Our experience as a group

We started this journey on the first week, with the theme “grades and the competition between students”. We discussed the positives this sort of system brings, making people strive to do better, and the negatives, with the stress and low self-esteem it can create. What’s more, what would happen if this system did not exist? Would there be a substitute? Would that push the students to not make as much of an effort as before? It was a difficult topic to talk about, and there were a couple of difficulties finding the appropriate vocabulary for it. 

On the second week, we moved to a closer and more realistic theme: Online classes and how the present situation affect students. There were the common connection problems and the feeling of loss over the kinship that being close and in the same space can give. We saw the additional strain this type of education put on some disabilities, and the help it can bring to others.  This topic was more participated, maybe because of the everyday feel it brought with it. 

In the third week, we decided to explore a bit more the question of disabled students in the educational system, how they were treated, how schools could improve integration, and the real problem of bullyism they face. We confronted experiences and discussed the existence of schools made to meet special educative needs, like schools for deaf and blind people. 

While not closely linked to the previous week’s topic, the fourth week was dedicated to dialects and linguistic certifications. Should dialect be included in certifications? How are certification different between countries? Most of us did not know much about our mother language certification, and we argued about the costs and the various expiration (while some have no expiration date, like the JLPT, other such as the IELTS will need to be renovated every couple of year. 

On the fifth week, we opted to talk about the still present sexism in schools, how it is condemned and how it is perpetuated in both explicit and subtle ways. The regulations on clothes were particularly popular as an argument, and the discussion flowed easily both in the group meetings and with the comment on blog. The topic of only boys and only girls schools were a huge success with the professors during the conversation lessons. 

With the sixth week we kept talking about school rules, the differences there were between Italy and Japan, bringing on the tales of personal experiences, and the different types of specialized high school in Italy was a surprisingly popular topic. 

During the seventh and last week we decided to talk about teachers, what it takes to be one, what should the characteristic of a good teacher be, and what teachers can do to stop things like bullyism from happening in schools. 

Getting to converse among students in small groups during the different lessons was a positive experience: there is less of a chance to feel too nervous to communicate properly. On the other hand being in the same group for too long could be detrimental, and a weekly rotation among the groups would have been a good thing to try. Having all the themes and groups laid out beforehand, letting the groups decide which theme they would have liked to do would have been an interesting experiment. 

With this project, we had the opportunity to widen our Japanese vocabulary, particularly in specific areas, to improve our dialectic abilities and our research methods. How to search for articles in different languages, share them and to discuss the new information and opinions. In some cases it helped to calm and win over stage fright that was detrimental to conversations in a language different than our own. We learned to write articles, and to use the digital documents and resources available to us in the most efficient way. The colleagues were always active, and we were able to help each other add new themes and topic of conversation. We developed and cultivated our abilities to work in groups, how to better communicate, and share the workload. How to solve logistical and technical obstacles in Japanese, both in written and oral form (problem solving abilities, leadership, and communication). 

Overall, it was a wonderful experience, which gave us the possibility to exchange different perspective on various aspect of our lives, and we are grateful for it.

Group 6: Abe Kanako, Campochiaro Federica, Fiorica Simone, Fonte Alessia, Giannetta Lucilla, Horii Asuka, Tridello Chiara