You know the feeling when it’s time to say goodbye? For me, this is exactly what’s going on right at this moment: saying goodbye to the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) where I spent just over a year and a half as a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter working together with and for Prof. Sara Hägi-Mead.

During this time, I had the opportunity to be involved in some really cool things (for example this cool project called MERREM). I trained future German teachers to reflect on multilingualism and how it impacts their teaching, supervised BA and MA theses on various themes around multilingualism in education and worked on projects implementing language awareness into teacher training for subjects such as biology and chemistry.

There are many things that come to mind when I look back at the last 20 months, but one particular moment stands out and coincidentally, it happened during my very last oral exam for the RPTU. After completing the exam in a spectacularly excellent fashion, a student wanted to share a story with my co-examiner and myself about their professional practice.

In my seminar, I had used a performative method to show students that they can learn chunks and phrases of languages very quickly. I used the Serbian example sentence „Zovem se XXX, kako se ti zoves?“ (My name is XXX, what is your name?) First, the student proved that even after weeks, they still remembered the phrase, supporting the claim that performative approaches can help memorize vocabulary, chunks and phrases. I was already delighted about this outcome but they went on to make an even more important point: In their own teaching practice as a support teacher, they had a little girl from Serbia with very little knowledge of German, who was often alone in class, shy and had difficulty engaging. When the student used the Serbian phrase, the girl’s eyes lit up. She was over the moon that her teacher was able to speak a bit of her language, and it motivated her to engage more with the other pupils and the teachers alike.

This story moved me deeply; in fact, I was very close to shedding a few tears in the exam setting. Not because I was so happy that my method worked but because this student understood and embraced - in my opinion - the most important part of addressing multilingualism in education: It all starts with respect and openness towards other languages and others as individuals. By showing this young girl that her language is appreciated, the student made a deeply meaningful contribution to the girl’s educational experience. We urgently need more teachers like this for the future.

This little story was the perfect way to end my chapter at the RPTU. I am still very moved by it and will keep it in my repertoire of anecdotal evidence, especially in my next chapter which is new but yet very familiar: I am going back to UCC where I will be once again taking up my role as University Language Teacher, spreading openness about multilingualism, and many other things.