Educational Methods

(The facilitators) immersed the kids in the issues with various resources; video and articles and so on. Pushing the kids to actually go deeper, yeah, some of them have done it quite well, some of them are still – it’s probably the standard range of how well they’ve got into it from any cohort of kids.

Another outcome of the time pressure was that the actions chosen to support the issue tended to be brief and relatively untargeted. For example, one group sold items during a single lunchtime to raise money for sending to an organisation involved with their issue. Although this type of action may legitimately be considered to be making a contribution, there was no opportunity to debrief the students afterward nor was there an opportunity to find out what would be done with the money and follow through on how the ‘action’ might help the issue. There was a sense that with handing over the money the action was complete. As a result some of the teachers expressed reservations about whether the final phase might have missed opportunities to add significant value to the students learning.

Two significant contributions to the program’s intended content did not eventuate. No further Indonesian communications arrived. The students had no feedback about their first communication and no knowledge of the issues that the Indonesian young people had chosen. Therefore, they could not explore links to their peers and develop understanding about the Indonesians’ issues and ways of taking action. It was also planned that the year’s program would end with a celebration exhibition that brought together all the students and teachers from all four schools to present their

communication pieces and share experiences. However, this planned exhibition did not take place owing to time and logistical restrictions.

7.2.2.2 Educational Methods

Throughout the implementation of Global Connections the role of the facilitators dominated

discussions about the pedagogical approaches employed within the program. Once the program was in progress, the uncertainty and concern about how the facilitators would manage the program and the students was largely replaced by respect and support:

I think that the girls that ran it were fantastic. They’re absolutely fantastic...For young girls that don’t have any teacher training or anything like that...they get different.

148

outcomes...And I think that’s all really positive.… And they’re not teachers, but they’re still really great role models I think, yeah.

Oh, excellent. Yeah, they’re both good. They both know their stuff and they’re inspiring the kids, who are relating to them very well.

I’ve been very impressed with them. They’re really well prepared and they keep it moving and the kids are really enjoying that. I think the girls have actually done a really good job of mixing it up and having something for everyone.

I mean, I come in, say be quiet and things like that, but they’ve been doing really well I think, yeah. If anything, I think moving a little bit slow, yeah, but I mean, it’s such an expectation with them in there to be able to even facilitate the classroom I think. You know, it’s a pretty amazing thing to be doing.

It should be noted however, that two of the teachers indicated that their own relationships with the facilitators were not straightforward in the early stages and in one instance the Plan coordinator had to come in and mediate a discussion about the roles of the teacher and the facilitators. Additionally, several of the teachers indicated that they did not routinely getting lesson plans from the facilitators and were not being informed about what was happening next so were not able to answer student questions between sessions or appropriately plan their own work. In this regard, although the facilitators were trusted to take responsibility for the classes the teachers felt increasingly distanced from the program’s activity as the facilitators became more confident.

However, as the program progressed, there also seemed to be a definite shift towards the teachers treating the facilitators as adults and colleagues rather than the ‘youth’ image they carried initially.

The change was profound in the context of the program and seemed to be related to two

interconnected reasons. The first reason was that the teachers clearly got accustomed to seeing the facilitators in their classroom every week over an extended period. The novelty of having the

facilitators present and active in class wore off and the initial feeling that the teachers had of needing to watch over the facilitators vanished. There was almost a taken-for-granted element to the routine interactions. The teachers had come to trust the facilitators ‘professionalism’ with regard to taking responsibility for the classes.

149

This last statement links to the second and more subtle reason for the shift in the relationship. The teachers all suggested that the facilitators had begun to operate more like teachers when the pressure was on to compress the remaining activity into a short time frame. There were less games and ‘loose’ periods and the facilitators were pushing the students harder to meet the deadlines. In this way, there seemed to be a merging of approaches:

(The facilitators) recognised that the students were sometimes hard to keep on task and they’ve developed strategies about how to engage the kids over a time span like that on a Friday afternoon and they’re doing it pretty well. I think they’ve certainly grown as teachers if you like, educators.

The students are sort of seeing them (the facilitators) as teachers. Yeah, there is a bit of that I think. There is a bit of that for sure. Probably they are maybe just pushing them to be more productive. It is more about outcomes.

One of the outcomes of the perceived change in approach of the facilitators was that the teachers were more readily able to identify with the conversations that they were having with the facilitators.

One teacher indicated that the facilitators were starting to question and think about the students’

engagement in the same way that s/he was thinking, for example:

I was talking to my facilitators about .... getting them (the students) involved in issues. There were some girls that were going for it, they were doing issues that they felt passionate about and there were others that just were drawing pictures... anyway we were talking about what’s prohibiting their engagement.

The last quote above also reflects a common theme that the teachers noticed in the ‘issues’ part of the program. The facilitators really struggled to get the students to engage more deeply with the issues. The teachers definitely linked the struggle to the facilitators not having some of the necessary

‘teaching’ and facilitating skills:

I think they either need training in scaffolding or the program itself is more

structured…because I found there was quite a few times where what they’d organised to do needed a bit of building, I guess.

150

I guess it was hard to get more (depth) having not had training in scaffolding…And I guess you learn how to do that through experience and without that experience it’s hard for them to do that scaffolding.

They’re young and they don’t have a lot of experience doing this either, I guess. So it needs to be tightened up and to keep moving and have something – like we have to do with teaching, you’ve got to have an objective for each session.... What do I want the kids to get out of this session?

The lack of ‘teaching’ skills notwithstanding, the teachers all thought that the facilitators produced valuable outcomes for their students that were different to those they would expect from trained teachers:

I think it worked having young people rather than, say, teachers....because they’re younger and, you know the (students) respond differently.

However, they were not able to elaborate on the results that they would expect to see an experienced teacher achieve. The teachers did comment qualitatively that the students really enjoyed the difference and by the end of the program there were very strong relationships between some of the students and the facilitators. They thought that the obvious enjoyment of the students justified the use of the facilitators and the difference was all to the good. The teachers thought that to a large extent the facilitators being younger⁷⁴ than most teachers was an important element in the different relationships formed but the informal approaches used were also significant:

The students were definitely responding differently, but it appeared to be as much related to the freedom and informality underpinning the facilitator-student interactions as to the age of the

facilitators⁷⁵. Although the teachers did not think the students saw the facilitators as peers, there was no change to their view that the youth-led design component of Global Connections equated to the work of the facilitators. The variety of activities undertaken and the production of the

communication pieces were considered to be part of a program ‘managed and delivered’ by the facilitators who were ‘youth’.

74 Several of the facilitators were in their mid-twenties and so were not in fact younger than many beginning teachers. The United Nations definition of youth is under the age of 26 for most of their youth related policy.

75 When I (as a middle-aged teacher) was in the classroom participating in an activity near the end of the sessions the students had no hesitation extending their informal approach to include me.

151

The teachers appreciated the relaxed and informal classroom environment that was fostered by the facilitators but there were inevitable comparisons with their own way of operating. In this regard, several of the teachers thought that the facilitators lost their way at times and as a result there was not a lot accomplished in some periods. They also felt that learning opportunities were lost when discussions took directions that the facilitators did not have the knowledge to support. This was particularly the case with regard to satisfying the students’ interest in Indonesia and issues of concern to Indonesians. The teachers all felt that the program would have been enhanced if it had a mix of pedagogical styles and included at least some ‘teaching’. In this way, questions developed about the learning that the students were experiencing as a result of the ‘facilitated’ approach.

7.2.2.3 Educational Purpose

Before the program started, the teachers strongly related the program’s primary purpose to the connection between their students and the young people in the Indonesian groups (see section 6.2.1.1). Through a ‘real’ connection the teachers envisaged that their students would learn ‘about’

their counterparts and develop a broader outlook and a more global sense of how they connected to the world. Although Global Connections was also recognised as including engagement with social issues, the issues involved were visualised as being linked to interactions with the Indonesians and therefore the program was in all respects related to the ‘connections’. As was described earlier, the connection was problematic and the teachers did not think it had been significantly established. As a result there was a prevailing sense among the teachers that Global Connections did not achieve its primary purpose.

However, the teachers also acknowledged that the program achieved other purposes. By the mid-point of the program, they had developed a broader vision of the program’s aims. They recognised that activity in the classroom and not communication with the Indonesians was Plan’s main

foundation for developing the social purposes of the program. They had come to understand more fully that the communication pieces provided a structure for the program and were designed to focus, motivate and support their students to engage more deeply with a social issue of concern to them. Furthermore, they also realised that the issue chosen was not restricted by the Indonesian communications or the Indonesians’ issues. Communication with Indonesia could add a significant dimension but the program was not entirely dependent on the connection.

Additionally, the teachers acknowledged that the student-led emphasis used during the preparation of the communications was designed to encourage the students to think about how they wanted to represent themselves. The approach required the students to interrogate their own identities.

152

Similarly, the process of choosing an issue required the students to think about how they were connected to their communities and what issues were of most concern to them. However, Plan’s representation of the processes involved in the program as a major purpose in itself of the program was never reflected by the teachers. For the teachers, the methods employed were not seen as particularly innovative and were not seen as being particularly skilfully executed. As such, they were a means to an end. The purposes of the program were seen as related to the outcomes rather than the processes of activities.

To a large extent the shift to accommodate locally-oriented purposes was a reluctant but necessary response to the fact that the first communication piece took so long to arrive. During the last weeks before the Indonesian communication arrived there was a unanimously held view that the program had stalled. Because the program had been so strongly linked to the Indonesian connection by the teachers and their students, the time leading up to the communication arrival had been a time of gradual disillusionment and unfulfilled expectation:

I think all of them (students) wanted to see something from Indonesia and I thought it would have been from day one, we would have had some sort of, something happening with Indonesia...

A number of my kids sort of said to me, Oh XXXX, when are we actually going to find out more about the kids in Indonesia.

However, when the communication piece did arrive it partially rekindled the teachers’ enthusiasm and clearly reconnected them to the initial expectations they had developed about the global connection part of the program:

The translations though, gave me insights into the different kids, yeah, and the kids loved reading them because they were giggling and laughing at some of the things that were said in the translations.

The kids loved looking at (the communication piece) but that was only the very last session that we had (in the term).

They did respond very well when they saw the first communication piece they spent quite a long time looking at it and reading all the bits.

153

Although there was unanimous agreement that the first communication piece was the highlight of the first half of the program, one of the teachers commented that the level of student engagement was not what they had anticipated.

My surprise was the apathy.... they were interested but they were a little bit just like, oh yeah, this is just another thing, and maybe not seeing the humanity of it or something, the fact that they’re actually real people and, you know…

There were also frustrations attached to getting the communication piece from Indonesia because translation was not complete, and the timing was such that it arrived right at the end of term and learning could not be immediately developed:

So we were looking at it, we could look at the pictures and some of the stuff that they’d written in English but there were a lot of bits that were written in Indonesian that we still have no idea what they actually say so we’ve got to wait. The girls (facilitators) had only just got hold of it, so they hadn’t had a chance to get it translated. It would have been great to have the whole thing because by the time it gets translated, the next session is not going to be for another four weeks (after school holidays).

There were some bits on it that needed translating and we didn’t ever get it back with the translations so I don’t know what happened. It sort of came for one session and then went away again and didn’t come back.

A lot of it’s in English but there was a few little bits they’d attached that need translating.

At the mid-program stage, Global Connections was at best partially fulfilling its potential and purpose from the teachers’ perspectives but they were still hoping that it would live up to the promise they could still see that it offered. Their support for the program’s purpose and aims was largely based on faith rather than the reality of what was happening. Neither the global dimension through the Indonesian communication nor the local dimension through exploration of an issue had advanced very far and the teachers were understandably reserved about the program:

I wanted more stuff; this is what I wanted. I wanted the kids to learn about Indonesia, learn about what’s happening there. Real, real, real stuff and that would engage the kids. I mean,

154

I’m dying to see the end. I’m dying to see what’s going to happen but I just thought a lot of the stuff would happen earlier...I don’t want to condemn the program. It sounds good. I’m still waiting because I reckon it’ll be good. I’m really hopeful.

But yeah, it’s sort of, I don’t know if it’s worked. I would like to see how it goes for the rest of it...And then, yeah, I would have to do another reassessment. I think, at this point I think it’s a little bit slow…and students haven’t been as engaged as I would have thought.

It seems to be happening a little bit differently to what I expected so...?

However, the doubts expressed were not unanimous:

Many of the kids are saying they’re really enjoying it. Yeah, no, it’s working. I think definitely their thinking about what it means to be a global citizen has gone up from very little to…

However, this teacher also recognised that the key element (for the teacher) of connecting the kids had not worked well and added a rider to the above statement:

Well, okay, there’s scope for improvement, yeah. To make it more real time connection with the kids rather than waiting for mail, yeah.

At the end of the mid-program interviews, there was a cautiously optimistic wait-and-see reaction to whether Global Connections would achieve its purpose that seemed to be heading along two paths.

There were two distinct reactions suggesting: ‘I’m hopeful’ and ‘I’m hopeful, but...’.

As the program developed the teachers recognised that the connection to Indonesia was unlikely to progress and that program outcomes for their students would be linked to involvement with local rather than global issues. In this regard, Global Connections’ purpose was considered to be about exploring an issue and being empowered to take social action. By the end of the program the teachers also acknowledged that a purpose of the program was the creation an alternative learning

As the program developed the teachers recognised that the connection to Indonesia was unlikely to progress and that program outcomes for their students would be linked to involvement with local rather than global issues. In this regard, Global Connections’ purpose was considered to be about exploring an issue and being empowered to take social action. By the end of the program the teachers also acknowledged that a purpose of the program was the creation an alternative learning