A Weekend Away

Students get a dose of the language and come back different, charged and alive in the classroom.”  That’s how Byron Despres-Berry from the Appleton Area School District in Wisconsin talks about why he brings a group of students every year to Concordia Language Villages Village Weekends.  He has been teaching German at the middle school in Appleton for the past five years and joins his senior colleague Deb Scheller in organizing this annual trek to Minnesota’s north woods.  In coming years, they hope to collaborate with teachers in area schools and bring more students from the surrounding districts and private schools as well.  They like coming to the January weekend, braving the twelve-hour bus ride in the deep of winter.  “Students are just stunned by the architecture, their first impression,” he adds, “when we turn the corner and see Waldsee, the German Language Village, for the first time.  We time it so we arrive just at sunset.”

That first night, having passed through customs, picked a new name and exchanged their money for the weekend, they already begin to settle into their surroundings and into the multiple opportunities to use the language to accomplish things.  Despres-Berry thinks increased language usage is just one of the outcomes, one of the things the students take away from the weekend.  “The way the program flows you need to speak the language to eat or if you want to buy something at the village store.”  He continues, “The students really listen and want to understand what the goofy and fun counselors are saying.  The native speaking staff members really help as well.”

“As a teacher, what I like is that this program facilitates the authentic use of language in a non-instructional way.”  He likes attending year after year because the Language Villages create a setting where teachers also get a chance to play and in the process learn something themselves.  “It’s a good opportunity for teachers to get a chance to speak the language with others beyond the language that is defined by the units in the classroom.”  Despres-Berry continues, “The weekend program theme really is worth a whole unit, so I use it to supplement a unit or substitute it for a unit I might otherwise try to do in class.”

And at Waldsee his students last winter were especially intrigued by the new BioHaus Environmental Living Center, where learning about science meets learning a world language.  His students came away with a sense that what they learn about in science class really matters and has some real important applications.  “It’s pretty cool when you get to do science in German.”

Byron Despres-Berry’s involvement with the Villages does not stop with co-organizing a weekend for his middle school students.  In fact his involvement started when he attended a summer program session not quite 25 years ago.  Even after stints of living in Berlin, Austria and the state of Nordrhein Westfalen in Germany, being involved with the Villages is a highlight.  Most recently he contributed to two teacher development programs offered by Concordia Language Villages this past July.  Of extending himself that way he says, “you don’t know how good that was for me”.  As an instructor of current and future language teachers, he found he increased his own understanding of the National Standards and the power of storytelling as a teaching strategy while guiding participants through the development of thematic units.

weekends@cord.edu
(800) 450-2214