Making links with schools in another country can have a powerful effect on students’ understanding of the world. But where to begin? Claire Shaw talks to teachers who have done it
Experiencing other cultures and traditions undoubtedly helps young people to understand the world that they live in.
It helps to reinforce societal values around respect and tolerance, and encourage growing minds to celebrate difference, broaden their horizons and understand global issues.
Living through this pandemic means that children around the world have experienced disruptions to their education at the same time. Connections and understanding have never been more important.
A recent insight report from Pearson shows that 86% of students say being prepared for their future in a global world, understanding and learning about different cultures, is important to them [source: School report 2023].
So how can schools bring global learning into the classroom to help broaden the horizons of all pupils? One effective way is through creating international partnerships.
Bilingual buddies
In 2014, a group of schools in Wales including Glan-y-Môr School and Richmond Park Primary School partnered with Lesotho schools Mokhotlong Primary School and Moyeni High School. Some of the schools are bilingual and faced the similar situation of promoting bilingualism in order to be part of both the local community and the national one.
At the start of the partnership, teachers from Wales went to visit Mokhotlong Primary and took with them handwritten letters from the Welsh students.
Excited by this opportunity to connect with pupils in another country, all 97 pupils from Mokhotlong had their handwritten reply ready on their teacher’s desk by the next morning.
As part of the project, students in both schools discussed global issues, such as the right to quality education, enabling them to contextualise their experiences of languages (and other things) as part of a much bigger world.
“The thing that surprised me was how similar their school was to ours,” one of the Welsh students reflected.
Angélique Perrault, cluster international co-ordinator for Glan-y-Môr School, says: “This is the world in your classroom. It fits in extremely well with our goal of empowering students to become better citizens of the world.”
Social enterprise skills
International partnerships can also be a great way to empower pupils to develop and share skills that they can take with them into the world of work.
The international partnership between National Star College in Gloucestershire, UK, and Joyland Special Secondary School in Kisumu, Kenya, for example, sees pupils with disabilities discussing and comparing cultural attitudes around having a disability, and running a social enterprise project in which they create, trade and sell each other’s crafts in their own communities.
The partnership started in 1997 and is still running to this day. Pupils write letters to each other and connect with their peers at the partner school through video conferencing via a webcam.
Pupils learn about the cultural crafts being made and about the lives of their partner students. They use this knowledge to create information boards, which they display in their pop-up shops.
In Joyland School, pupils are taught local crafts such as sewing and needlework, where they make bags and jewellery from recycled materials. At National Star College, they focus on making printed materials, such as greetings cards, mobile phone cases and T-shirts.
David Finch is director of international development and research at National Star College and says the project brings the twofold benefits of increasing both cultural understanding and empowerment for traditionally marginalised groups.
“It is important for both partners that students with disabilities have opportunities to work with their peers from different cultures and open up the world to them,” he says.
Deeper thinking
Stephen Ellis, a British Council schools ambassador, highlights the fact that international partnerships offer opportunities to develop myriad transferable skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, digital literacy, creativity, citizenship and communication.
For example, when focusing on a global topic such as climate change, pupils can engage in discussions that require a deeper level of thinking - debating the negatives as well as the potential positives of deforestation, for example, and the impact this has on different environments and groups of people.
“International partnerships between schools see pupils and teachers from different cultures and faiths sharing their learning on global issues with such pride and joy. These projects encourage pupils to have a voice, and to know that they can make a difference,” Ellis says.
