Assignment 3

Describe the Home-School connection in your country

The home-school connection in France is not very important unfortunately. Teachers and schools don’t really try to build a relationship with the kids’ home. There is even a barrier between the two worlds. What happens at school is different from what happens at home. Parents often only care about their kids having good grades and don’t want to know about what they have learned and how they are doing at school. Teachers often don’t care about the kid’s culture. They don’t want to know what is different for this or this particular kid. The important thing is for the kid to get well integrated into the class.

However, there are some meetings which are organized between parents and teachers to try to communicate. But these meetings are just a way to talk about grades or some problems with the kids. If there is a serious problem with the kid, then the teacher may pay more attention to the culture, the life in his home and everything. But if the kid has good grades and a good behavior, they don’t really care. Of course there are exceptions and some teachers really try to see the different cultures that are present in his class and to talk about it, so the kid can grow up accepting both cultures, but it is not often.

Now, schools in France are trying to improve themselves because the Ministry of National Education has been strongly criticized. There are many things they are trying to work on, and one of them is the relationship between homes and schools. Researchers made an investigation and wrote a report: http://sitecoles.formiris.org/document/dossier-relations-ecole-famille/0/773. One thing is to try to give the families a role to play in their kids’ education. They have to be part of the process.

Violence at schools is a big problem in France. Teachers are afraid. And I think creating a real connection between the kids’ culture and the culture they are acquiring at school would be a good solution. We shouldn’t try to assimilate them to one culture, but we should try to integrate everybody with all the differences to create a world of tolerance and variety and it begins with education. To be educated is first of all to accept people and be openminded.

Assignment 2

How has my own family experience been impacted by responses to minority languages and cultures?

I am going to talk about my mother’s language. My mother is from Spain, from a town called La Coruna, in Galicia, where there is a regional language called gallego. People, in this part of Spain, speak Spanish and gallego. These are the two official languages.

But during the time my mother lived in Spain (until she was 25 years old), there was a dictatorship. And Franco, the dictator, wanted Spain to be a united country so he reinforced the patriotic feeling and prohibited to speak the regional languages. So mother only acquired Spanish, and not gallego. She came to France before Franco’s death.

And now we go to Spain every year. In the town I live everybody speaks gallego, but as my mother doesn’t know gallego, I never learned to speak gallego. So we had a lot of problems to speak with other people at the beginning. The whole generation that experimented the civil war (1936-1939) and the dictatorship (1939-1975) didn’t learn gallego. When Franco died, everybody wanted to speak gallego again. So we had to learn it to be able to understand everybody.

Many people speak Spanish, but sometimes they don’t want to or don’t know. In Spain, the topic of regional languages is really sensitive. It is really a political matter. Regional languages do mean something. It is not only a language. It involves the culture and the political problems that are behind.