Global Collaborations

The title sounds grand but this is about how you can make global collaboration an everyday part of the life of a classroom as and when it is appropriate. I was asked to do a 5-minute talk (via Skype as it happens) to a group of about 200 trainee teachers in Israel. Since their first language was not English but either Arabic or Hebrew I had to limit myself to 5 minutes. The brief was to talk a bit about my global collaborations over the years.

Looking back over the last 15 years or so I recognised a few key factors:

The italicised questions were asked by the audience.

Who? Use your PLN

Almost always my starting point is to work with people I know. These people often introduce me and my students to new people so my circle enlarges. So your personal learning network (PLN) is a good starting point. Digital tools tend to amplify this network and honestly it would be difficult to set up any forum or community and try to limit it to a specific geographic area. So if you are a member of any forum or online community, even better if it is one in which you have interacted, then you have a readymade starting point for online collaboration. Just ask! People are incredibly generous of their time and generally curious to take part.

What? Anything!

What you should collaborate on can be almost anything that comes up in class. Almost always, an expert third party has more cognitive and emotional impact than a dry fact passed on by the teacher.

As a language and intercultural trainer, my collaborations have tended to centre on cultural differences such as:

• Acceptable behaviour in public spaces
• Whether England means the same as Great Britain
• How to embed intercultural awareness in adult education
• Learning about common and specific celebrations such as Christmas and Thanksgiving
• French conversation

Question: Is there any potential for global collaboration for science teachers?

Yes, in spades. Biology students for example could exchange photos of different habitats. You could also test out theories about which way round the water drains in sinks in different hemispheres by videoing.

Why bother?

Because it makes a cognitive and emotional impact. Many teachers are a little afraid of their students’ superior knowledge of technology and in awe of their intensive socialising and so they underestimate the impact such collaborations can have. The truth is that most people, of whatever age, have a narrow spectrum of tech skills centred on what they use. As for the social aspect, it is focused almost exclusively on close peers. So I have a feeling that it will always be an adventure to get in contact with people in the other four corners of the world.

Adventure means that it is a challenge and for many teens this means that they have to psyche themselves up to take this challenge. So this means careful ground laying by the teacher to learn about the people they will be speaking with and establish trust and confidence.

In one of my projects, a 17 year old said:

I never thought I would speak. I planned just to write. But she was so friendly and in the end it was much easier to speak.

And this feedback was pretty typical of the whole class. They feared it in anticipation but once it was over were extremely proud of themselves and had a great positive emotional experience.

When?

Collaborations succeed both when they are meticulously planned well in advance and when they happen spontaneously.

Question: Would it be a good idea for newly qualified teachers in their first year to try out these collaborations?

Emphatically yes! I was here thinking of the quick, small-scale and spontaneous collaborations which can arise as a natural part of everyday discourse in the classroom.

Example

Some years ago the issue of how to translate Great Britain or the UK into Danish as England arose in one of my classes. The standard English-Danish dictionary used in schools here has a map of the UK in one of the flaps so I started to get the class to take a look and explain that England was a part of Great Britain and excluded Scotland, N Ireland and Wales. After the class, I spontaneously decided to email Ewan McIntosh in Scotland to get a reaction from him that I could present to my class. Ewan is a passionate Scot, who, as I write is advocating for a Yes vote in the upcoming referendum for Scottish independence, so I knew he would have some strong views! By return I got a long, detailed history lesson in language which was beyond the capabilities of my class. But I created a glossary and we looked at it in the next lesson. I added the text of the email to a blog post and invited my students to reply. They ended up apologising to Ewan for equating England to the UK. This was not what I had intended but showed that contact with a relevant third party had had an emotional impact and had pushed them to understand language which was otherwise beyond their level. And I am sure that that group remembered not to confuse England with the UK or Great Britain for a much longer time than if I had just told them.

This was very low tech and completely unplanned, but I feel is far more pedagogically effective than a larger, more complex project, precisely because it arose as a natural part of what was going on in the classroom at the time. It is this sort of project that I believe a first year teacher could and should implement. In fact it hardly deserves the title of project and should just be a normal pedagogical approach of bringing in relevant experts as part of the classroom dialogue.

How?

I deliberately did not talk about how to implement collaborations technically in order to focus on the pedagogical benefits.

It was a great deal to pack into five minutes, especially when I was trying to speak clearly and more slowly for a non-native audience.

Question: Who helped me to carry out these collaborations?

Spontaneously I replied nobody, as I was the one in the room who knew most about what I was trying to achieve but I was overlooking the screamingly obvious fact that I had learned about all these possibilities from my PLN. Without the constant creativity and generosity of communities such as the Webheads I would never have had the courage of my convictions that this was a worthwhile route to take back in 2000 or so when I started. Which neatly brings me back to Who?

Thanks to Elaine Hoter of Ohalo College for inviting me to reflect on my collaboration journey.