What is one object that reminds you of the person or teacher you want to be?
This hand-made clay cup sits on my bookcase, next to my teaching resources.
It's a reminder of the reasons why I became a teacher, and a call to try reconcile what I find easy to teach with what my students really need to learn.
My background is in teaching languages, and I decided to become a teacher after spending time living in a rural village in West Africa. That's where I really came to understand how foundational education is to a basic functioning society. It was also my first full-blown experience being immersed in languages and cultures completely different from mine. That experience led me to become a language teacher, but I've had a hard time reconciling that ideal - basically the dream that I'm contributing to a system that would improve the quality of life for everyone - with the reality of my career in the West, teaching students who may never use the languages I teach, and if they do it would probably be just for a bit of luxury tourism.
When I was 17, I moved with my family to live in rural Nigeria. My brother and I homeschooled, while my Dad worked at a hospital. One week we had a bit of a break and some time to travel. We were on our way back from a national park, with hitch-hikers in the back of a borrowed pick up truck, when my Dad took a detour following a sign toward some ancient rock paintings.
We meandered off the main highway, down a rutted dirt track, to see these paintings. We must have found a local to help guide us, because I remember someone explaining that the chicken wire surrounding the paintings was to protect them from being chipped off and used in local medicine. I also remember that my Dad was the most excited, and we were generally happy to follow along in the wake of his enthusiasm.
On our way back along the dirt track, a group of children from a nearby village ran out to the truck holding up handmade pottery to sell. We stopped and bought the cup.
Meanwhile, my Dad saw the children's thin, brittle hair, and distended bellies- the signs of malnutrition we had come to recognize easily. He got down from the truck, and asked one of the men traveling with us to serve as a translator. He spoke to the parents, who were hovering a little behind their children. Dad knew that in the local language, there was no word or concept of protein. In this region many families grew protein-rich crops to sell, but didn't have the nutritional understanding to feed their children the same. So he said , "when you work in your fields and you see that your corn is yellow and thin, what do you do? You add fertilizer. When we see our children, with thin yellow hair, and big bellies, even though their arms and legs are thin, they need something like fertilizer too. We give our children corn and potatoes for energy, but our bodies also need other foods that help us grow strong, children especially. Those foods can be eggs, soy beans, lentils or a little meat... "
It was a brief lesson, but it was communicated with simple metaphors that were passed on easily through the interpreter. It was a message that he had worked on developing with the help of local staff at the hospital, to be sure that he was communicating effectively to parents across cultures and languages.
Our time there shifted my idea of eduction, and my purpose as a high school student. Before, growing up in the USA, it was just something you do, go through the school system and choose a career for you yourself. After visiting remote places, where education was a luxury not everyone could access, I saw things differently. On our way there I had imagined that in this place with so much need, I would be able to make this fabulous contribution. When we arrived it was clear, I was a teenager with no skills or knowledge that could really help significantly at the hospital. The best I could do was follow others around and learn from them. I started thinking of the problems we face as a society, as humanity, and saw my education as the way to gain the skills I would need to actually help. Choosing a career became as much about choosing the issue I would help to improve, as it was about furthering my own development or making a living.
It was a subtle shift, like looking at the same mountain from a different angle, but it changed my worldview significantly. I saw my dad explaining nutrition to families, and my Mom donating supplies to local schools, and I saw how fundamental education was for a stable society and good quality of life. So, I chose to be a teacher in order to contribute to that foundation, and the cup reminds me of that. It's a souvenir of lessons worth teaching.
Our time there is also what sparked my interest in languages. The rural village we lived in boasted 27 languages and dialects, and it was my first real experience in a linguistically diverse region. Fast forward 10 years and I was a high school French teacher. I had completed my masters and developed expert teaching strategies to build my students' competence and proficiency. I earned a position at an elite boarding school with high-achieving students from all over the world, the kind of place that values and supports their language teachers. And I continued to tell the stories of my time in Africa, to explain my reasons for going into education.
Then one day a young man asked me, "if that's why you went into teaching, then why are you teaching here?"
Gradually it sunk in: this disconnect between what I was teaching and why I had wanted to teach. Maybe at some point I had a vague intention to circle back to a profession in educational development serving remote areas that needed basic support. Instead, I had followed a track in teaching languages to places where only elite travellers were motivated to learn them. I found myself worn out, and teaching the same things from textbooks that built a linguistic foundation, but didn't introduce much cultural competence or perspective taking, until students progressed enough to discuss ideas in the target language. Only a small handful made it that far. So, the main cohort (those beginning students who were required to take a language class, but wouldn't continue to an advanced level) they were just getting pounded with vocabulary (through engaging, effective teaching strategies, of course) - vocabulary they would soon forget.
By default, I was teaching for fluency first, then for adventure and self-fulfilment, and only after that, maybe, teaching for a wider view of the world and a sense of how to contribute. Most of my students would never get that far. They seemed to enjoy my classes, but dropped the language before they got to the things that I felt really mattered. How was I actually empowering these students to make the world a better place?
By this time I was tied to the job, and the town I was in. I had family commitments I couldn't abandon. I wasn't at a stage where I could up and travel to remote areas with the greatest needs, but maybe I could contribute in other ways. Maybe I could teach student who would help meet those needs someday, or at least be a bit more aware of the needs that existed.
I should clarify here, that there is huge value in teaching languages with a clear goal of fluency. No one ever truly experiences the depth and nuance of another culture without learning its language competently. The thing is, most language teachers started their journey with a nerdy passion for a language, then they followed on with it to have eye-opening experiences, and only later they started to see the human journey and how we face our problems as a planet. Most students in our classes won't push through the nerdy language learning to experience that whole journey, and what's really worth learning is that destination - that global understanding. What I'm exploring, is not dropping the goal of mastery in languages, or mastery in any other subject, but framing it in a way that prioritizes that global understanding from the very beginning.
Across education a similar disconnect arises. What's easy to teach is information, in my experience, concrete vocabulary. (Ok, not always easy, but straight-forward, especially when textbooks lay it in such linear steps.) We know we're in this age when information is at students' fingertips, and teaching how to learn, how to think, how to question, and how to communicate is more important than memorization.
"The dilemma for educators is that the skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test are also the skills that are easiest to digitize, automate, and outsource... the world no longer rewards people just for what they know - search engines know everything - but for what they can do with what they know, how they behave in the world, and how they adapt." --
Andreas Scheleicher, Director for Education and Skills OECD,
prologue to Four Dimensional Education: The Competencies Learners Need to Succeed (2015)
We have to somehow reconcile what's easy to teach with what's worth teaching. Where is the balance between assessed learning objectives and true life learning? How do we interpret the broad educational goals emerging in movements like 21st century skills and global citizenship education, and how do we distill those into concrete, teachable lessons that our students can relate to? I'm not sure if that necessarily means changing the core content of my learning area, or any other. It does mean clearly articulating and returning to the reasons why we're learning it, and to the contexts where this learning is needed. That's how we show students the purpose and relevance of our subject areas. It's important that they see the path ahead of them not just as a journey towards good grades and a profitable career, but as a choice regarding which problems they'll train to help solve and what contribution they'll make.
I went into teaching because I saw how foundational education is for a stable society. I went in thinking it improves the condition of children like those who made my cup. Now I'm trying to move back to those values, and to make my own classes more relevant to students in a modern world, where they need to interact and work together with many cultures on a regular basis.
This is the Journey that I'm on, and I want to share that journey, here at Worth Teaching. So far that has meant collecting stories and perspectives [through the Global Conversations project], exploring aspects of global citizenship, and identifying the skills that are needed to collaborate across multiple cultures. I’m looking to connect with educators who are on a similar journey, looking to explore what works and what doesn’t, and looking to design resources that help make education more relevant and engaging for the right reasons.
If you're on a similar journey and would like to keep in touch, sign up for our newsletter or reach out to us here.
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