Online lectures and presentations (Slovene): November 2020
Although classes at our school have moved to a system of distance learning, teachers across all departments have been hard at work to make sure that there is a variety of classes available and that students are given as many advantages as possible when it comes to the topics being covered.
With that in mind, our Slovene department arranged a number of lectures and presentations given online to several different classes through the month of November. These were arranged through video conferencing with students given the necessary information to join the presentation and interact with the guest lecturer.
Dr Vladimir Osolnik, an expert in South Slavic Studies and a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, gave a detailed and interesting lecture to some of our students on the theme of Romanticism in Slavic literature.
This theme was also dealt with by Dr Špela Sevšek Šramel, lecturer in Slovak Studies at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Her presentation dealt with the works of three Romantic poets including France Prešeren, Slovenia’s most famous poet.
The third guest speaker organised by the Slovene department was the famous writer Goran Vojnović whose works have been presented in print, on stage, and on film in Slovenia as well as having been translated into numerous other languages.
One of our fourth year students, Eva Brank, prepared a short report on this presentation:
After a whole week of classes spent in quarantine, another Zoom meeting on a Friday afternoon seems like piling on the agony of staring at a screen full of faraway faces. However, this definitely wasn’t the case on 13 November as our Slovene teacher, Ms Jana Ozimek, had organised a talk with Mr Goran Vojnović – author of one of the books chosen for this year’s Matura exam, the exams taken at a national level at the end of secondary school.
Our class was thrilled as we had been thoroughly analysing the book for the past two months, making this event a nice opportunity to get to learn more about and to understand the writer’s perspective.
At 1 o’clock, all 4th year students, some from other class groups, and some teachers joined the anticipated Zoom meeting. Ms Ozimek had prepared questions which Mr Vojnović answered in depth and with a relaxed tone.The book’s title is Figa (The Fig Tree), yet he revealed there is not any particular symbolical meaning to this title. Later on, we focused on the plot and the characters. The main themes of the book are love and family, dealing with three different couples and their hardships throughout their lives which makes the book historically relevant as well.
He emphasised that to him, as he is a film director as well as a writer, one of the most important elements is the montage process where you get to think about how you will put all the pieces of a story together. The reader is then challenged to interpret and imagine the possible outcomes of endings which have been deliberately written in an open way.
I found his attitude and the way that he talked about the creative process inspiring, especially as he brought the presentation to a close with the following piece of advice for young artists: read as much as you can, don’t wait for inspiration, and go and explore the world around us.
With these interesting occasions taking place alongside regular classes, we are glad that our students get such opportunities even when they do not have their lessons in the usual classroom setting. We would like to thank those who gave their time to talk to our students and the members of our Slovene department, especially Ms Jana Ozimek, for organising these greatly appreciated events.