U.S. Schools Forge Foreign Connections Via Web

By Robin L. Flanigan

Ed Week

Ninth graders at the 2,300-student South Plantation High School in Plantation, Fla., were in a videoconference with Egyptian students and journalists last year when President Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Both the Americans and the Egyptians were in awe, clapping and laughing and sharing in a moment of global importance.

“All of a sudden, our students understood what freedom is, what a democracy means, how fortunate they are to be where they are, and how people have to struggle to get to that level,” said Donna Rose, the director of the school’s VALOR Freshman Academy, the academic program for the school’s 500 9th graders. “In a heartbeat, they changed their view of humanity. How could I have done that on my own?”

Across the United States, students are teaming up with classrooms around the world, using videoconferencing equipment, social media, and other technologies to learn about current events, historic milestones, economic trends, and cultural norms. Educators say the collaborations, which lend themselves to co-curricular projects, foster deep and meaningful conversations, whet a thirst for knowledge that textbooks cannot offer, and show that people in different countries have a lot more in common than many assume.

Educators note that no matter what countries American students are paired with, the same teenage topics seem to come up as they get to know each other during formal class discussions: dating, sex, family, music, and clothes.

And they point out that the poor technological connections between countries, the dropped calls, and the broken translations teach patience and perseverance even as they pose logistical problems for the partnerships themselves. At the same time, educators say the authentic relationships that form between students from different cultures tend to turn them into more independent thinkers with higher levels of tolerance and compassion.

“It’s really easy to hate what you don’t know,” said Lisa Nielsen, an international speaker on innovative education and the co-author of Teaching Generation Text, published in 2011 by Jossey-Bass Teacher. “In the future, I think there are going to be big changes in the way countries are defined, because people around the world are going to be connecting and bonding with each other in a way that doesn’t involve places, but their ideas and passions.”

Ms. Rose has noticed a rise in the academic performance of each freshman class at South Plantation High School, particularly with critical-thinking skills, since she started partnering with other countries five years ago. Students have spoken with earthquake survivors in Haiti, widows in Afghanistan, and indentured servants in Pakistan.

This school year, they’re connecting regularly with a school in Nagoya, Japan, and with students in a Yemeni refugee camp. (Sensitive to requests from Yemen, South Plantation students make sure there are no high-tech gadgets on their desks and nothing too ornate in the classroom within view of the refugees, because they don’t want to make them feel deprived.)

“We are an urban school with a high minority population,” said Ms. Rose, “and this is how we expose our students to the world.”

Connecting Cultures

For the same reasons but in a far different environment, social studies teacher Suzie Nestico oversees a project that involves 14 schools and nearly 400 students in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. She teaches students in grades 10 through 12 at the 900-student Mount Carmel Area High School in Mount Carmel, Pa.

“We’re a small, rural town of 6,000 with ultra-conservative family values and viewpoints, and most of our students have never gone anywhere else,” said Ms. Nestico, the project manager for the Flat Classroom Project, an international collaborative effort that links classrooms around the globe. She also built a course called 21st Century Global Studies that started this academic year. The course is for students in grades 10 through 12 who, through project- and inquiry-based assignments such as editing wiki pages, learn that working collaboratively with other cultures—an increasingly marketable skill—can be challenging.

“It’s a big shift for them to go from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ ” she said. “I can’t help but think that the more kids we involve in projects like this, the more we start to break down some of this sense of entitlement” that exists among students in the United States.

“Just imagine if you wrote 200 words on your wiki page, and …

Click here to continue reading