Our school placements still hadn’t been finalised yet, and therefore we had Monday free. Rachel, Daniel and I decided to visit the local town of Utrecht. This is the fourth biggest town in the Netherlands and it is located in the centre of the country. The town was beautiful and had stunning canals and a multitude of old historic buildings. Daniel described the town as similar to Amsterdam, so we are planning to visit it over the coming weeks. Utrecht had a substantial amount of shops, which as you can imagine kept Rachel and I busy all day, poor Daniel had to trail around girls’ shops for the majority of the day. It was a worthwhile trip to see another town of the Netherlands.
Daniel and I in Utrecht
In classes this week, I learnt about the different types of schools in the Netherlands. The main four school types are the Freinet School, Dalton School, Jenaplan School and Montessori School. This week within the module of re-thinking education I was given the opportunity to visit a Freinet Primary School. I was extremely excited and anxious about the experience as it would be my first visit to a Dutch school. One of the main differences I have found is that there is commonly no school uniform in the Netherlands and the teachers themselves dress casually to work, many wearing jeans, which is something that is not common or seen as acceptable at home.
The visit to the Freinet School was an eye-opener. I have never seen so much confidence in children so young. The Freinet School is based around pupils deciding what they want to learn. The purpose of this is so that pupils are highly motivated as they about topics that they are interested in. The school values that pupils learn through experiences and interactions with other. I found it interesting that every classroom has a budget and the pupils themselves have to decide what it is spent on. Even as young as four, the pupils will decide what they want to buy for the classroom and then present their argument to the teacher in a group interview. Clearly there are substantial benefits that can be gained from such an activity such as numeracy skills, learning how to co-operate and make effective decisions. The Head Teacher explained that they have strategies for numeracy and literacy requirements, however everything else is what the pupils want to learn and each day the pupils have regular time to do their own learning, may this be reading a book or painting a picture. This allows the pupils to gain more independence in their learning and helps the pupils to use their own initiative. This type of school seemed very different to the typical ‘spoon feeding’ that happens in the Northern Irish school. However, I do question whether it is suitable to give so much independence to the pupils at such a young age.Hopefully, I will get a better insight into this area over the coming weeks.
On our last class of the week we had to give presentations on the education system in our country. I found this extremely interesting to hear more about the diverse structures of the education systems across countries. I was surprised to find that there the majority of educational systems were similar to our own. I am intrigued to learn more over the coming weeks.
On Friday evening Rachel and I got a visit from the boyfriends and we all went out along with Daniel and had a big yummy meal in Nijmegen. I was excited to show them our new home in Nijmegen and introduce them to all our new Erasmus friends. We had a great weekend and on Sunday it was time for the boys to catch the flight home.
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