INTERNATIONAL THINKING

in association with

Real-life: Cramlington’s international

work on Haiti took on extra significance this year after the horrors of the Haitian earthquake shocked the world

We’re all global citizens

N

othing brings foreign language work more alive than setting it in a real-life context. It becomes doubly enriching when it opens children’s eyes to a lifestyle and culture very different from their own. That is the rationale behind a

year 9 project on Haiti introduced three years ago at Cramlington Learning Village, a large Northumberland comprehensive with specialist status in science and vocational education. This year the project had an even more powerful

impact than usual. On January 12 classes had just begun learning about inequality, poverty and the desperate plight of street children when news of the earthquake broke. Their response was immediate. They baked cakes

and sold them at break time. They printed tickets and hired a DJ for a disco. Through these and other means, they raised £3,400. “One of their ideas was a non-uniform day, which

the head doesn’t normally favour,” Chris Harte, assistant headteacher with responsibility for gifted and talented and international education, told SecEd. “So they went to see him, argued their case and won it. That was all at their own initiative. They were acting as global citizens. Learning about other parts of the world gives them a wider perspective and they want to engage,” The Haitian project is no isolated case and a

strong international dimension permeates the entire curriculum. International themes also come to the fore at the end of the summer term, when normal lessons give way to diverse activities designed to stimulate, challenge and broaden horizons. Last year, one project explored sustainability at an

individual, local, national and global level. Another was a story-telling week for year 7 featuring tales from different cultures, including Nepal, where Cramlington has a partner school. A bi-annual exchange with Bettendorf in Iowa and

foreign language exchanges with Spain and Quebec complete the picture. It all adds up to a rich and varied agenda that has earned the school a DCSF International School Award (ISA). Keen to explore new avenues, the school is

expanding its work to include more curricular projects with partners abroad. “We’ve always been good at linking students’

learning to the big wide world. But we don’t just want to teach them about other countries, we want them to connect with the people who live there,” explained Mr Harte. The excitement generated by a year 8 eTwinning

project is testimony to the motivational appeal of this approach. Working on the theme of Fiestas and Siestas, students exchanged penpal letters with children in

SecEd • March 25 2010

Cramlington Learning Village does not miss an opportunity to introduce the global dimension into its curriculum, and this can often have a very powerful affect on

students. Alison Thomas explains

Guadalajara, central Spain, before moving into their own Twinspace on the internet to share information and ideas through emails, blogs, chats and skype. Their goal was to produce a bilingual calendar

illustrating celebrations and festivals unique to each country as well as those they share. The process of collaboration enriched their learning on many different levels, the tangible outcome was sent out to parents and was a source of great pride. Year 9 gifted and talented students are also working

with a Spanish partner towards a common goal, although what form it will take has yet to be decided. This is a year-long project facilitated by Achievers International, an online programme which brings schools from different countries together to put business theory into practice by trading with each other. It began in September, when each team set up

a company with a board of directors covering key functions such as finance and marketing. They then embarked on market research to find out what young consumers in the partner establishment might be tempted to buy. Ideas came thick and fast, from T-shirts and pin

badges to pencil cases and stationery. Some were discarded on the grounds of impracticality, others are currently being trialled as prototypes. The Cramlington students would like to give their product a British touch and one of their latest ideas is a recipe for an After Eight smoothie. It might sound a little odd, but it went down very well when they sold it at the Haiti disco. By the time they wind up their companies in July,

they will have been through every stage of launching a business venture, from raising capital to marketing, production, importing and exporting and putting the goods on sale. If all goes well, the experience will be repeated next year. Looking beyond Europe, the school has started

working with a school in Ndhiwa, Western Kenya, through the Kenya Acorn Project, a charity that runs a hospital and supports schools in the area. It started as a fundraising initiative instigated by a music teacher, who sits on the charity’s board, and now it has moved on

to educational support. When the Kenyan headteacher was asked to identify his greatest concerns, literacy came top of the list. Cramlington’s response left these shores on March 10 with a group of nurses, who travel out for several weeks at a time to work with the charity. It comprises a collection of texts written by students from years 8 and 9, describing their lives at home and at school with pictures to illustrate. In addition, the literacy co-ordinator has supplied

worksheets and each pack contains essential writing equipment. Everything the nurses need to run a two- hour workshop with a group of 20 children. They have also taken disposable cameras, so that

their charges can respond with pictures of their own, which will provide the stimulus for creative writing back in England. Mr Harte hopes to receive letters too, although that

may be impractical given that this is a project in basic English literacy for children whose schooling has been blighted by personal tragedy. “Many of them are aid orphans who are paid to go

to school, otherwise they would have to earn money by going out to work. It’s not unusual for the head of the family to be as young as eight years old. That’s quite an eye-opener for our pupils,” he said. On a very different note, communicating through the

language of art is the purpose of “turbinegeneration”, an international schools project produced by the Tate and sponsored by Unilever. The starting point is the Unilever Series in Tate

Modern’s Turbine Hall, which features a specially commissioned work by a different artist each year. This year it is the turn of Miroslaw Balka, whose giant steel container filled with a vast dark void evokes disturbing echoes of wartime atrocities in his native Poland. This has been the stimulus for creative collaboration

between year 13 Cramlington students and pupils from a school in Moscow on the theme “objects of memory”. Not only are they gaining cultural insight through sharing ideas and responding to each other’s work online, they are also benefiting from the professional input of a practising artist, who has run workshops in both schools.

• Alison Thomas is a freelance education journalist.

Further information

• Cramlington Learning Village: www.cramlingtonlv. co.uk

• eTwinning: www.etwinning.net • Achievers International: www.achievers international.org

• Kenya Acorn Project: www.kenyaacornproject.org • Turbinegeneration: http://blog.tate.org.uk/ turbinegeneration/

• Global Curriculum Project grants: www.dfid.gov.uk • International School Award: www.globalgateway. org/isa

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“It’s a mature, thought-provoking project and

has given rise to some fascinating work,” Mr Harte continued. “They started by bringing in an object that has special meaning for them and told the story behind it by drawing a series of sketches on a blank till roll. “This was filmed and streamed live through Twitcam

for people to post comments and we archived the video so that the Russian pupils could watch it again later.” Regeneration is the theme of a comparative study

conducted by year 11 geographers and year 12 scientists and students from a school in Nepal. Funded by a Global Curriculum Project grant from

the Department for International Development (DFID), this is a tale of two rivers: the pollution-choked Bagmati River in the Kathmandu Valley and the clean waters of the Tyne, home to salmon, otters and seals, but once almost as badly degraded as its Himalayan counterpart. Nepalese students conducted tests on the river and

uploaded the results onto a website which one of their number designed. When their headteacher and another member of staff visited Northumberland in November, they brought with them more pictures and data to share with the British students and accompanied them on their own mission to survey the Tyne. Year 11 has also done a presentation on the

regeneration of Newcastle. “The Nepalese school is involved in a community

initiative to educate people about the consequences of dumping rubbish in the river. The core idea of the project is that the damage can be reversed and the health of the Tyne is proof,” Mr Harte explained. The project is still in progress but when it comes

to an end the partnership will live on. Mr Harte has already received expressions of interest from several departments, including travel and tourism, humanities and music. “We are deeply committed to enabling our students

to connect with people from different cultures, so they can work together and learn from each other,” he concluded.

SecEd

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