A few weeks ago my class were learning about climate change and the climate emergency and we had to do a comparison to another country. I asked my pupils: how do you think climate change is impacting on Ghana? They came up with some suggestions and they said, can we check? This is one example of how effective WhatsApp has been. I said, yes, I'll just WhatsApp Madame Juliet and she'll get back to us, she's always very quick to get back.
At midnight that night, I got a message back from her and she said: yes, the children are right. This is how climate change is impacting on Ghana. But the reason that I have been so late to get back to you is because there's been a storm because of climate change and it has blown the roof off the school and it's destroyed all the jotters, all the furniture, all the paper, totally destroyed.
When I told the children the next day, of course they were devastated. They were determined to do something to take action. So they organized a coffee morning in the community and ran it themselves.
But the really interesting thing and the nice thing as a teacher is that they saw the link between climate change and climate justice. They were telling me it's not fair because it's Westerners that cause the most climate change and yet it's those that don't cause it who are having the effects and having to raise £12,000 themselves to fix the school.
As a teacher, that is really good and powerful and it's real life. That's something they'll take forward as they develop their thinking, as they grow into adults and hopefully will continue to want to take action about things like this.
Other projects
Another thing we've worked on in recent years, has been learning for sustainability issues. We've looked at saving water. We've looked at school gardens and growing. They've grown tatties [potatoes] in Ghana and my children learned about cocoa plantations and chocolate. They loved that. The Ghanaian school is near a cocoa plantation so their children took our questions on a trip to the cocoa plantation, asked our questions as well as their own, filmed it, took photos, did diagrams and sent them back. Later, when the Ghanaian teachers came across to visit us, they brought chocolate for us to test and we did a whole thing on fair trade as well.
We've looked at campaigning for the global goals and that's been really interesting because it has widened and deepened pupil learning. For example, my class chose what global goal they wanted to campaign for in groups or by themselves and they did their own campaigning through writing to MPs, prime ministers, the newspapers or making PowerPoint posters.
The pupils in Ghana were amazed by how many of my pupils had chosen to think about animals. We'd looked at Life below water and Life on land and plastic pollution [British Council classroom resources]. Lots of the Ghana pupils live on farms, so they don't have pets. But they began to realise as I showed them the campaigns of my children, some issues that they hadn't really considered before.
And then I asked the Ghanaian students: what have you chosen to campaign on? And it was health care. I asked: Why are you campaigning for healthcare? You've got good hospitals, you've got good clinics. And they told me about a story they'd heard a few months ago in Northern Ghana, which is a poorer area, where one mum had tried to get her child to the nearest clinic, and she had to take the baby on her back plus her child, and they had to cross a lake to get there and they drowned. The Ghanaian pupils were outraged at this, saying this shouldn't happen in modern day Ghana.
Through a different lens
It made the teachers and the students in both countries think about things through a different lens and to think about the global goals more globally, I suppose.
Probably the favourite project that we've done was where we did a collaborative song video [you can watch it here] promoting the global goals. We recorded it in both Ghana and in Scotland with children singing and dancing together and then it was edited so you can see both Scottish pupils and Ghanaian pupils. The kids love seeing how many people have viewed that video in both Ghana and Scotland.
We were able to pay someone to do the video to a high standard in both countries. We used a Ghanaian company that we knew were good because it's the director of the school's sons! And I know somebody here and they were able to communicate through tech with each other and managed to edit it to make the final video.
The best form of communication is when the teachers visit one another and they can bring across children's work with them. But that doesn't happen that often. We found that letters haven't been that successful. The post takes a long time. But WhatsApp has definitely been the best way because you can send film clips, you can send messages. We found that to be a really good and immediate way of communicating with one another.
As for future plans for our partnership, I am going to ask the pupils because I find that if the pupils come up with the ideas themselves, there's more ownership, there's more motivation and in the past I have found that the most successful projects have been when the children come up with the idea.
You can read more about the partnership and how it has grown into a genuine friendship
