On February 13, 2019, a joint student-senior conference was held at the Seniorenresidenz Augustinum as part of the event "Life Stories in the Context of Past and Present: A CLIL Approach". The context of this conference was a teaching/learning project on narrated life stories conducted in the winter semester 2018/2019 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, students wrote down their life stories, then interviewed their tandem partners* and worked with them to create posters 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 presented the ABCs of Cultural Understanding and Communication and the Iceberg Model (Weaver, 1993) to the participants. Afterwards, the posters were presented in a Gallery Walk. At the end of the conference, the students as well as the seniors received a certificate of successful participation in the project "Narrated Life Stories" within the framework of the ABCs. In addition, the seniors were presented with their biographies written by the students at this conference.
This project was supported by Service Learning with funds from the "Quality Pact for Teaching" (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 "Quality Offensive Teacher Education" of the federal and state governments.