[WARNING: Long blog post alert! I tried so hard to keep it brief but it was impossible to sum up my summer abroad in so few words! Grab your coffee, get comfortable, and enjoy!] For as long as I’ve wanted to be a teacher, I’ve also wanted to teach abroad, immersed in a culture different from my own. This dream of mine has even taken me to visit schools in other countries, getting close to applying but not quite being able to commit to a year or two abroad (yet). During a particularly stressful school year this past year, it occurred to me that spending my summers abroad could be a perfect way to satisfy that international craving, at least a little bit. In this blog post, I want to tell you a little bit about my experience living, learning, and teaching in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and the biggest takeaways that I will bring to my practice here in the US. Later, I will write a blog post detailing how I was able to make this work financially (spoiler alert: it was FREE!) and the steps I took to secure an amazing funding opportunity. About the Program:Around November of last year, I started searching for summer opportunities abroad, specifically in Spanish speaking countries. Of the students I work with, a high percentage are Latino and Spanish-speaking. A major goal of mine was to become fluent in Spanish, to the point where I could comfortably talk to a parent in Spanish or translate an IEP. A google search led me to a company called Common Ground International, a husband-wife team based in Colorado who lead Spanish immersion trips for teachers, medical professionals, and high school students. Their ‘Spanish for Educators’ program was perfect for me: 4 weeks in Nicaragua and Costa Rica working with local education-related organizations and schools, taking intensive Spanish classes with a focus on education, and living with host families in both countries. I knew this program would bring me out of my comfort zone and help me to not only become more proficient in Spanish, but also become a more culturally competent educator. Nicaragua:I started the program in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, a colonial city situated on the coast of Lake Nicaragua. Granada charmed me in every way imaginable, with its pastel colored buildings, bustling Parque Central, and breathtaking horizon filled with volcanoes and church steeples. But what I loved most about Granada was the people. I stayed with a host family with three generations, and was always warmly greeted with a ‘Buenos dias’ in the morning and the love they had for each other and their country was obvious. As for the work I did in Nicaragua, our days were split in half between educational outreach in the mornings and Spanish language classes in the afternoons. During the first week, we worked with an organization called House of Hope, a refuge and safe place for women who have escaped or are still experiencing forced prostitution. I could go on for a while about the prostitution industry in Nicaragua, but I will brief here and encourage you to research it on your own if you’re interested. To put it simply, House of Hope works with some of the strongest women I will ever encounter in my life, who value their children more than anything but aren’t always comfortable parenting their children due to a lack of parental support of their own as children. Now, the idea of being a white person from the United States going into another culture and trying to be a savior is something I have a lot of issues with. Who am I to tell these women how to parent, when I don’t even have children of my own? While that is a complicated issue, our program made a point to ask the women what kind of support they needed so we could plan workshops that would actually benefit them. We ended up delivering workshops to the mothers about how to get their children involved with age-appropriate chores at home. The women were engaged in our workshop, patient with our subpar Spanish skills, and genuinely grateful for the information and resources that they could actually use with their families. During our second week, we worked with a local school on the outskirts of Granada that serves marginalized neighborhoods or ‘shantytowns’. For families in these neighborhoods, money is scarce and education is often seen as a way out for their children. The students at the school are excited to learn and see a bright future for themselves. Since students were on break when we were there, we again put on workshops for parents. This time, the theme was more general: how to support your child’s education at home. My partner and I focused on math development, and simple ways that parents can reinforce math concepts at home as part of their daily routines like cooking or walking to school. Again, the parents were eager to hear what we had to offer and willing to share their own input on how they talk to their children about math at home. When we weren’t working in the community, we had Spanish classes for four hours each day, focusing on education-specific usage of the language, such as how to talk to parents about their child’s progress in Spanish, or how to address student behavior in the classroom. I even learned technical, IEP-related terminology and was able to translate an IEP, one of my long-term goals! My teacher, Alvaro, was an incredibly talented educator, and I also learned some great engagement strategies and activities from my time in his class. Overall, Nicaragua left a huge impression on me. Seeing people so dedicated to improving the lives of others through education was incredibly inspiring. The level of commitment that these parents had for their children’s education, despite difficult circumstances, was unwavering. The two weeks I spent in Nicaragua went by way too fast, and before I knew it I was hopping on a bus for a nine hour journey to Costa Rica! Costa Rica:Costa Rica was drastically different from Nicaragua, and I think the most emotionally challenging day for me was the day of transition between the two countries. The beautiful landscape I saw out the window was just as enchanting as Nicaragua, but as we entered the cities of San Jose and Heredia, I was struck by the economic differences. It was obvious, from the availability of American fast food chains to the (relative) lack of stray dogs to the style of dress, that Costa Rica was in a very different situation economically. This is something that I could write about in much greater detail, not that I would be qualified to do so, but again, I will keep it short here. Overall, the drastic differences in the standard of living between two nations so close geographically was shocking and tough to accept. The work I did in the community in Costa Rica was different as well. Instead of working with parents, we spent most of our time working with students, which I was so deeply missing! Getting to interact with kids again, although challenging in my second language, brought me so much joy and energy. I was living in a small city in Heredia called Santo Domingo, a town where everyone says hello to you on the sidewalk and everyone seems to know each other. Within five minutes of meeting someone, they’d know all about my life, my boyfriend, my job, etc. The people were truly some of the warmest I’ve ever met, which is my favorite thing about Latin cultures. We spent our first week putting on an educational day camp for kids in Santo Domingo who were still on break from school. My colleagues and I set up separate learning stations, and I decided to teach the kids some of my favorite math games from my own classroom. Their eyes lit up when they found out that they could actually practice math through games. I asked if they ever played games in school and they laughed and shook their heads no. One student even got excited about a multiplication chart, something she had never seen before, exclaiming “Ay, que chiva!!” (“Oh, how cool!”). We played dice and card games, practiced our multiplication facts, listened to the Moana soundtrack in Spanish, and laughed as the kids taught me some new vocabulary. It was sad to part with the kids on the last day (one first grade boy even told us “these were the best days of my life!”) but luckily we would be seeing some of them the following week at their school! Students in Santo Domingo were back in school the following week (my last week in Costa Rica), and we got the opportunity to work in a local public school. I got to assist the ‘Apoyo de Aprendizaje’ teacher (learning support) in her classroom where she worked with students with learning disabilities in small groups. This teacher was absolutely amazing. Everything was made into a game (unlike what students had told me the week before!) and students were so engaged and excited to learn. The school had a separate teacher and classroom for behavioral disabilities, and because I was paired with the learning support teacher I didn’t get to see much of that. But overall, it seemed to me that this school’s approach to Special Education was very effective. I saw a lot of collaboration between the special education teachers and general education teachers, and the school had a very inclusive atmosphere, even though students who needed individual attention were serviced in a separate room when necessary. Biggest Takeaways: Why Will This Matter in My Classroom?The most important thing for me in this whole experience was that I would be able to better serve my students as a result. Here are a few major takeaways that I believe will make me a better, more culturally-responsive educator:
Have you had any experiences teaching or learning abroad? Please share with me in the comments! And don’t forget--I will be writing another post all about how I got this amazing opportunity for FREE! Stay tuned :)
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August 2016
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