I’ve always had an issue with the term international school. It’s probably due largely to the fact that working with lower elementary kids, the majority of my students have barely ever lived in their country. Still others have multiple nations that they’ve been told they come from.
Invariably, our schools have special days or units of study that encourage students to identify themselves according to their national heritage. Flags are waved, food is prepared, festivals are compared and charming traditional clothes are worn. The flashbulbs pop. We are an international school. Students are affirmed in their national heritage. Or at least in a candy-coated, puddle-shallow manifestation of it.
My discomfort with this is probably also connected to my own experience. What are you going to wear on Culture Day Mr Canadian Teacher? What food will you bring? Um… Maple syrup and a hockey shirt? Or maybe bacon and a mountie hat? Canada Dry and sealskin? I’m definitely not building a fire on the playground to make S’mores and Clamato is hard to come by in Japan.
I usually end up wearing something that suggests camping and forests. I know these things aren’t the same kind of quintessential Canadian iconography. But if I think about what sort of things my family engaged in, that were meaningful and formative for me, that suggest what I love about Canada, they’re about the closest I’ve come.
As we’ve gone through the annual process of refining our Culture unit in second grade, we’ve tried continually to re-position it to get more at these sorts of things. Our central idea has evolved to be: People are enriched by their own cultures and the cultures they connect with throughout their lives. We do a whole lot of iceberg-metaphoring of culture, trying to unpack the depth of cultural traits that sit invisibly beneath the surface. We often try to pinpoint discussions of culture by discussing family culture, and letting nationality slide to the side. For a seven year old who’s possibly never lived in Canada, talking about their family culture seems much more authentic that their Canadian roots.
This takes a while for many students to connect with, but with time, exploration and modelling, most do get there. Where we inevitably hit a bit of a wall is later in the unit, when students build up a personal collection of artifacts. These are meant to be a culture collection of items that represent significant elements of their personal and familial culture. This is something that we go to great lengths to model with them and their families. We explicitly outline a wide range of artifacts that might suitably represent something that the student can identify with as being part of their family’s culture, and/or of personal importance to them.
Students share artifacts from their culture collections.
Even still, the artifacts that students bring in to share are often largely of the flags, festivals and food variety.
I began to think about how to deepen the learning around family culture. I thought it would be powerful for children to gather further insights on their cultural connections from their wider family; uncles, aunts, grandparents and friends scattered around the globe. By having students create Voicethreads of their culture collections, they could be accessed globally, irrespective of distances in place and time, and significant friends and family of students could contribute their insights on the cultural connections through audio, video and text with relative ease.
So, I had a go at converting my own collection to a voice thread and showed my class.
They were instantly on board and enthused by the possibility of their wider network being able to look into their digital culture boxes. So they set to work.
Using their existing Culture Collections, students began to photograph, import and upload images to Voicethread (and even video, which was neat, as these were now artifacts that were becoming more complex than those that could have fit in their physical boxes). Then they spent some time considering and recording comments on each artifact, exploring how it represented something which had culturally enriched their lives.
Students upload images to Voicethread and spend some time commenting on their digital artifacts.
At this point our Voicethreads are in various stages of development. We’ve added a new page to our blog to host the finished products, and one student has completed hers, ready to be shared, but we’re waiting until we’re all ready for the official launch.
I’m optimistic about it. I feel like the use of the Voicethread tool could be transformative in creating understanding about the more subtle aspects of culture. I think we’ll get interesting commentary, and likely even more interesting fodder for discussion and reflection.
At one point during a job interview, I made the point that I was uncomfortable with the term International School. The interviewer agreed and replied that he’d been reading articles lately which had suggested the alternative term Intercultural School.
It’s not perfect, because we still tend to knee-jerk associate culture with nationality, but if we can deepen our understanding of cultural experiences as building blocks of identity and threads which connect us with our communities, no matter how far flung they may be, Intercultural may be heading in the right direction.
For more on redefining the term International School, particularly in the context of the International Baccalaureate, read this essay from the IBO site.
9 Responses to Gettin’ Your Culture On(line)
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Hey Jamie – I am teaching Gr 2 now as well, and we just finished our Culture boxes too! But I *love* your use of VoiceThread and will maybe try that next year. I also completely agree with the idea of getting away from the word “international”. The more we discussed “culture” the more we realized that culture comes from your family, and the fact that many of the kids have lived in different countries and adopted parts of the cultures from those countries as part of their own family culture (much like yourself!) Also, with several multi-cultural families, we wanted to get away from the idea of flags and festivals and food (although those are also part of who we are!) We went in the direction of “family traditions” which sometimes included holidays and the special things kids did in their family to celebrate them, but also included things like Friday night movies with the family, or travel adventures with the family. Keep up the good work. Spread the word! 🙂 and thanks for the VoiceThread idea. 🙂
Hey Jane!
Good to hear from you (and nice to know you’ve joined the Grade two team!). Isn’t it odd that despite the PYP being adaptable to different contexts so many of us end up having similar units of inquiry? One reason I particularly like the Voicethread idea is that this unit is such a great fit for the beginning of the year and building understanding of ourselves, each other and our community. But, with written descriptions of our work it often ends up being far more writing-heavy than I think I want a first unit to be. Voicethread is a nice way to differentiate those entry points and not let the form of student reflection limit the content.
Cheers!
Jamie
Awesome! Love the idea of thinking about family culture rather than national culture (so much more interesting and relevant!). A perfect use of VoiceThread to really capture the variety of artifacts that students can share, as well as this moment in time and their understanding of what those artifacts mean. Will their parents, grandparents, extended family also comment on some of the artifacts to give an even broader picture of how they reflect the family culture?
Hi Jamie, I really like this culture box project!
I also feel the same way about culture. I like your grade’s revised central idea. Culture isn’t the clothes, food and holidays of your passport country. It is also deeply embedded within all the cultures you connect with. Despite never having attended international school, my parents were new to the USA so I was not technically growing up in my “home country.” My parents both moved there in their adulthood but I don’t know when it was decided that their move was permanent. Inside my house was quite different than outside my house. Everything at home was “traditional” Chinese from food, language, customs, holidays, even artwork. I only learned in recent years this makes me a third culture kid. So when I come to these “international days” I have as complicated a story as many of our students. Am I “from” my mom’s country, my dad’s country or the USA? I hate when people ask if I’ll “be Chinese or American” on days like this, as if it was a black and white choice.
This is an excellent use of VoiceThread to “explain” the box. Still, it’s a great project, and the tool used to present the box could depend on the preferences and resources available to the class and the child. I would love to see what the students would choose if given a choice.
Thanks for your input Elvina. I think it’s interesting that you bring up a similar connection regarding kids of recent immigrants. I guess for so many of us, whose families have moved at some point in our history, it’s all shades of grey. I feel like to identify with such tokenistic generalizations about national identity is really trivializing and oversimplifying. We really are complex little bundles of all our woven histories, bloodlines and experiences. Simplifying that doesn’t seem to me only inaccurate, it also seems boring. I figure these complexities really contribute to why people are so fascinating.
Thanks for the comment!
Hello Jamie
I love your words “cultural experiences as building blocks of identity and threads which connect us with our communities”. This seems like a very useful definition to keep in sight when planning, teaching and reviewing an inquiry.
As the school year draws to a close here in Australia, your post has prompted me to think: did I enable my students to express their cultural identity this year? Did our school do only ‘chomp and stomp’ special days, where culture was experienced rather than expressed?
The Voicethread seems an ideal way for the students to tell their personal stories, built around objects meaningful to them, with opportunities for others to comment and add to the stories. Were students able to build their Voicethreads at home? Our personal family stories are then valued by school.
cheers
Brette
Hi Brette,
Thanks for the comment! In this case students were building the Voicethreads at school, for several reasons… One, at YIS students aren’t issued individual email addresses until a bit later on, so G2s have no way of individually registering for accounts on sites like Voicethread. Also, as this was their first time through, there was a lot of mutual support going on in the construction of the VTs, meaning that that community of expertise that grew up around their construction would have been lost if students were working individually at home. Great tool though! But beware the multiple sign-in issues if you have people sharing one account. I’ve found that two is the maximum safe number of devices to have simultaneously signed in.
Hi Jamie. Like you I am wary of the connotations of International schools but I also really dislike the ‘third culture kid’ label. It seems so patronizing and intentionally disassociating students from cultures they may actually feel deeply connected to. No, you’re part of a third culture, so only a few people will ever understand you or relate to you – and expect most people’s eyes to glaze over when you start answering the question ‘So where are you from?’
In grade 2 at my school (Shekou International School) we also do a culture unit – rooted in the Chinese culture (bonus- field trip to an amazing restaurant!). From this we expand to other cultures, home cultures, cultures you’ve lived in. In grade 4 we do a unit on ‘Why people emigrate’ again it ties in with migration within China and the students produced Aurasma posters of their parents/ a favourite teacher/ a family friend answering questions about where and why and what next.
The grade 4 project worked really well – especially the ‘magic’ Aurasma part! I am now really excited to try your Voicethread project as a way of enabling them to talk about far bigger and more meaningful things than a book, a rock, a picture, some kimchi that they can actually put onto a display table. I used summer holiday photos to distill the idea of a ‘small moment’ for their writing and they interviewed each other to work out what they wanted to write/ the questions they wanted to answer in their writing. This really helped my EAL students and I think your Voicethread would be fantastic for encouraging speaking, encouraging positive feedback and for extending the scope of what is important to them and where they identify with. Thank you SO much for this great app idea – and for the thought provoking basis for this.
I found that the word, international schools really did not say enough about the students.. but that was until i discovered the word- Third culture kids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid
Somehow the more I dwell upon posts like yours and concerns of many educators who also feel like you do ‘the majority of my students have barely ever lived in their country. Still others have multiple nations that they’ve been told they come from.’
The term third culture answers and gives an insight into these children’s lives far more.
I would like to relate this term to technology and why we need it, but I think I shall do that in my bolg post so do look at my blog-http://www.coetail.com/himanisblog/
if you would like to read up on it, but for now, I am convinced that today’s kids require a perception which allows for the exposure they have had- to multicultural experiences, to a diversity of cultures and changes. Just calling them international is not enough because as your correctly say, they are not just international because many have not even lived in their own countries.
I prefer the term intercultural too, probably because it encompasses the many cultures these kids are a part of along with their own.