I can say that since 2001, I've been to Spain, Peru, Chile, Ghana, and others. But what does it really mean to have traveled somewhere? When I go to a new place, I don't want to just take pictures and visit tourist sites. Traveling like that only allows me to understand the sites of a country, and from a perspective of my country of origin. When I travel overseas, I want to really get to know people and understand their lifestyles, their joys, and their struggles. I want to know how they see their own country, culture, and tourist sites. This weekend I participated in a number of tourist activities... parks, canoe trips, a crocodile pond, etc. I could write about them all here and post pictures, and I probably will briefly at some in the future, but I don't think it's the tourist stuff that helps me say, "Yes. I've been to Ghana." Instead, it's the moments of human exchange, like the one above in the picture. And this weekend I had so many of them! Although conversations with kids here often start off with a request for money, whether you give them some or not, they want to talk to you just the same. They want to get to know you, where you come from, what you do, and why you're in Ghana. These kids in the picture were really excited that I was a Spanish teacher, and they wanted me to teach them some Spanish. They are such good students! (Not that I'm surprised after visiting the schools here.) Those moments of human connection that transcend race, country of origin, age, gender, etc., is what I will most treasure about this trip. And so, after a weekend full of visits to parks, new cities, and interesting canoe rides, I choose today to write about this moment, because it is these ones that will leave the biggest impression on my heart, and create meaning for me when I say, "Yes. I've been to Ghana."
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I have a bit of an embarrassing story to tell, but one that I'm eager to share…even on the Internet. The weebly website is banned in Ghana, so therefore, I had to write this post on blogspot. However, I plan to use weebly as my blog, so I am copying the link here. To read my embarrassing story, please click the link below and it will take you to the original blogspot post. My story! In the afternoon today, we visited with the representatives of Parliament that are on the Education Committee (the committee that makes educational policy), at the Parliament House in Accra. It was very nice to meet with them and discuss the educational systems of Ghana and the United States. I was most surprised to hear that almost every member of that political committee was a former teacher. The weebly website is banned in Ghana. Therefore, I wrote about my Parliament faux pas on blogspot. You can read about our visit by following this link to the original blogspot post. The last few days we've learned a lot about school in Ghana, but I don't want to overwhelm the blog today with absolutely everything I've learned. I do, however, want to share just a few observations and pics upon our visit today to the public junior high school, Abokobi Presbyterian. Because the weebly website is banned in Ghana, I had to post this writing on blogpost. However, weebly is my designated blogsite. Please follow the link below to read my original post about school in Ghana. Click me to read more! It is my favorite part of traveling.... learning the culture, practices, and perspectives of a new country and people. It always fascinates me.... how sometimes certain practices that we have, in the United States, are so strange to others around the globe, and vice-versa. But, traveling always creates a bridge. Through conversation with others, learning about their beliefs and perspectives, we can walk away from each other with an appreciation of the other's practices and perspectives, without losing our own. It's a beautiful party of humanity. Sometimes, I even think...wow! So cool.... I wish we did that.
Because I could not use my weebly blog in Ghana as it was banned there, I had to write the post on blogspot, but this is my permanent blog. Please follow the link below to read my post about some very unique Ghanaian cultural customs, and see pics! Click on me to go to post! As is standard when first arriving in a country you haven't visited before, there were lots of mishaps and mistakes I made. Because the weebly website isn't useable in Ghana, I had to write this post originally on blogspot. Please follow the link below to read about all of my first day mistakes :) Go to the blogspot post I remember the first time I got on a plane to spend eight weeks in Spain on a study abroad program. I was 19, traveling alone, and had never navigated an airport by myself before, let alone an international airport in another country. I was so afraid, but under that fear was this wonderful level of excitement..... one that seemed to be whispering to me that I was going to have not just an amazing summer, but a life-changing one. And it was. Since 2001, I have completed two additional study abroad programs in Spain, another in Chile, and have spent a portion of a few summers in Peru and Costa Rica. What I experienced on that very first study abroad trip turned me into a global citizen. I saw that there was not just one way of living, one way of learning, one way of growing up, one way of dying. It made me hungry to know more of the world.... more of its perspectives, people, history and places. Here I am again, about to embark on a new travel experience to a place, a continent I've really never been before. In just a handful of days I'm off to Ghana. It is a culture I know almost nothing about, a language that I will understand but probably have some difficulties with due to variations in English, and a people that of course look very different from me! In the two weeks I'll be in Ghana, I will be spending almost a week in Sunyani, at the Notre Dame Secondary School for girls. A Catholic boarding high school, I will surely feel somewhat out of place as a white American in a building of over 500 African girls. While I most certainly have felt like an "outsider" before in various situations in my life, I think this will be a different kind of feeling. That being said, based on the fact that their school motto is "We Are One," just maybe I will feel right at home. After all, we ARE one.... one human family. One of my favorite phrases is the African phrase "Ubuntu"-- I am because we are. I think these next two weeks will change me once again. This kind of fear isn't so much the "I fear for my safety fear." It's the fear of the unknown. The fear of something you can't quite name, but in the gut, you know is a good thing. That's what I've learned about fear. It's not always something to be so afraid of :) Africa... I'm ready! Since 2001, I've done a lot of traveling. I've spent substantial time in Spain over the course of many summers, short vacations in Italy and Paris, two months in Chile, various weeks in Peru between 2006 and 2012, and most recently, I spent three weeks in Costa Rica. I've done so much traveling to Spanish speaking countries in order to enhance my language skills and always have new cultural experiences to bring to my students. This will be my first time in Africa. I couldn't be more excited. I am traveling as a part of the Teachers for Global Classrooms Fellowship with the US Department of State. I will be in Ghana for two weeks. The first few days will be spent in the capital, Accra, and a week will be spent in Sunyani, working with and teaching at Notre Dame Secondary Schools for Girls. From gathering information via the internet, I've learned that Notre Dame Secondary School is one of the best schools in the country, but the area historically had one of the lowest education rates for girls in all of Ghana. The motto of the school is "We Are One." It is also a boarding school, so there are girls that come from villages throughout Ghana. Classes are conducted in English, however, many languages are represented in the school. I love this motto. It made me think about my own high school. At my high school, over half the population constitutes of minorities (I think I need to make a blog post about why I hate that word), mostly being Hispanic. There are over 20 languages spoken by students within the district. The history of our town in rooted in Dutch colonization, and sometimes it seems to me that the city is still trying to figure out its identity, often going back and forth between its traditional history and current multicultural status. I have been asked to develop an essential question while I'm in Ghana; one that I can take perspectives of and apply locally. Using the theme "We are One" and what I've learned about the school, my question is "How does a diverse school create a shared identity while still honoring individual traditions and beliefs?" I'm excited to see how their "we are one" motto plays out in the school's daily and yearly activities, as well as its programs. I wonder if it's what kids rally around. I'm curious if it empowers all in their learning and growth. I simply can't wait for this experience! So much to learn, so much to see, so much to gain! "I can see myself in all things and all people around me." ~Sanskrit phrase I love learning new concepts and ways of thinking because there's always some "aha" moment, and then it becomes impossible to turn back to the way I thought before. As a world language teacher, one could say that I've always taught through a global education lens. Perspectives, practices and products of the target language culture is always something I've considered important to teach about, but after completing the State Department's "Teachers for Global Classrooms" fellowship program, my lens became magnified. Learning a second language is not just a gateway to the countries that speak that language, it is a gateway to the world. While I absolutely want my students to gain an understanding of the products and practices of the Spanish-speaking world, I want them to be able to apply the skills they've gained to the world at large (learning to appreciate other perspectives, a desire to understand perspectives different from one's own, and seeing that one's personal way of life isn't the only way, or even always the best way). Since the Teachers for Global Classrooms program has ended, I've expanded my teaching to exploring the whole globe, in Spanish. Recently, students were learning how to describe daily routines (getting ready for school, the school day, and afternoon and nightly activities). Each student investigated daily life in any country in the world, and presented to their classmates what life was like for a teenager there. We learned about daily life in various countries within Africa, about daily life in Afghanistan, Brazil, Australia, Norway, Ireland, and Indonesia, to name just a handful. Actually, out of 55 students or so, only 5 or so picked a country where the official language was Spanish! I think that's quite telling as to the curiosity of these teens. Music from the country was featured during the presentations, and in many of them, we learned about typical lunch and dinner dishes. We also sometimes were able to explore gender differences. The presentations led to many conversations outside of just vocabulary and grammar. If it weren't for all the snow days lately, we could have done even so much more. In the past, I think education has been thought of as a preparation for the world after graduation. I think it's time to re-frame, and grow. Why prepare students for the world in 18 years? We must bring the world to our learners, today. View " Daily Life in Our World" assignment here:
Since 2008, I've been bringing the world into my classroom through small lessons, side projects, community service, and international trips. Since I teach a world language, culture is a part of everyday class, and I always found kids to be curious about the world. However, there were always the themes of the book to make sure I was getting through, sometimes irrelevant vocabulary lists, and fill in the blank homework sheets to pass out. The students I've had in my first eight years of teaching have generally been all middle class. They, for the most part, enjoyed school and had supportive home lives. Now in my tenth year of teaching, I am in the most diverse teaching environment of my career. About forty percent of my high school's student population is Hispanic, forty percent are white, and about twenty percent of the students come from other diverse backgrounds. The community votes conservatively. We have a high free and reduced lunch rate, but are also home to students from quite wealthy backgrounds as well as the middle class. I've never had such socioeconomic diversity sitting in one classroom. It certainly has changed the classroom dynamic. My students are some of the nicest and most polite students I have had. They like their own social groups, their Ipads, and sometime seem to be unsure of this new teacher (that would be me) who comes from the other side of the state. At first, my Hispanic students seem wary of this white woman (again, me) who is here to strengthen their Spanish. As a whole, my classes are not fond of discussing ideas and experiences that reflect diverse thinking; I can see they are most comfortable to seem like the majority. Those that know they simply don't think like the majority choose to just remain quiet. My first two weeks of school were full of excitement for me as I had always wanted to teach in a school with such ethnic and racial diversity. I eagerly played the Spanish music videos that had always appealed to my students in the past as this new group walked in the classroom each day. I quickly learned it bothered most everyone other than my Spanish-speaking students. After a full two weeks of playing music popular with teens in Spanish-speaking countries to no avail, I decided to ask a nice sophomore student in one of my classes what she didn't like about this fun, upbeat music. "I'm white" she responded, in a very innocent, yet matter-of-fact voice. "Wow, do I have my work cut out for me," I thought to myself. The first semester I spent slowly integrating culture into my classes. We used the grammar and vocabulary of the textbook to learn about Peru and Costa Rica from a vacationing perspective. I taught them a new dance every month from the Spanish-speaking world. Slowly, some students began to gain interest in the music, and started to ask questions that really mattered. Questions like, "Why do people in Mexico worship Mary so much, and why do they call her Guadalupe?" Or, very generally, "What is life like in Spanish-speaking countries?" I began to see a small shift in thinking.... a very small shift. Simply put, the students started to wonder about people and places different front them. At the end of the first semester, I surveyed students. I wanted to know, outside of Spanish, what were they curious about in life? What did they want to know more about? In regards to Spanish, what did they want to continue to learn? And what did they want to discover about themselves? I was SHOCKED and EXCITED by the responses. Over and over and over I read, "the world," "other cultures," "what it's like to live in a different culture," "why not all Spanish-speakers look the same," "why are there different religions." What did students want to learn about themselves? "How do I fit into the world?" and "How I can overcome hardships like other people?" and "What I am good at?" I feel as though I am on to something. Although these kids hesitate to interact with each other, don't talk about their differences both in heritage and socioeconomic circumstance, and often see each other as "other," they are curious about one another. And they are curious about their world. They want to learn about life and how they will integrate themselves into it! And so, for second semester, I am ditching the textbook and teaching with the world in mind. Students will learn about themselves, life, and what it means to be a global citizen, in Spanish. In the process, I hope to see them finally come together as the familial unit I'm accustomed to so easily creating in my classroom. I hope they appreciate one another in a new light, and leave the judgements and stereotypes at the door. I hope they come together to make their school, community, and world a better place. I hope, above all else, they feel they have grown as a person after being in my room. I confess. I am absolutely without a doubt, an idealist. Recently, I took a silly facebook quiz about what decade I should live in, and it reported back the future, because I'm a forward thinker with my head stuck in the iCloud. I laughed, and then shrugged my shoulders. In the words of Jackson Kiddard, “Instead of making up excuses for why something is impossible, it’s far better to come up with reasons why it could be possible. One reason why is more powerful than all the reasons why not.” And the possibilities are endless..... |
AuthorI am a teacher, traveler, and life-long learner. I connect students and teachers to globally -focused learning. I believe students crave to understand and interact with the world. I have a Michigan home, and a global heart. Archives
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