CIICPD 2023

Appendix II – Example Students workshop Business before pleasure?

During my studies at IUT Dijon, Cindy and I took part in a video project group within the subject “Projet tuteuré”. The task was to think up a film yourself, to write the screenplay and to carry out the implementation. We were in the group with six French women who had known each other from university. At the beginning I found this subject very exciting and creative, but over time I had to realize that as a non-French person you can really reach your limits. In the beginning, the group work was designed in such a way that we should first discuss an idea for the film. But the conversation was much too fast for me because all the girls were talking at once and each was eagerly contributing or developing ideas. I behaved very calmly and simply couldn’t keep up with the brainstorming because when I had a good idea, I couldn’t put it into words so quickly either. At the same time, I didn’t want to slow down the process by asking vocabulary questions. After one such discussion, the group asked us very briefly if we agreed with the genre of the film (a girlie hero story), which we simply said yes to avoid a confrontation. A 3-hour meeting then took place every week, which turned out to be more than tough for us and we often felt so out of place (since we didn’t think we could contribute anything) that I increasingly felt like doing this group work passed. It was the same every time: We sat down, 3 of the French women played around on their mobile phones, the others talked about personal things like boys or the weekend, then after a quarter of an hour of “chattering” the real work finally started. It was true that over time I was able to follow things a little faster and get involved, but we never really warmed up to one another over the course of the semester. Cindy and I always sat there, listened, got bored and didn’t feel integrated. The French, on the other hand, couldn’t even respond to us if we didn’t understand something because they only spoke English very sporadically and I also had the feeling that they couldn’t put themselves in our place as foreigners. Maybe they were just shy and insecure because of the language barrier, who knows? Of course, Cindy and I thought about how we could improve the situation, but we couldn’t really think of anything and we didn’t dare to address this “intercultural problem”. It wasn’t until one of the last meetings before filming that I went to McDonald’s with the group for lunch and spoke to the others for the first time. Actually, they were all really nice and asked interested questions about life in Germany, experiences abroad, etc. We laughed a lot and afterwards everything was much more relaxed and happy, unfortunately much too late. I think this experience really made me realize that the saying “work before play” tends to be misunderstood in France and that it’s normal to get to know each other before working together.

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