The island of Aruba follows the Catalan language immersion model
At a first glance, it may seem that Catalonia and the Caribbean island of Aruba do not have much in common, but if these places are compared in detail we would find something similar between them: more than one co-official language. Aruba belongs to the Netherlands and schools teach in Dutch, although the most used language in the street is Papiamento (Caribbean creole language). Moreover, most of the inhabitants of this island speak and understand Spanish and English.
At a first glance, it may seem that Catalonia and the Caribbean island of Aruba do not have much in common, but if these places are compared in detail we would find something similar between them: more than one co-official language. Aruba belongs to the Netherlands and schools teach in Dutch, although the most used language in the street is Papiamento (Caribbean creole language). Moreover, most of the inhabitants of this island speak and understand Spanish and English.
This is why students in Instituto Pedagógico Arubano are interested in knowing about the Catalan culture and its language immersion model and, for four years, Miquel Robert (lecturer at the Faculty of Education of the University of Barcelona) has been leading a collaboration programme with them, which consists on a short Catalan language course which treats issues on general culture and analyses our education and language model.
Around forty students have joined this program and had the chance to share some lessons with the students of the Faculty, apart from paying a visit to Catalan schools to see the reality of the classrooms in person. As a result of this agreement, there are two schools in Aruba which are applying a similar model to the one of Catalan, since they are offering a bilingual education (Papiamento-Dutch) instead of only Dutch.
When students go back to Aruba, they offer an oral presentation to talk about their experience with the students and highlight those aspects that were most surprising during their stay in Catalonia. In this yearʼs presentation they also mentioned the events of October 1 and the current political situation in Catalonia.