Dear Parents/Guardians, Pupils and Staff,
Day 2 of Erasmus on Wednesday has finished.
Today, we visited the Rectorat de Nice which is the region's Departmental Service for National Education. They support the national educational policy and support schools to implement this policy.
We had a meeting firstly with Anne Bayart Villeneuve who trains teachers and gives them supports, resources and training around foreign language teaching in French primary schools. She spoke about how English is taught and many of the methodologies she mentioned overlapped with how we teach Irish. One difference however is, that in France, they do not introduce the written form of English until the spoken language has been achieved.
This meeting also spoke about the Assistant Exchange programme - this is where they love anyone with a basic level of French to come and help out in French schools for 12 hours per week and you are paid a basic rate. This would probably appeal to someone who would be on a career break or going to France to learn the language. This is organised through FEI - French Education Internationale.
We also had a meeting with Laetitia Spreiregen who along with an Inspector set up a wonderful programme between pupils from a city school in Nice and pupils from a school in the mountains who were visually impaired. This project was called Pierres, Feuilles, Stylos - a version of Rock, Paper, Scissors and it was a project with one aim - to bring pupils together to learn about the mountains no matter your ability or disability. This project impacted all the children in ways they could never have imagined. The organisers of it knew they had accomplished so much when the pupils said that it is not the pupils we must change but the environment around them. We got many ideas on how we can be more inclusive in our school too.
It is clear from our visit here that awareness and acceptance of special needs is a long way off what we have in Ireland but they have a clearly defined strategy/mission. They have a 5 step mission for what they want to see in society going from 3 year olds right through to adult education.
We share a short video here from outside the Rectorat de Nice.
Check out some photos of Day 2 here.
We look forward to sharing more information tomorrow!
Regards,
Erasmus Team!