Subject:

The African Continent

[AFR]   Hours: 425    ECTS: 17    Exam: in 1st Yr 

Study modules in the 1st year (425 hours).

In the modules, students will:

• travel overland, in the team’s bus, through African societies, economy, politics, environment, art and culture
• explore the African Continent  through field investigations
• focus especially on human living conditions
• learn to travel
• travel to learn

More about the subject

Studying the African Continent by bussing it, from Northwest Africa through the Sahara desert to Sub-Saharan Africa and back – living, investigating and working together with people from all walks of life, and producing and giving on new knowledge in the process, calls for being busy, staying active and listening to the continent breathing.

It is our vision at DNS to imagine teachers and students excavating for a mine of new knowledge among the peoples, while bringing to them the collected knowledge from books and other files and new knowledge from the midst of people met, talked to, debated with and shared bed and breakfast with.

It is methods of this training that allow the student to break the chains of the classroom.

Field Work · African Studies

The investigation method is not only used by the police.  The teachers at DNS know well their art and craft of investigation. They know to look for the broad picture, for the perspectives and for a way forward. The teachers know the devil in the detail when they see one. They take their notes by pen and paper as well as by taste and smell and hearsay, and they know how to sort it all out when at home again after a trying tour investigating. They know how to teach the craft to students. They know how to inspire the student to the highs of artistic investigative practice.

Now the students must turn Sherlock apprentices. Getting to know the African Continent is a privilege for the few. Getting to know it as a student of DNS by a million methods and one bus is a Fata Morgana come true. Each of our students and the student body as a collective will become inhabitants of the soft village of Fata Morgana, and they will have to endure the harshness of the deserts around it. They will experience its present and embrace by reading and studying in other ways its historic past, they will confront its conditions, and they will do so while debating and while trying to design its future

Bringing It to the Public

The whole lot will serve the people by being communicated from lecterns, in city halls, in small town squares, in schools, by television and by radio and on the Internet, bringing it onto the public arena.

The realism of the human conditions experienced, and the importance of bringing these experiences to the people as a political presentation, justifies the inclusion of this subject in the teacher training course.

It is certainly suitable for a hopeful student teacher to break her or his silence about serious matters. It is so much more suitable for a hopeful educationist, aiming at practicing as a teacher of the future generations, to bring it onto the public arena.