The Summer Course
The 2004 Summer Course took place for 3 weeks during the month of August. The course, which is designed to orient participants to the language, environment, systems, people and culture of the RCNUWC experience, included 20 first year RCNUWC students, the two Chinese teachers, and 3 visiting Chinese students. Providing invaluable assistance throughout the course were 5 ex-UWC and local young people doing their teacher training in preparation for a year of English teaching in China. For the third year in a row, the course focused on helping new students to the college make the transition from home and preparing them for the 2 years ahead.
When not busy in interactive lessons, the students enjoyed a wide variety of indoor and outdoor activities, hosted a group of young asylum seekers for a weekend, travelled to Fjærland book village and the Norwegian Glacier Museum, and made the most of their first taste of community life in Fjaler!
Big news in the physics department has been the removal of the chalk board and the installation of an Interactive white board or ”SMART board”. It looks like a normal white board but acts like a touch sensitive computer screen. A computer image is projected onto the screen and the teacher can simply use a finger to draw, move objects around and open applications. Students have often found it difficult to visualise concepts such as the diffraction of waves, the Doppler Effect or the motion of gas atoms. Using the board animations can easily be incorporated into every lesson making physics really come to life. Since the day’s notes are produced digitally they can also be stored digitally, after each lesson the notes are saved to the college website in PDF format to be accessed by students for review at a later date. In this way a student missing class can easily catch up on the class work. All links to websites accessed during the class are also active on the saved file and can be used to enhance understanding. Students with problems understanding English no longer have to struggle with note taking, they can use all their effort to follow the class and read the notes from the net later.The fact that the notes are exactly what students have seen in class aids memory and prevents copying errors.
RCNUWC Model United Nations
Since the early days of the college an annual session of a Model United Nations has become an important and exciting feature of our college life. This year we had perhaps the most successful Model United Nations and for this we owe our thanks to the team
of dedicated and efficient second year students who served as the secretariat, the administration and the media.
Our first year students who served either as member delegates or as representatives of specialised agencies, took their roles seriously in drawing up resolutions, in lobbying for support from fellow delegates, in compromising to ensure the success of resolutions and in enthusiastically debating resolutions before a vote. Students were able to represent the views of their designated countries with conviction and confidence because of their extensive research into the positions held by member states on a variety of international issues.
First Aid
In the first week of February 2004 it was cold and dark in Norway, however at RCNUWC blood curdling screams and shouts of ”Can you hear me….?” resounded around the campus. This was the week in which 1st year students participated in a First Aid course which aimed to teach them all some basic, practical 1st aid skills. The instructors for the course were 2nd year students who had over the previous year taken further training (with a local Red Cross “hjelpekorps”), advancing their skills and developing techniques for the instruction of these skills to others. We were lucky also to have a
coinciding visit of a Red Cross First Aid team from Belgrade, who were the national competition 1st aid champions.
As this project week is seen as a break from the normal academic routine, the course has been developed over the past few years to be as practical as possible. A rotation of many different workshops meant that learners were put into practical situations
that they should try and solve with prompting and guidance from their 2nd year
instructors. As they have learned only the most basic skills beforehand this often posed
a challenge for them, but discussion and missing “theory” after their attempts were
provided by the workshop leaders, thus facilitating their learning through experience.
In September the Care Centre staff, Hilary Hamper and Lesley Robertson, were
invited to The College of the Adriatic to offer some basic 1st aid instruction to the students there.
