Blending training and cultural immersion...

How do you choose your TEFL course? One important factor is always the location, and rightfully so! You are selecting the city you will call home for the duration of the course and beyond. 

Naturally if you choose to uproot your life for a month and live in a new city, you want to SEE and EXPERIENCE it! 

 

So at Via Lingua how do we incorporate a way for trainees to get acquainted with their new city into the full workload and class schedule? We do this with the Culture Capstone Project - a project that trainees find to be one of the most eye-opening and enriching aspects of the course. 

 

What is it? 

 

Trainees are grouped together and given “cultural tasks” throughout the city that guide them to discover less-known museums, monuments, outdoor markets, and unique areas off the beaten tourist path. They are not asked to create a “Wikipedia” type of entry, but to seek to understand how and why this place or monument is culturally significant to the city and its residents.  This often allows trainees to meet and interact with locals, who are delighted to share the knowledge they have and who appreciate the genuine curiosity the trainees have about them, their beautiful city, and their culture. 

 

Following this project experience, trainees often comment that they are happy to have had the chance to experience something they would not have otherwise known about. They comment that while they had done plenty of sightseeing in the past, they had never really used the opportunity to reflect deeper on what they were visiting. Traveling and sightseeing should never be a checklist of places to cross off. 

 

People who come take the course in any of our Via Lingua’s school locations arrive knowing how to find the main tourist attractions, but don’t always know where to look for something more. 

As TEFL Trainers, we have also immersed ourselves in new cultures. We are bi-lingual, multi-cultural people ourselves and we know that the experience is rich and rewarding only when we dare to explore deeper than the surface.