You know the feeling when you think you have a full-circle moment? At this stage, it’s been quite a time since it happened: On the occasion of the very first Österreich-Tage (Austria Days) in Serbia on 23 and 24 November 2023, I travelled to Belgrade and Niš to give professional development workshops for German teachers; I was there on behalf of Kultur und Sprache, a programme of the The Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF). 

While I had convened many workshops in similar contexts before, it was only this time that my mam found particular interest in the fact that I was travelling to her and our family’s native Serbia, which she commented by saying, in Serbian: “Srspki Austrijanac koji živi u Irskoj ide u Srbiju da predaje srpskim učiteljima nešto o predavanju nemačkog u Srbiji.” (roughly translated to “a Serbo-Austrian fella, who lives in Ireland, is travelling to Serbia to teach Serbian German teachers something about teaching German in Serbia.“) And when she said it, it really made me think how crazy this whole situation was, or at least how crazy it might sound. There it was: my full circle moment.  

In Serbia, everybody seemed delighted that it was precisely me who was there for the inaugural Austria Days, seeing my background as special and being appreciative of my international experience. But not only my international experience, it seemed to me that it was especially the experience of growing up with a background A in a ‘foreign’ country B: As a son of migrants, I assume was the assumption, I must have made certain experiences which provide with a certain ‘toolkit’ to teach German, and perhaps a certain understanding of what it means to learn German.  

It made me think about how I got here, where I currently am, and it also made me reflect about myself and my family quite a bit. My grandfather (deda) and grandmother (baba) moved from Serbia to Austria in the 70s, then my parents followed, and soon thereafter I was the first of my family to be born in Austria. While the story of migration is not a very special one and many of us living in Europe and on this planet have made similar experiences (and unfortunately, many have had worse), it is nevertheless special to me and my family. When my deda and baba moved to Austria, they did so with the intention of eventually returning to their native Serbia. And they were convinced of it for years, they would say, “idemo mi kod kuće”, we are going home. Even after spending over 40 years in Austria. Home to me is perhaps even more complex, so I like to pull the “home is where the Wi-Fi connects automatically”-joke whenever anyone asks me. 

I grew up in a household where there were always at least two languages present; my parents and grandparents used Serbian at home and I picked up German in kindergarten and school and brought it home, so to speak. Once my brother was born and started kindergarten, German found its place more and more within our family so that it’s now a fundamental part for the communication between myself and my brother, while Serbian is still the language of choice with my parents. Additionally, I was in contact with another language, if only briefly: My deda grew up with people who spoke Vlaški, a language used by the Vlachs in Serbia. He taught me some short songs which, looking back at them today, don’t make much sense. Regardless, I still remember them and it also lead, years later, to my taking a course of Romanian (mulțumesc, dedo!). Family friends would use either Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian, but also a mixture of Polish and Serbian, as well as Goranski, a language spoken by the Gorani people, would be present. French was one of my favourite school subjects, so much so that I studied it at uni, togther with Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, and given that I share an office with a French-speaking colleague, it's still in my life, albeit more passively eavesdropping than using it myself. And obviously, English came along, too, and became an important part of my life, too. 

In some way, this is the linguistic experience which I bring into my classroom, and perhaps one of those experiences that I can constructively use in my classroom. It’s the understanding that we are not all the same and bring a variety of experiences and languages with us when we hit the school (and before). This presence of linguistic diversity was also evident recently when I visited St. Mary’s secondary school in Mallow, County Cork, to give a workshop/presentation promoting studying German. While I worked with the students, some of them shared their language knowledge and seemed delighted by my appreciation and acknowledgement of their stories and linguistic backgrounds (or where they delighted at my miserable attempts to come up with words in Dari and Arabic?). This is my humble attempt at providing a fostering, caring and understanding environment for all students. I am convinced that my experience growing up with multiple languages and experiencing them on an everyday basis has contributed that it is one of my core beliefs that it’s important to appreciate, acknowledge and include students and their linguistic backgrounds. I learnt, so to speak, from a very young age that there are such things as other languages, that they are very real and that they are part of life. I taught my friends some words in Serbian, and they taught me words and expressions in their languages. My personal experience as a child of immigrants growing up in Austria was predominantly a positive one; the negative ones I take as extra-motivation to contribute that my students have an even better and more positive experience. The good thing is, even if you as a student had bad experiences with your linguistic background, or even if you did not have any similar experiences at all, you can still make a difference to your students. And importantly, this is not something that you have to be "born" with (again, whatever that means in the case of languages). 

So this was it, my full circle moment: being in Serbia made me feel as if I was at the start of it all, and in someway it felt connected to my being a teacher. On my taxi ride to the airport when I was leaving Belgrade, the taxi driver commented that my Serbian was excellent and that he would not have know that I grew up abroad, and it made me smile. One the one hand, I enjoyed the compliment and felt a bit proud of my achievement (and bloody hard work) to speak the language "like a native speaker" (I don't like and avoid this term but that's for another blog post). At the same time, I realized once again that it’s not easy for anyone to grow up between multiple languages and to satisfy all the expectations around you. And that’s why it’s so important to appreciate what is there instead of criticizing what isn’t.