'Bearing each other is not enough'
Asis Aynan, Dutch teacher and writer, sees bicultural students at his university of applied sciences mingling and Dutch cheese heads clump together. That must change.
Picture: Fred van Diem
Lineoleum fever: The stage fright a teacher experiences before or while teaching. Writer Asis Aynan is still 'bothered' by it when he faces a new group. He not only attached a term to it, but also used it as the title of his latest book: Linoleum fever, about life at a college in the big city.
In conversations with colleagues - his word - many claim not to know about stage fright. “I think many teachers think that you are unsuitable for teaching if you have linoleum fever. It really is a taboo, perhaps the public secret in education.” While according to Aynan you can't help but experience nerves when you are faced with a group with 25 new 'souls'. It is a necessary sensation if you want to move students to learn. “I hope to experience it throughout my career. The day I don't feel it anymore, I'll resign."
All Dutch names: I even had a nightmare about it
Does that linoleum fever bother you too?
“I taught for a short time on the communication course because I thought I could do more with my writing skills there. In my study of social legal services, 60 percent of the students have family outside the national borders. But when I got the list of names during communication, I got stressed: all Dutch names. I even got a nightmare about it when someone asked me: Do you speak Dutch? I woke up sweating. Fortunately, I knew then: that lesson will be fine. I have no faith, but I have developed a superstition in which something goes really well when I have dreamed about it. ”
So those lessons in the communication course were a success?
“The students got the points they had to get: in that sense my lessons were a success. But that was all that interested them. Where I would like to lovingly conflict, want to discuss, that did not interest the communication students. While the students have often had to help people in their lives in the social legal services program, that is why they choose this study. They are not do-gooders, but they do want to do good. They are involved and do not shy away from discussion. ”
We are obliged to show our students how diverse society is
If you deal with a case in which two neighbors, a Turk and a Kurd, get into a fight, you will be called out by a student.
“I like to diversify my cases. I chose an explosive, political subject. I think it's good to go to the place where it hurts, but sometimes as a teacher you might want to take it a bit easier. Although we as a social legal service program are obliged to show how diverse our society is, because that is the field in which our students will work. ”
Do you therefore find it important that the university of applied sciences offers the subject of diversity?
“A course like this should also be taught at universities. Students have to participate in the world and experience that the world does not revolve around them. ”
You yourself have received an education where diversity was hard to find.
“When I started at primary school in Haarlem I only spoke Berbers. I was the only one whose parents were not born in the Netherlands. But it was completely normal for me. Of course I had a sense of being different. For a while I made it a migration issue, but later I realized: every child has a sense of being different, because every child is an individual. ”
It's a hodgepodge, not a melting pot
Your classes are very diverse.
“My groups are a reflection of the Amsterdam street. A mishmash, not a melting pot. To be a melting pot, students from different cultures must talk, eat and fuck with each other. And they don't. The bicultural students mix with each other, but the native students do not. Exaggerated: they think they are part of the multicultural society when they eat shawarma. But it does not work like that. You have to show people that you are open to it, that the door is open. For me, a society is only multicultural if you interact with each other, not if you only tolerate each other. ”
The soil here is very fertile, also figuratively speaking
You love the Netherlands, your book shows.
“Awesome! If you put a potato in the ground in the Netherlands, you get ten in return. The soil here is very fertile - also figuratively. If you want something, you can start an initiative, I don't know: set up a foundation. In the country where my parents were born - Morocco - there is a dictatorship, everything is corrupt there, nothing is possible there. While this country is open to ideas.”
Asis Aynan was the first of his family of nine children born in the Netherlands and grew up in Haarlem. He studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, is a writer and works as a teacher of Dutch in the social legal services program of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
