Five schools - five countries - one topic
This blog is a kind of diary of our seminar in Kiel. You are invited to follow us...
Welcome! This website documents an Erasmus+-Project about "sex and gender" at the
Thor-Heyerdahl-Gymnasium in Kiel in November 2016. Enjoy our blog with all news of our project!
Here you can find the documentation of our work produced during the whole Turkish seminar.
It’s up to you
On Friday November 11th, we had a panel discussion between 3 experts on the topic of sex and gender
to get professional answers for the questions from the students:
...
These are our written products of the lasts four days and at the same time our preparation for the panel discussion at the last day.
There are still questions...
Connecting cultures
To let you know a little bit more about the Erasmus+-project, we want to share our expieriences and questions we have talked about.
We had the opportunity to make new friendships with different nationalities, so we had the chance to get to know different cultures. Also we got a more complex insight into the topic LGBT. It was very interesting to work on the different topics for example how religion and society is dealing with homosexuality, but we didn't hav emch free time, because we were working too intensively. For the final discussion we prepared some questions in small groups. About religion, the laws made by society and last but not least about tolenace. The best activity we did in the afternoon was actually to go bowling on Wednesday, where all of the students had a very good time. Starting with funny sport execises, like on monday when all the student became closer to each other.
After all we can say the the whole week was an interesting experience for everyone and a great chance to get in touch with this comlpex topic in the Erasmus+-project.
Today prof. Dr. Holterhus from the CAU (Christian Albrechts University Kiel) visited us, in order to give us a presentation on the topic “development and disorders of biological sex”. He laid his focus on intersexuality and what function the hormones and chromosomes take in connection with it. It was really interesting to see how the gender roles for example come about, considering it from the biological point of view and not from the psychological one, like we did before. It was also surprising for most of us to learn how the biological sex was formed by hormonal influences and the fact that before the impact of those hormones on the embryo, everybody is female, was quite new to a lot of us.
Another really interesting aspect was the difference between the brain cells of heterosexual/homosexual men and women and transsexual women which showed us that the feelings of transsexuals being imprisoned in the wrong body could be occurred through the differences of those brain cells, even though this is just a study and no official proof.
In the end he said that on our topic it´s important to always consider both sides the biological and also psychological one.
We think that all of us were able to learn a lot more about the biological side of our topic “sex & gender” and we also got some useful information that we can now use to answer some of our questions we discovered at the beginning of our seminar. All in all, it was a great and really interesting presentation.
« You are not responsible for your imagination!» was the quote of the week. We followed it during our practicing days, to let our imagination take over
ourselves.
Get to know each other was the first step to build a group cohesion and cooperation. Games were settled, involving everyone in the group. As time passed, we « got out » of our heads and
forgot the awkwardness of what we were doing in front if people we barely knew.
This week has been a way for all of us to get tips about acting, and mostly about improvisation. One of our main rules was « don’t block your partner », and interacting with each other made us get to know the others pretty well. Furthermore, the energy and the power we had as a group showed how important cohesion is. Also, it showed that the cultural differences as we were all from different countries was not a border to express ourselves and to have fun.
Of course, introducing the theme « Sex and gender » to our scenes has been a challenge. But as the ideas came from all of us, we finished by finding out
how it was possible to introduce this theme, without blocking our imagination.
This workshop has been appreciated (even loved) by all of us, as we learnt about drama, the others and also about ourselves.
What
is
right
and
what
is
not? What is the difference between sex and gender? ... More questions than easy answers... Look!
In preparation of our meeting in Kiel, we startet a questionnaire about "sex and gender" in every home country. This is the result, which is the base of our discussion today:
At the first morning in school, all students were meeting in gym, to play cooperation games. There were 5 stations with different tasks and at the end we had to built the most be beautiful castle just with bamboo canes and rubber bands. Look at the result!