Western Denmark Tour

As promised I have found the time to add a new post. The past weeks have been so busy. On Thursday we left for a 3 day field study to Western DK. We set out to visit areas in Denmark with high concentrations of immigrants, refugees and their descendents to learn first hand about the problems of these segregated areas and the challenges the minorities face integratind in the the Danish society. Through several academic visits we were able to learn about approaches teachers and consultants use to teach Danish language to ethnic minority children. The schools we visited ranged from schools with high population of ethnic minorities to more traditional Danish fold schools with almost no ethnic minorites.

Our first stop was in Odense, the second largest city in Denmark, about a 2 hour bus ride from Copenhagen. Here our group of 40 students was split into smaller groups and sent to different schools. My group consisted of the full year students, about 9 of us. We were sent to a Egehuset Treatment Center which is located in Vollsmose, an area where about 10% people are Danish and the other 90% of the population is from other countries. Egehuset is a treatment center is for children 0-14 years old with social special needs, those who are abused, have alcohol problems in their family, mothers who had been sexually abused, etc. Basically this is the "last chance" place for families to seek help before their children are taken away. The treatment center is made up of 15 staff members. Egehuset is currently working closely with 8 schoolchildre,n 12 children between the ages of 2 and 6, and about 10 mothers with babies. The center works closely with parents and children in the community, where both the child and the parent receives individual treatment sessions. Their basis is to build a good relation there are any damages. Every morning there are different specialized sessions for the children 2-6 designed to meet their specific needs. The children 6-14 have a trained staff memeber visiting their schools as well as their houses to have sessions with their parents. The treatment center focuses on creating an environment of trust, both towars parents and children. The stress to parents that their objective is NOT to take their children away, they want to integrate the families back into society slowly. The families come to them during the day then go back their homes at night. Staff are trained to educate the families, whether it be on how to bath a baby, sit with a young child, cradle them, put them to sleep, etc. They use clay to bring the children and parents closer to each other, creating activities for them to share time doing. I found this center very interesting. Their goals were clear and the ways they went about things were very interesting. They had one situation where they were working with a young boy was out of control. After years of working with him, rolling around on the floor for hours just holding him close, craddling him for hours at a time, they asked him why he stopped fighting with them. His response was "cause I know you like me" It is things like this that give me so much to think about and many times bring tears to my eyes. A 5 year old boy fought for years and was so unhappy simply because he did not feel like he was liked. Sometimes we all just need to take time out of our lives to pay attention to things like this. Not everything is so black and white, somethings need to be looked at for longer, because for everything I do think their is a solution... we just need to dig deep enough to find it.

Our next stop was the Hans Christian Andersen museum , then we stayed in hostel in the city that night. Random short funny story... we went out to wander around the town that night and met some random drunk guy who talked with us for an hour or so about how he visited King Tuts tomb and took some coins back with him. He was a coin collector, and actually carried around 3 coins dating back from the 1600's... it was pretty crazy. I dont know how much of that visiting king tuts tomb was right cause he made some comment on how if you steal a coin its bad luck (its only good luck if it is given to you), but when i brought up the curse on those who steal from king tut he said that he and the king have an understanding with each other.... thats where things got a little sketchy. I'm not quite sure where the whole conversation was going, but he wanted us to guess hid granddaughters name, somehow i think i guessed right, don't ask how or why, but it was Nefertiti (have no idea how to spell it). it was a weird night, i was so intrigued by him though, while my friends were trying to escape the whole conversation. The really funny part though is... he offered to give us his name and number in case we wanted to talk to him in the future, so for the sake of remembering the whole experience I said yes... little did i know he pulled out a bank statement with all his information on it and wrote his number on it... it was SOOO weird, and NUTS!

Friday we went to visit a typical Danish folk school (kindergarden-9th grade) The school had 805 students, with less than 2% ethnic minorites. The priority is the students education and well being. They believe that students with low self-esteem are often subjected to bullying and that bullying then inhibits learning. Therefore they created this program to prevent bullying. They have the students once a week massage each other under the principle that 'the one you touch, you won't bully'. Apparently, the % of bullying has gone down over the years due to this program and the school has become well known for being the first to create it... I came home and talked to my host family about it and my host sister who is 13 has done it in her class here in Farum. My thoughts on the program... at first i was a little skeptical, but after we tried it i must admitt the back massage was pretty sweet and i can see how it might help. It's hard to explain without doing though... anyways, so things I found pretty different with this school than with the US schools... the children had cooking classes, where they took their shoes off and walked around barefoot. to being with you have to understand that these children come to school everyday and bring an extra pair of shoes because it keeps the school clean if you dont wear the outside shoes, indoors. Seriously though, we went into classes where kids just simply had on socks or slippers, or nothing at all! It was the CRAZIEST thing ever! but, i have pictures of it!! In the cooking room, young children were using the oven on their own without assistance at all. We walked into one classroom and saw young children playing chess and danish scrabble. I must say I am 21 and have no idea how to play chess. Scrabble i thought was a great idea because it helped the young kids with learning danish.

After visiting this school, we went to the ARoS, an art museum in Arhus, the second largest city in Denmark. ARoS was given a unique gift from the artist Ron Mueck who had created a landmark for ARoS with the sculpture "the Boy". Soon I will post some pictures of this sculpture as well, it was pretty incredible. When looking at his face, you'll see that his mouth is covered, so all that shows are his eyes. Therefore, your first impression is usually that the boy is frightened or angry, but if you walk around the sculpture you will see that he actually has a bit of a smile on his face. It's pretty neat.... when i put the pictures up you can see it all, and how big the statue is. just imagine how tall he would be if he weren't croutched down....

"Den Damle By" (The old town)- This was an open air museum we stopped at. It was comprised of 75 restored buildings brought from all over Denmark and reconstructed as a provincial town, complete with a working bakery, silversmith, bookbinger and so on. Most of the buildings there are half-timbered 17th and 18th century houses. There is also a water mill, a windmill and a few buildings from the late 19th century. It was such a change to be to an open-air museum, actually my first time too!

That night we stayed at a youth hostel in Skanderborg. It was kinda in the middle of nowhere, back in the woods, but was sooOOOOooOoO nice. We had little cabins right on the lake. I must say though, if you're in europe... its a tradition! If you swim, you swim nude... that's just the way it is.... need i say more?

Saturday was the last day of our field study. We drove to Jelling-the city of the Kings to visit the runic stone. A thousand years ago in the middle of the viking period Jelling was the residence of the Danish kings. Two kings for certain lived there, Gorm known as "Gorm the Old" died in 958 and his son Harald "Blatand" (Bluetooth). These kings left monumnets: two enormous mounds and two runic stones, a large one and a smaller one. Gorm is famous because the list of kings in Denmark originated with him, and the present queen of DK is related to him in complicated ways.

The last stop on Saturday before we returned to Copenhagen was to LEGOLAND. This is the largest tourist attraction in Denmark outside of Copenhagen. More than 1 million guests go there every year. The children look at legoland like our children look at disney world in the US. Many danish children actually beg their parents to take them to Disney World oneday when they hear about it. Personally I think LEGOLAND is way cool though! I wanna go back!! they had this one build you own ride there. you wait online and get a little card which you put into a machine and you can choose the speed of the ride and the different combination of motions you want the ride to go through. It was sooo cool. Then you go in and put the car in the machine, buckle yourself into the ride, and get tossed around, spun around, flipped upside down and more. So basically you have complete control over how fast it goes and what moves it makes. Let me tell you, after a PB and J sandwich and 5 scoops of ice cream, the ride was still crazy awesome! :) I loved it man... so cool!

Well, that was the end of our trip.... it was pretty sweet though. Definitely a nice break from schoolwork and classes. This Sunday our Danish class is going to a fodbold game (soccer). So that should be sweet too. Well, I think that is about it for this blog. There really is so much more I want to talk about, but it is all so hard to fit in (and I know this is still very unorganized, but thats just how it is going to be). When i get back to school though I am hoping to be able to make some sort of presentation, maybe look into putting together a Bergren Forum about the Danish School sysytems. Just a way to present all that I have learned and experienced because there is sooo much I want to share with people! So, that's it. I am hoping to write about my experience at the daycare I attend everyweek in my next post :)