The Collaborative Research Centre goes to school: students of the University of Tübingen’s department for cultural anthropology again organised project days, this time for two different schools: The Uhlandgymnasium Tübingen und die Kaufmännische Wilhelm-Schickard-Schule both reserved a complete day of lectures for the projects.

With the topic ‘Cultural Heritage’ the students addressed one of the major fields of study of SFB 1070 and developed and conducted 14 exciting hours of lecture. There was a huge variety of different subjects stretching from indigenous cultural heritage to nature-human-relationships, the significance of language, music and celebrations as cultural heritage and the question of how ‘World Heritage Sites’ are defined.

About 60 participants from universities, schools, school-administration and non-profit societies came together at Tübingen castle for the workshop ‘Diversity as a Resource’ held from May 10th to 11th 2019.

Lecturers from Norway, Austria, the UK, Germany and Switzerland shared their knowledge about intercultural education at schools.

This workshop derived out of the school projects designed by the SFB 1070’s Scientific Communication and was conducted in co-operation with the project „Wissenschaft lernen und lehren“ of the Wissenschaftsministerium BW.

Again a project day in a 10^th grade of the Uhland-Gymnasium in Tübingen was conducted by students of the University of Tübingen, directed by Veronika Ederer PhD. This year’s theme was ‘Culture is Life’.

I order to deal with foreign cultures it is indispensable to first understand one’s own culture. Thus, the first lesson was dedicated to a definition of ‘culture’ and the ‘German Culture’. During the second lesson a short excursion into Korean language helped to demonstrate the close links between language and culture and how strong the influences of other countries on language (and culture as well) are.

After a break Afghanistan was the subject of exploration. Texts, movie clips, teamwork projects and a final discussion easily filled 90 minutes of time.

In the end a quiz was conducted for all participants, who emphasized how much they liked the great variation of subjects and ways of presentation.

This year again a project day under the guidance of Dr. Veronika Ederer was organised for 7^th grade class at the Uhland Gymnasium in Tübingen. Themed ‘The World is our Field’ university students presented exciting insights into various subjects of cultural anthropology.

The project morning started with a topic that did not take the students too far away from home: it was exploring the identity and material culture of the Banat Swabians. It became more exotic during the second part, when a quiz lesson presented a Caribbean island in all its complexity.

The legend of Hua Mulan was used as an example to discuss the gender roles in China. Also the recent historical changes and the current situation was presented.

Using the example of Vietnam, the topic of stereotyping and clichés was introduced and compared with Germany: what is ‘typically German’?

The final event was a team project, in which students explored various significant historical sites in Kyoto and produced a poster for each attraction.

The positive feedback the students gave, showed that they had appreciated the versatile project day and the manifold insights. They praised not only the presentations of the students but above all the different perspectives – Curtain up for Cultural Anthropology in school.