I’m an exchange student from Germany. At the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz I’m studying translation, linguistics and culture with the languages English, Dutch and Italian (and German as a base language) and am currently in my third year. My main reason for studying this is that I have always been interested in learning about new countries, their history and their cultures – maybe because I grew up in a bilingual household myself in a country that has more than one official language as well, Belgium. Coming to Canada I was excited to see if Canada therefor would be similar to Belgium, in any way. Neither in high school, nor in university did I get the chance to learn anything about this country, to study Canadian history – the focus was always on European history or, which came the closest, the U.S. history. This is the main reason why I decided to take this class.
Although not having studied Canadian History in depth before, I at least thought that I had some vague knowledge about it. But, sitting in class the first day, I didn’t even know what ‘’confederation’’ meant and when I went home that day, the first thing I did was look it up. And then I thought – if I didn’t even know about this important event in Canadian History, then I will for sure learn a lot during this term. Coming here on an exchange program to learn about Canada and with a personal interest in different cultures, I asked myself: How did the society of that time look like? Which issues did it have to face? Were there any differences to Europe during the same time period? These are topics that I present in my Reading Logs, as well as in my Document Analysis and Research Paper.