Learning a language in a new country does not take place only in the classroom.
For international students, language quickly becomes necessary to move around, understand directions, identify a place, ask for information or interpret ordinary situations.
In Kyiv in 2021, the then State University of Telecommunications incorporated this dimension into the language training offered to international students in its preparatory programme.
The methods used included thematic excursions through the city.
Their purpose was not simply touristic.
They connected vocabulary, history, monuments and movement with situations that students could observe directly.
The city therefore became an extension of the learning environment.
This practice raises a broader question:
what happens when language learning begins to pass through concrete experience of the territory in which that language is used?
A programme for international students
In 2021, the institution was still known as the State University of Telecommunications.
Today it operates under the name State University of Information and Communication Technologies, following a change made in 2023.
At the time, its preparatory department included international students who needed to acquire sufficient Ukrainian before or while continuing their university studies.
The programme was not limited to academic vocabulary.
The university also identified everyday, professional and scientific communication as learning goals.
This range of uses matters.
A university language does not exist only in textbooks or examinations.
It is also used to take public transport, understand another person, read signs, complete administrative tasks and gradually enter the social life of the country in which one studies.
Leaving the classroom
The thematic excursions followed precisely this logic.
The university described them as part of the educational programme for international students learning Ukrainian.
Subjects introduced in class could therefore be continued directly within the city.
Kyiv’s history, for example, became the basis for visits to several historical areas.
Learning then changes form.
Vocabulary is no longer associated only with a definition.
It encounters a place.
A monument.
A street.
A landscape.
A situation.
This relationship between language and environment gives certain words a material dimension that abstract instruction alone cannot provide.
Kyiv as a learning environment
An institutional article published in May 2021 describes, among other activities, an excursion devoted to the history of Kyiv.
The route took students to several historical monuments and places in the capital.
They could therefore directly observe elements discussed in their language and history training.
The educational value of such a method does not lie only in visiting monuments.
It lies in the relationship created between knowledge and environment.
A foreign city initially experienced as a difficult-to-read collection of streets, stations, buildings and signs gradually begins to produce reference points.
A name is recognised.
A historical figure is connected with a monument.
A location is situated.
Relationships between different urban areas become clearer.
Language learning therefore contributes to the construction of a personal geography of the city.
The Ciel-Bleu article and another urban route
The text published on Ciel-Bleu.org on 29 May 2021 described the same method through another route, including Arsenalna metro station, the Arsenal Square area, the surroundings of the Park of Eternal Glory, the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, Mariinsky Palace, Mariinsky Park and the Verkhovna Rada.
This route differs from another excursion documented by the university on 21 May, which included Volodymyrska Street, the Golden Gate and several other historical monuments.
The difference is significant.
It suggests that this was not a single exceptional outing, but a pedagogical method using several routes through Kyiv as learning material.
The city became a collection of possible educational situations.
Language as a way of reading space
Learning a language gradually changes the way a territory can be read.
At first, the name of a metro station may simply be a difficult word to pronounce.
With experience, that name becomes associated with a route.
A district.
A connection.
A concrete experience.
The same process applies to street names, public buildings and institutions.
Language makes elements of the environment interpretable.
At the same time, the environment helps make the language understandable.
The relationship works both ways.
The city gives words context.
Words make the city more legible.
The metro station as a learning situation
The metro offers an especially clear example.
For a newly arrived international student, a transport network is not merely technical infrastructure.
It is a system that must be learned.
Identifying a station.
Reading a name in Cyrillic.
Understanding a direction.
Recognising an interchange.
Anticipating an exit.
Associating a station with an area of the city.
These actions eventually become ordinary.
At the beginning, however, they require learning.
A guided excursion temporarily reduces uncertainty.
Students move with teachers or a group.
They can ask questions.
Observe how others behave.
Later repeat some of the same journeys alone.
Collective movement can therefore contribute to the gradual development of autonomy.
History as situated vocabulary
The excursions described by the university also gave an important place to history.
This connection is particularly useful.
A language course may use history simply as lexical content.
But when a monument or public building stands in front of the student, the relationship changes.
A proper name becomes associated with an image.
A historical period with a place.
A political institution with a real building.
Vocabulary becomes embedded in spatial experience.
This does not mean that seeing a monument automatically produces historical understanding.
The teacher’s mediation remains essential.
But the site provides a concrete support for that mediation.
From sightseeing to learning
A university excursion can easily resemble a tourist activity.
Both involve similar actions.
Visiting.
Walking.
Observing.
Taking photographs.
Listening to explanations.
Discovering monuments.
The difference lies mainly in the function assigned to those actions.
Within an educational setting, discovering the city is connected to an organised learning process.
The route is selected.
Information is provided.
Vocabulary can be reused.
Monuments become teaching resources.
This distinction prevents such excursions from being reduced to entertainment offered to international students.
Socialisation and familiarisation
The term “socialisation”, used in the 2021 article, nevertheless needs to be handled carefully.
A few hours of excursion are obviously not enough to integrate a student into a society.
They can, however, contribute to a broader process of familiarisation.
Students begin to recognise particular places.
They share an experience with their peers.
They encounter teachers in a setting different from the classroom.
They develop common reference points.
A monument seen together may later become a subject of conversation.
A shared journey may become a reference when someone has to travel alone.
The activity therefore creates small resources for future situations.
Learning alongside other international students
The group itself also matters.
International mobility is often described as an individual experience: one person leaves one country and must adapt to another.
In practice, much of that experience takes place alongside other international students.
Language difficulties are shared.
Information circulates.
Students who feel more confident in certain situations may help others.
Individual trajectories remain distinct, but they are also shaped within peer groups.
The excursion temporarily creates such a collective environment.
The teacher as mediator of territory
The teacher’s role changes when learning moves into the city.
In the classroom, teaching is mainly organised around linguistic content.
During an excursion, the teacher must also establish links between that content and the environment.
Naming.
Explaining.
Contextualising.
Drawing attention to details.
Responding to questions produced by a building or an unexpected situation.
The territory therefore adds an element of openness to the learning process.
Not everything can be fully planned.
A student may notice a detail that was not part of the programme.
A question may emerge from something happening in the street.
The city introduces a degree of educational unpredictability.
Knowledge through movement
The method also reminds us that knowledge is not always produced while sitting still.
Walking can itself become a form of learning.
Moving through the city requires places to be related to one another.
Students understand that an institution is close to a park.
That a monument belongs to a larger urban setting.
That a metro station provides access to several places previously discussed.
They no longer memorise only isolated elements.
They begin to establish spatial relationships between them.
The city gradually becomes a lived map.
The limits of immersion
The word “immersion” should nevertheless be used cautiously.
Going out into the city does not make every barrier disappear.
A student can take part in a guided excursion and still have major linguistic difficulties.
They can recognise monuments without feeling socially integrated.
They can know perfectly how to travel between university and home while developing few local relationships.
Urban experience is therefore one component of socialisation, not a guarantee of it.
This distinction avoids turning a useful educational method into an exaggerated promise of integration.
Unequal trajectories
Students also begin from different positions.
Some have already lived abroad.
Others are encountering a new alphabet, language and administrative system for the first time.
Some rapidly develop relationships outside the university.
Others remain largely within international student networks.
Language skills differ.
Financial resources differ.
Confidence in social interaction differs.
The same educational programme can therefore be experienced very differently by different students.
The university as an intermediary between student and city
A university does not teach academic disciplines alone.
When it receives international students, it also becomes an interface between those students and a new environment.
This function can take different forms.
Language courses.
Administrative information.
Orientation.
Support.
Excursions.
Introductions to local infrastructure.
Such mechanisms do not replace personal experience.
They can, however, reduce some of the uncertainty associated with the early stages of international mobility.
The thematic excursion belongs to this family of institutional mediations.
The campus is not enough
Understanding international student experience therefore requires looking beyond the campus.
Student life extends into the city.
Transport.
Shops.
Administration.
Housing.
Cultural spaces.
Parks.
Streets.
Political institutions.
These spaces are not simply external to education.
They shape some of the conditions under which education can actually take place.
Knowing how to move around or complete an administrative task may not be part of the academic curriculum.
Yet it can be essential to making that curriculum possible in practice.
Learning a city without completely mastering it
Over time, particular elements become familiar.
A station.
A route.
A building.
A street.
A way of interacting.
But learning a city never means mastering it completely.
Urban knowledge remains selective.
Some places become part of everyday life.
Others remain unknown.
Knowledge of the city develops according to each person’s needs, activities and relationships.
The realistic educational goal is therefore not to “know Kyiv”.
It is to make certain parts of the city sufficiently legible for students to act within them with greater autonomy.
An archive of university life in Kyiv before 2022
Seen today, the 2021 documentation also has a particular historical dimension.
The texts and photographs show international students moving through Kyiv as part of ordinary university life before Russia’s full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022.
That later event should not lead us to reinterpret every image from 2021 solely through the war that followed.
At the time, the purpose of the activity was educational.
It documented language learning, urban discovery and student life.
Its present documentary value lies precisely in preserving an ordinary scene from Kyiv’s university life as it existed then.
An institution that has since changed its name
The source must also be situated in its institutional chronology.
In 2021, the institution was called the State University of Telecommunications.
Since May 2023, it has been known as the State University of Information and Communication Technologies.
Maintaining this distinction preserves the historical accuracy of the archive.
It would be misleading to apply the current name retrospectively to an activity organised under the previous institutional identity.
Institutions, too, have histories.
Conclusion
The thematic excursions organised in Kyiv in 2021 could easily be seen as supplementary activities attached to a language course.
They reveal a broader educational mechanism.
Learning Ukrainian also meant beginning to connect that language to a territory.
Words encountered metro stations.
Streets.
Monuments.
Institutions.
Historical narratives.
Everyday situations.
The city did not replace the classroom.
It temporarily extended it.
This connection helps us understand student socialisation not as an immediate transition from “foreign” to “integrated”, but as a process made up of small successive acquisitions.
Reading a name.
Recognising a place.
Understanding a route.
Asking a question.
Connecting a word with an experience.
Returning alone to a location first discovered with a group.
It is at this scale that situated learning becomes particularly visible.
The experience documented in Kyiv therefore shows that international student mobility does not consist only in entering a foreign institution.
It also involves gradually learning the environments in which student life becomes possible.
Editorial note — This article is based on a text by Blaise Puala originally published on Ciel-Bleu.org on 29 May 2021 using information and materials provided by the then State University of Telecommunications in Kyiv, where the author was studying at the time. It examines thematic excursions organised as part of language training for international students. The text has been revised, verified and re-edited for the Kultur Insights library in order to preserve its documentary value while clarifying the relationships between language learning, urban experience and student socialisation.
