Equality and Justice

The really significant thing I have realized about education is to respect every human being with its faults and its talents. To teach my students to become open-minded citizen is my biggest goal.
I noticed that even if we taught so far that every human ought to be treatened equaly no matter what his cultural background is, we still have a lack of teaching that there is no "normal".

Culture in School is a Must!!!

Why does culture matter in school?
School is one of four institutions which helps to raise our children and our future. My personal attitude is, that children have to identify themselves with their culture, with their language, and with their religion (as far as they belong to any religion). Otherwise a student would never really know to which group he belongs. He might feel a foreigner in his "home culture" and also in his "school culture"; because he is living between two worlds and might make him to an outsider in both cultures.
That is something I feel in Germany where I was born and raised. I feel like a foreigner because I don´t think that I really belong to them, and even for Germans I am "different". Back in Morocco where my roots are I am also treated like someone who is "different". In order to improve we have to build a bridge between the home culture and the school so that everyone knows where they belong and how to identify themselves.
A classroom is probably the only place in which we will find a huge diversity and that is the best opportunity to educate students towards equality and justice. In addition we should, resting on Amin Ahmads´ philosophy, focus on what we have in common in our cultures rather than pointing out the differences. That makes us aware of being equal and being different at the same time.

Being a Foreigner

How has my own family experience been impacted by responses to minority languages and cultures?
40 years past and still my parents are the foreigners, as well as I am. "They are lovely but, you know, they are different". That is one of the most common sentences from the Germans how think of themselves not to be racists. One has to read and to listen between the lines to hear that minorities are not welcome.

My parents are very open-minded and they would like to see our cultures and languages to be respected. They try, as far as they can, to include other cultures like the Turkish or Italians and any other culture as well. Whenever we celebrate something, like my wedding, they invite nearly everyone from the neighborhood. My parents always taught us to respect every human being, no matter where he is from. That is exactly what my siblings and I try to do as far as possible, but with Germans it is often difficult. For the most of them we are always "the foreigners" even if we were born in Germany and raised up there and we have the German citizenship, we all speak German, we are well educated, we work, we pay taxes and insurances and we make as much as we can for an intercultural, peaceful community. However, we are the foreigners and they judge us for every mistake in society.
Concerning our language, Arabic, they are very upset hearing us speaking another language. Most Germans expect us just to speak German because they think otherwise we would not speak the German language adequately. They do not see the Arabic language as a worthy one. Sadly, there are still a lot of non-open-minded people.

My first language skills

My name is Yasmina, I am a 22-years old student of Biology and English for educational purpose.
Actually, I am from Germany, I was born near Frankfurt and I grew up there but my parents are from Marocco. Due to the bad economic situation in their homeland, my parents decided to immigrate to Germany in the 1970s. My father is a worker and my mother is an analphabetic housewife. The reason why I am telling these facts is that I want people to understand under which circumstances children, whose parents are immigrants, are living and learning. Parents are often not well educated and there are mostly no books at home.
Apart from English, I also speak a little bit of French. Since I was brought up bilingual, I speak Arabic and German as well. However, I can only speak Arabic fluently in BICS, but unfortunately, I can only write and read moderately. That is because my mother was not able to teach me the Arabic language in CALP. That means that the German language is for me a more or less foreign language as well which I first learned due the television.

When I was in the kinder garden, I did not have many friends and I now believe that the reason was the language. I did not speak as well as the natives did and so I might seem stupid for them, so it was not worth playing with me.

In the primary school our teacher showed us the library and since then, I borrowed books once a month approximately and I found my favor in reading. Since then I become better in writing and speaking-in CALB! This took its time and I assume that I needed about nine years to become an adequate writer. Even though I am not as good as the others are in writing academically, neither in German nor in English, nor in Arabic.