At PURA VIDA School, the subject NMG (Nature, Man, Society) is taught immersively in English. For this reason, NMG and English teacher Alex Cardona invited a group of Bolivian student teachers, who were guests at the Thurgau University of Teacher Education as part of a project, to our school for two very special lessons on climate change.
Using a glacier in Bolivia, whose disappearance has drastic consequences for the drinking water supply of their hometown of La Paz, the students illustrated possible consequences of global warming and, in particular, glacial melt. The comparison with Switzerland, where the topic of glacier melt is also a very topical issue, albeit from a completely different perspective, was exciting. At the end, the students of the 5th and 6th grade were rewarded by their Bolivian host teachers with a song in Aymara and a spirited folk dance.
The two lessons were a good example that topics of education for sustainable development can also be implemented very well in foreign language lessons, if content and language learning are linked in a meaningful way.
