Dana Papadima, our Educational Director, talks about the bilingual profile of our school and about celebrating the national identity, an essential element in the profile of the Avenor College graduate.
The bilingual profile of Avenor College makes elements of British language and civilisation coexist harmoniously and balanced with those of Romanian language and culture. Speaking of the Romanian language, the cultural knowledge and skills are not only found within the classes established by the national curriculum of Romanian language and literature for primary and middle school, but at the level of most of the activities and events carried out in and outside the school.
We refer thus to elements of Romanian heritage, cultural, geographical, written or unwritten, to knowledge about Bucharest’s heritage and the surroundings of the Capital, to the feeling of belonging to a socio-cultural community. The Romanian language classes, lessons of geography, history, leadership, arts, trips, cultural events, and school competitions are multiple opportunities to awaken our students’ identity awareness and pride.
The knowledge of Romanian heritage is taken further during the high school Romanian language classes, for which we built a specific programme, based on the national curriculum. The Romanian language course for high school is finalised at the end of each year of study with a graduation activity in front of the public: group project, debate, essay and, in Grade 12, a speech on a given topic.
Celebrating national identity is an essential component of building a reflective, confident, informed high school graduate profile. Linguistic-cultural identity represents the essential and necessary ferment to help create beautiful characters, governed by a system of values and perennial moral principles. The fact that our first generation of graduates found their way to remarkable universities, both from abroad and from Romania, that they “easily” move and develop in and between different systems, different cultures are also due to the school’s care to grow in them and protect their identity culture. Conscious and honoured to have Romanian roots, our students, our graduates naturally become European citizens, citizens of the contemporary world.
