Bishopbriggs Academy run a wide range of projects and events with links between languages and employability at the heart. All languages are involved, and the school’s projects cover a range of sectors. Several of the projects use German or Gaelic and involve film and drama.
Following the SCILT Business Brunch in December 2018, we decided to organise a careers event for the whole of S3. First of all, pupils gathered in the assembly hall where they listened to a keynote delivered by Calum Ferguson from BBC Alba, a former player with the Albion Rovers and Inverness Caledonian Thistle as well as a former Canadian International player.
After this, all pupils took part in a series of workshops. Each class participated in four different workshops. The workshops were delivered by the Goethe-Institut, the school’s German Language Assistant, British Council Scotland, HarperCollins, Language Ambassadors from the University of Strathclyde and an Art teacher from the school, who had lived and worked in South Africa. Higher Spanish pupils also delivered a workshop
To finish, pupils returned to the assembly hall where Eòghan Stewart, Professional Development Officer at SCILT, delivered a plenary about languages and where these could take them.
On 11 October 2018, the school organised and hosted a commemorative celebration to mark a ten-year partnership with the Goethe-Institut. This showcased the German linguistic flair and experiences of pupils, past and present, including song and drama, and had important German officials in attendance.
S3 pupils took part in a German IDL science project, which saw pupils challenged to conduct the STEM aspects of the experiment in their L2. The project culminated in an event in which Stephanie Zihms spoke to the S3 cohort about her work and experiences as a geologist, all in German, and also gifted the school a fish fossil.
This year, S6 pupils of German were involved in the SEET competition, Our World - a creative film-making project. Their film had to cover one of the following themes: sustainable tourism, migration and welcome, or trade. They chose migration and welcome. View the film
A group of S1 pupils took part in the FilmG Gaelic film competition. Pupils were given a central theme and had to conceptualise, write, act, shoot and edit their own creation, entirely through the medium of Gaelic. Pupils received professional training and guidance on how to use a wide-array of film/audio equipment and also on how to use advanced editing software. After a two-day period of production, the pupils had created a very slick five-minute short about a pupil who uses her powers of telekinesis to thwart a school bully. View the film