IE #2 2020

Carmen m contribut Carmen Anders is a proud union member and the Head of Languages at St Rita’s College in Brisbane, Queensland. Last year she was awarded for her Outstanding Contribution to Language Learning by the Modern Language Teachers’ Association of Queensland. She discusses the value of language teaching, unionism and the teaching profession with IE journalist Jessica Willis.

Carmen has been teaching since 1999 at St Rita’s College and has been the Head of Languages for the past nine years.

She teaches German and Japanese and prior to her appointment as Head of Languages, also taught mathematics – having graduated with a double major in pure mathematics and a Diploma of Education in German and Japanese Studies from The University of Queensland.

Under her leadership, the languages program at the college has increased from three to six teachers, with 68 per cent of students in Years 7-10 and 33 per cent of those in Years 11-12 learning another language.

“I am German and migrated to Australia, so German is my native language,” Carmen said.

“I decided to go into teaching – and be a language teacher – because I would help my high school friends with their German schoolwork and found that I loved helping them.

“I thought, ‘oh, this might be my career!’.”

High value of language teaching Carmen is incredibly passionate about language teaching because students are usually self-motivated which can make lessons fun.

“For starters, students choose to take the subject and be in your classroom,” Carmen said.

“This means most students are very self motivated and ready to learn. You can make it fun and real, especially by incorporating online technology into lessons.

“For example, we can be looking at food and I can ask students to look up a grocery store in Berlin, find certain groceries and ask them to calculate how many euros needed to cover them.

30 | independent education | issue 2 | Vol 50 | 2020