Back to Main Page Bernard MacLaverty: CAL Back to Main Page Bernard MacLaverty: CAL
About us & this
project 
the course
Erik, Ilka, Nina, Silke G., Sara, Nicole, Maren, Doris, Martin, Gitta, Dörthe, Renée, Marlis, Silke Schl., Silke Schw., Hacky, Lars, Carola, Wilko, Patrick and Reinhard Donath
We realized this project as part of our Englischleistungskurs EN 21L in 12.2 with 20 pupils in February and March 1998. Topic of the course: "Britain: Current issues". One aim of this term is to prepare our study-trip to London in September 1998.
With the situation in Ulster changing I suggested to read Cal by Bernard MacLaverty. The author was not unknown as we had read his short story Father and Son in the term before ("Literary Analysis" that term was called). Personally, I favour Landeskunde topics which can be dealt with by reading literary texts as well as factual ones. The combination love story - history seems to work: "CAL seems especially suitable for German students, because it offers deep insights into the tragic conflict that opposes Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland" (cover "Cal").
In February and March 1998 the Peace Talks in Belfast were in their final phase, overshadowed by Sinn Féin's exclusion for two weeks as well as sectarian killings going on, thus topical events in Ulster were dealt with in class quite often. Handouts with articles from Newsweek and online texts from The Guardian, Belfast Telegraph etc. were used in class and more or less traditionally analyzed.
The pupils were to read the book chapter by chapter. Each chapter was analyzed by concentrating on the main aspects: Characters, relationship, events etc. along with the necessary vocabulary activities - business as usual. We worked mainly in groups who prepared posters about each chapter and showed their results to the course, discussing the findings. A summary had to be written of each chapter as homework, characterizations and little interpretations as well.
One of my task was to help with information on Ulster now and then: Especially the historical events mentioned in the book as well as names of Catholic and Protestant groups and parties were difficult to understand for the course.
Whenever the media reported events from Ulster, I handed in printouts of articles from various sources on the World Wide Web. Some of these texts were used by Hacky and Martin as background information to prepare articles for our 12th edition of The Ulricianum Times for the International Newspaper Day on March 12th, 1998. A complete feature page was written by them, covering the following topics:
Apart from working on the main characters Cal and Marcella the chain of events (Handlungsstrang?), Cal's relationship to Marcella, Shamie, his mother, Skeffington and Crilly was analyzed.
Some chapters were started with an oral summary, some with a little written 'test' like this:
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Sectarian violence from Republican and Loyalist groups as mentioned in CAL was analyzed and explained, sometimes referring to current events which were reported from Ulster.
To understand the attitudes of Loyalists and Republicans this text was really helpful:
Just for a change I taught the following song to the course which I sang together with them, afterwards pondering over historical events referred to in the text and the question of nationalism. Quite interesting, especially with an exchange student from Arizona and an assistant teacher from Manchester in the course as well:
GOD SAVE IRELAND
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When we were more or less through with the analysis of CAL and had even read
we prepared the hypertext-project which I had suggested to the course more or less as an idea from my side some weeks before.
Oh yes, shortly afterwards we had to write a Klausur which was the more important as some of the tasks were supposed to be included in the web-pages, at least parts of them. But that meant I had to correct and mark them before!
Topic: Bernard MacLaverty - Cal
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