I have just returned from Ethiopia with a group of six students. We were visiting our partner school in Bishoftu, near Addis Ababa. My students have worked for the last year raising money for their flights and collecting books, which we took to stock the school's library. For the students, the purpose of the visit was twofold; firstly to sustain, by being part of, a reciprocal partnership with Bishoftu Preparatory School through the Link Ethiopia organisation and secondly to challenge themselves to widen their understanding of themselves and the world by living in a community with very different values and environment.
As is often the case on a visit to a developing country, my students had to deal with seeing the misery of poverty and struggled to articulate their sadness and anger at some sights. They were exposed to different beliefs and the rituals that go with them, frightening sometimes in their sounds and actions. As an educator, to talk these through with a student struggling to understand them is hard work but a rare opportunity and a total privilege.
However, more powerful than this was the freedom that being in a totally new environment gave the students to ask questions. Fostering the ability to ask questions is somehow being sidelined by current school curriculums, certainly at the pre-16 level and it is very hard to re-establish at post-16. On our first morning in Ethiopia, as we were walking along a road side near to our accommodation, we encountered a large, smelly, fly-blown pile of goats' heads. Expressions of disgust and a wide berth were my students' first responses but being shocked provoked them to start asking questions and they never stopped. They learned that the Ethiopian students they worked with liked being asked questions and in fact that most people enjoy being questioned and listened to. What my students gained from last week is an outlook on the world which will never be the same again and a confidence and desire to ask, ask, ask.
My sixth form at Impington Village College has long given students incredible opportunities to extend their global awareness in this way; at the same time I was in Ethiopia, my college was with another group in China, in the past we have worked with Menelik Education in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with partner schools in India and Yemen, with schools all over Europe through the Comenius project and with Peacechild India in Bangalore. We firmly believe one of the best ways to engage students in global understanding is to get them out there into the world, asking questions of it.
However, visits to developing countries are not the only way to develop the skills of global awareness, neither are they a source to plunder. Simply visiting places with students is not an easy way to promote global understanding. Impington has another powerful means through which our students are exposed to multicultural, multilingual environments; that is the student body themselves. In the last year book, our student council wrote a page called You Know You Are An Impington Student When... and among some humor and satire they had the line "walking through the common room is like backpacking across the world". We have students from more than 15 different countries. Students local to Impington, who have attended our main school, are taught with students from China, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Russia, Turkey, Poland, France, Hungary, US, Sweden and more. Each student has a different experience of education and crucially those differences are not hidden away or homogenized but focused on and examined. There is always open and honest discussion of what things are like in different places and how and why that is. Until students have the desire and the confidence to explore differences and be excited by them, they cannot really develop the skills needed to operate in a global context.
To develop the awareness in students that there is a world out there with which it is necessary and valuable to interact, there needs to be deep reflection on differences and similarities in human societies brought about through constant discussions in groups and classrooms, through assemblies, team work on fundraising activities and through the curriculum. The International Baccalaureate, taught at Impington for the last 21 years, has global education at the heart of its curriculum and its learner profile is specifically designed to encourage students to develop the skills, such as being principled, caring, risk-taking and inquiring, needed in the globalised world of the 21st century. In terms of developing global awareness in students, I believe that one way is to sustain reciprocal partnerships with schools in different countries, but underlying this there is the much more valuable tool we need to develop in our students; the ability and confidence to ask questions and the desire to know about how other human beings live.
www.guardian.co.uk
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