Aim

Reflect on what living through war means by carrying out interviews with people who actually experienced it.

Who is involved

Two schools in European countries where there are people who have war memories. Maybe it is the student’s grandparents, maybe their parents, maybe themselves who can bear witness, and share their experience.

Language

Students use their native language for interviews and write summaries of them for the Foreign language teachers or older students to translate. The language for translations will be agreed by the two partners before the project starts.

The agreed lingua franca will be used by students for captions for pictures and documents.

Pedagogical objectives

• Reflecting on the horror of war
• Learning about recent history
• Making summaries and diagrams
• Looking for documents and resources
• Writing relevant captions in a foreign language
• Creating small web pages

Teachers responsible

• History Teachers
• Language teachers
• Foreign language teacher
• ICT teachers

What do Learners do

1. Get information about the war they are going to work on (History teacher)
2. Make a summary document of it (History teacher)
3. Design an interview to ask the people who lived through that war (History and Language teachers involved)
4. Share their interview questions with their twin school to get suggestions and make possible changes (ICT teachers)
5. Find people to be interviewed
6. Write summaries of what they learned from the interview, to be translated either by themselves, older students or their foreign language teacher in the agreed lingua franca (History, Language and  Foreign language teachers)
7. Find unpublished material to support their findings (pictures or small documents)
8. Write captions for this material (in the lingua franca agreed for the twinning) (Foreign language teacher involved)
9. Make a small web page (ICT teacher)
10. Visit each other’s web page and ask questions to one another on aspects they do not understand (Foreign language teachers)
11. Write a document on the similarities and differences of the conflicts they studied (Language and History teacher)
12. React to each other’s document (Language and History teachers)

Credits:Magda Tebe and Victoria Nicuesa, from Spain, who implemented a version of this scenario