The organisers of the course ‘Teaching Science through English’ asked Science across the World to fill one morning with Science across the World activities. The British Council attracted 27 participants from 17 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

School fair

An attractive part of these courses always is a school fair. Participants show their own school/university and look at the posters of others. In the picture an example from Argentina by Virginia (Argentina) studied by Ho (Malaysia).

Science Curriculum Development

We visited Sheffield Hallam University to use their computer facilities. We got information from the Science Curriculum Development group about its efforts to produce modern current materials (and were impressed by the results) and about a project to implement a new science curriculum in Malaysia and Thailand.

Science across the World: the programme

Thursday was Science across the World day. Marianne Cutler, the director of the programme introduces the programme: a science, language and cultural exchange programme, where children investigate a science topic, carry out some research into how their lives are affected by the issues of this topic and gather data for exchange with partner schools in other countries.

She also described recent developments, a new website, growth in membership and more topics translated into more languages.

Stefka Kitanova from the Spanish language school in Sofia (Bulgaria) then explained her experiences with the programme.

She presented examples of materials written by children in Bulgaria as part of the topic What did you eat? Stefka had her children gathering food wrappers and analysing the nutritional value of the foods.

Her students sounded to be great detectives in Biology and Chemistry, carrying out surveys in health, the environment and diet to name but a few. Her work has also involved organizing competitions, one such competition was designing models of DNA in celebration of the 50 anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA. Over 150 entries were received including pizza DNA, pumpkin seed DNA, matchstick DNA and Disco DNA. The model building has been directly inspired by ideas from Science Across the World  project work. Often competitions come up indirectly through events such as the European Day of Languages in September, when a language competition is organised.

Stefka uses up to six topics over the period of a year in her teaching.

Science across the World: teacher training

After the coffee break Lida Schoen described the situation in teacher training for international collaboration in the Netherlands, one of the aims of which is to develop ICT and networking in schools internationally. Lida uses the Science across the World programme as a tool for teaching international collaboration with her student teachers. Biology and English students work together with Erasmus students and choose a topic from Science across the World.

Then Lida had us carrying out an interactive workshop, related to the Science across the World topic: ‘Chemistry in our lives’, where colleagues had to produce three cosmetics products, bath salts, a shampoo and a hair gel, and then prepare a marketing campaign to present the products to the group. The first picture shows part of the ‘Asian’ group with Indira (Sri Lanka), Sharifa (Oman) and Sadia (Pakistan) at work. In the second picture Joaquin (Argentina) and Maria Luisa (Spain) proudly show a product of their group.

The presenting took place during dinner and the results were breathtaking! We had the Peak of sensuality range of products which worked on a sheep and Yorkshire theme, we had the Flash theme reflecting ‘Beauty Across the World’, there was the ‘Holiday Best’ theme, and the ‘Vump’ theme, ‘stimulating and styling shock’. We also had the ‘Haze’ range in a Teleshop format and the ‘Aqua’ range in marine blue.

Prizes were given out to all participants and everybody went away with something, but it has to be said that the jury had a long and arduous time deliberating over the order of merit!

On Friday during the farewell dinner Luisa Nutt (British Council Seminars) and John Shackleton (replacing Paul Woods - event commissioner) thanked the course organisers Keith Kelly and John Clegg and our event manager Lynne Fox (kissing Ramon from Slovakia) for the success of the course. Well done!

March 2004

Text and photos: Keith Kelly and Lida Schoen

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