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New dimensions in Education
Primary Curriculum Exchange between US and UK
MirandaNet fellows, Marion and Geoff Scott-Baker have recently completed a primary curriculum exchange between the US and UK. Read about their experiences here.
The autumn sun was still low in the sky, adding depth of colour to the thick blanket of red and yellow leaves that lay in front of the long low, grey single story building of my exchange school in Rhode Island USA. An Elementary School consisting of 250 students from Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8 (Year 9) run by 12 teaching staff and a number of ancillaries.
For the past four years we had been exchanging project work with the first and fourth year pupils here, and at last I was about to meet the staff and children who up to now had only been names on drawings, essays and emails. As Beverly - my contact in Rhode Island whom I had just met for the first time the day before - drove us up to the school it could easily have been the start of any academic day in the UK. Parents arrived in cars and four-wheel drives, children bundled out carrying all their paraphernalia for the day, and shouts of 'don't forget to.' and 'picking you up at.' rang across the forecourt. Only the fact that the vehicles were on the 'wrong' side of the road and carried colourful Rhode Island number plates gave the game away, that we were in fact 3000 miles from home. And the school would never need to worry about attracting more pupils every year as Rhode Island state law gave it a strictly defined clientele that was dictated by geography and statute rather than parental choice.
As well as making the acquaintance of the children who had so far known me only as 'the teacher from England' I had also been asked to read a chapter from one of the Harry Potter books. In addition, as we were nearing Guy Fawkes Day in England, I had brought along some information about the gunpowder plot, and had made a book containing material provided by members of my class at Cheam. I had asked my children to give me essays and pictures on whatever part of their lives that were most important to them. As a momentary diversion, the collation of this book met with as much enthusiasm from the children's parents as it did from the children themselves. The result was a thick document on A2 paper covering everything from the stunning views out of a holiday cottage window to a child's pride at living in a house dating from the Tudor period. The readings and the book went down extremely well but the story of Guy Fawkes and his gang met with less enthusiasm as the American children found it difficult to relate to a plot against a political system that was so different from their own. Emphasised to some extent by the fact that none of the children I asked had any concept of where Great Britain was or even how small it is compared to the United States. You may be pleased to know that we are located somewhere between Canada and New Zealand, though nobody actually placed us in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
My first reading was with Beverly's class - Grade 4 - and it proved to be a two way learning experience but not in the way I had anticipated. One of the mistakes that we make as Britons when visiting America is to assume that because we appear to understand each other there is no need for any kind of translation, whether verbal or literal. I was therefore surprised to find myself reading words such as trunk, windshield and highway instead of boot, windscreen and road. This book that I thought would be so familiar to me as I opened the page to chapter two suddenly took on the dimensions of a foreign translation. As I read it struck me that perhaps we could turn this into a mutual awareness session so I began to change some of the words into their British English forms. I paused from time to time whenever one of these 'foreign' translations arose to show the children that we are indeed two nations separated by a common language. We even raised the important difference in the use of 'pavement' which in the UK is something we walk on whereas in America it is their word for road. Could you imagine the disastrous consequences of an English teacher telling an American child to always walk on the pavement between home and school? The readings went well and one of the more amusing pieces of feedback was that my characterisations were 'just like the tape' where the characters 'sounded as they should', i.e. with an English accent. The teacher agreed with the class that they would try harder to make their readings of the book more authentic - unfortunately we didn't hear the results of their linguistic quest.
This was only one of my curriculum adventures where I found so many of my professional assumptions challenged. I had not expected to find so much that was totally different in a country where so much of the research we value and quote from takes place. I am anxious to spend longer there to observe rather than teach and to share experiences and opinions with the staff there. Beverly and I talked far into the night for the two nights that we stayed and I left feeling that we were really "kindred spirits" (Anne of Green Gables) with so much to share and learn from each other. And hopefully this is the start of many trips in both directions for us.
It was a wonderful visit and I would encourage you to do the same if you can possibly set up a relationship with a school abroad - thank you Beverly!
Marion Scott-Baker, Cheam School, Headley, Berkshire, and Geoff Scott-Baker
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