the north of Germany. In April 1999 I had the chance to visit

Midori-High School and ever since Ms Kuga and her students and my students and I have exchanged E-mails and digital pictures on a more or less regular basis.

When I was informed about a possible participation in this year's WYM I had the following expectations:

Students and teachers from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the US and Germany had all worked very hard in the previous weeks of the conference. Most of us had only got to know each other via E-mail, questionnaires and digital pictures and some groups had managed to organise videoconferencing in advance.

After an intense working phase in spring / summer I was curious about a face-to-face meeting with all those great people I had got hundreds of  E-mails from.

I had an image of many participants and expected somehow that this image would be confirmed. I wanted to learn about the work of other groups and I thought that there would be time to plan our future work and maybe to make new contacts to people and schools.

 

2. Our preparations, presentation and some personal reflections

I must admit that our common presentation with Midori-High School students and my student Melanie had not been finished when we left Germany on 17 July due to other commitments at my school. But luckily Ms Kuga and I had agreed on a draft, we had taken digital pictures and there were a few days left before the conference. It was new for Melanie and me to see how many students and teachers spend time at Japanese schools with various activities during the summer break. In Germany our schools are usually only visited by some very eager teachers who need to get some preparations done, but you will hardly find any students!

Anyhow, thus it was quite "normal" to meet on a couple of days with the students at school to finish off our preparations for the presentation.

Despite language problems between our students, it was good to see that they grew closer very quickly and that they eagerly tried to find all sorts of communication to make themselves understood. Melanie had a chance to experience homestay  with Yukari's family and I bet that this experience was one of the very special and most wonderful experiences she had.

The final touches on the presentation were done at the hotel on the night before 23 July.

The college students were excellent support for us, because we had some trouble with different software versions on our computers.

In my opinion the conference as such was very successful. The careful planning and all the work that had been put into the preparations turned out to be a perfect mosaic! - I suppose the structure of the conference - first day getting to know each other with the help of the rope activity, get together in the evening  and second day presentations, speeches and get together - was the key for the success.

The rope activity broke the ice and it was wonderful to see that students got along so well despite very different cultures, experiences they had so far in their lives and personal environments.

My main expectation to contribute to a successful conference and to learn from other contributions was fully met. On top we had the great opportunity to take part in the trip to Ise - ideal to learn more about Japanese culture and to spend time with each other.

 

3. Conlusion: Internet, English and I - our future project through the Internet

Participating in the conference with Melanie encouraged me to go on with our work and even to improve our work.. Ms Kuga and I reflected that our students improved their English language skills a lot and that they really enjoy writing and getting E-mails. They suddenly see

that there is a point of learning languages if they want to share experiences with somebody from another country than their own. It was fantastic to see how hard the Japanese students wanted Melanie to have a really good time. They saw that they must do something against language barriers, and I think that our students got really convinced how fantastic it is to learn and speak other languages and to use the Internet as a basic means of communication because we can only have a limited number of face-to-face meetings.

On top Ms Kuga from Midori-High School and I applied for a project initiated by the companies Oberon in Dusseldorf and Uchida in Tokyo/Nagoya in which interpreters will support us to overcome language barriers.

I would like to thank everybody who made it possible for us to come and to participate in this great venue also on behalf of my student Melanie. I am looking forward to our future work and hope to welcome Japanese visitors in Germany in the near future.

 

Schleswig, 11 August 2000 Karen Thomsen