Week One Complete

3/28/11

Our UNCW students completed their first week in the schools here in San Pedro and it was quite eventful. Many of the students were asked to observe their partner teacher for the first week of schools, while others were asked to “dive right into instruction” as their partner teacher relinquished control quickly. It was interesting to see how our student teachers (and the children) would react. Some student teachers were anxious while others were excited to begin! Teaching in Belize and employing a foreign curriculum can be disconcerting to those students that like to be well planned and informed; while others teachers are more comfortable becoming engaged quickly without the direction provided them in their student teaching classrooms. Many of our students are provided a high level of support structures in Wilmington internships to be successful. I will argue that our teachers are overly supported in some cases. So we observe some students struggle to teach in an environment where those ‘home-based’ support structures don’t exist. But, throughout the week, almost all of our students get familiar with their local environment, if not all together comfortable. I don’t think they understand how capable and well trained they are!

But isn’t that what teaching in a foreign environment is supposed to be about? Placing each of our students in an unfamiliar environment and then asking each student to make sense (and meaning) of their new surroundings is about being adaptive. In science education we call this inquiry learning. We ask our k-12 students to do this, but how often do we ask our teachers to do this? Really…how often? Many of our student teacher are being asked to do just that during this field experience. All of our students are put into a state of disequilibrium when confronted with an environment completely familiar to them. And what is amazing to me is to watch them “work themselves back to stability.” I’m a firm believer that if they can be successful teaching in San Pedro, Belize without the resources they have available in the states, then they can be successful anywhere. We have a combination of students amongst this year’s 18 participants. Some are well traveled internationally. These students tend to adapt to this new environment much better early in the field experience. We also have students who have never left the southeastern part of the United States. Many of these students have a bit of ‘culture shock’ initially. But, after a week, we find that these students grow in ways we could never have planned for. It is an amazing realization to observe! And Susan and I believe that international experiences like this get our students ready for the classroom in ways that I could never do as a teacher educator back in the states.