On February 13, 2019, a joint student-senior conference took place at the Augustinum senior citizens' residence as part of the event "Life Stories in the Context of Past and Present: A CLIL Approach". The context of this conference was a research-based teaching/learning project on narrated life stories conducted in the 2018/2019 winter semester under the direction of Prof. Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner and Regina Kaminski. To implement the approach, the ABCs of Cultural Understanding and Communication (Schmidt, 1998; Schmidt & Finkbeiner, 2006; Finkbeiner & Lazar, 2015) was used as a model and vehicle. In preparation for the conference, the students wrote down their life stories, then interviewed their tandem partners and created posters together with them to present the life stories. In addition to pictures, the posters were also designed with maps to show the common or different origins. At the beginning of the conference, Prof. Dr. Finkbeiner introduced the participants to the ABCs of Cultural Understanding and Communication and the iceberg model (Weaver, 1993). The posters were then presented in a gallery walk. At the end of the conference, the students and senior citizens received a certificate for their successful participation in the "Narrated Life Stories" project as part of the ABCs. In addition, the senior citizens were presented with their biographies written by the students at this conference.
This project was supported by Service Learning with funds from the "Qualitätspakt Lehre" (University of Kassel) and is embedded in PRONET (Professionalization through Networking). PRONET is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the joint "Teacher Training Quality Campaign" of the federal and state governments.