Symposium Towards a Learning Society:
Supporting teaching and learning quality in Vietnam Conference
22nd to 23rd August 2013
Hanoi, Vietnam
Website: http://www.vvob.be/vietnam/?q=en/symposium
Contact person: Ms. Tuyet Anh Dang
The symposium provides platform for education sector stakeholders to share national and regional lessons learnt and best practices of promoting quality of education to recommend policy on further enhancement of education quality in Vietnam
Systemic advocacy for immigrant teachers: At the intersection of “isms”
From 2005-2011, I helped oversee a bridging program for internationally educated teachers (IETs) offered at the University of Manitoba. The program involved university coursework required to meet certification requirements, practicum placements, professional development and networking, and customized language support. The program was premised on an equity mandate that promoted a more diverse teaching force and recognized the many attributes of internationally educated teachers.
One of my roles was to chair advisory committee meetings with key stakeholders, including school division liaisons (often superintendents), ministry representatives from education and immigration, NGO service providers, and teacher education colleagues from the Faculty of Education.
Discussions at the bi-monthly meetings were intense and often controversial. Committee members had different levels of investment in issues facing IETs—some were part of this committee because they were immigrant teachers themselves and spent years trying to move an equity agenda forward; others were new to issues facing internationally educated teachers and had been assigned to be part of this committee by their school divisions. The issues presented below were raised by different stakeholders at advisory committee meetings over the duration of the program, though not all of the issues arose at the same meeting.
Key stakeholders raised questions and concerns such as:
To learn more about this scenario, including the author’s own response, please attend the Intersections of Diverse Teachers and Diverse Learners at CSSE 2013, or stay tuned to the DiT website because we will be posting those details in the near future.
Until then, please leave a comment so that we can read your responses to this scenario. Here are some questions to consider interacting with each other and the author (Dr. Clea Shmidt, from the University of Manitoba) about:
Why is she behaving this way?
As a professor at the University of Toronto, I work with graduate and undergraduate students of different ages and religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds. As such I often meet with my students in small groups to support their developing skills as researchers. I encourage them to work collaboratively and help each other in reaching their goals while sharing their concerns and questions about the research process.
Although I strongly encourage a spirit of collegiality among my students, I have observed that not everyone is equally comfortable in the context of these group meetings. In fact one day, after one of our regular meetings, one male student asked “Why is she behaving this way?” in reference to a student he perceived as particularly guarded during the meeting.
His question made me wonder about my role as the facilitator of such a diverse group. I wondered if it would be a good idea to review the norms for interaction at meetings and emphasize the group as a “safe” place for expressing diverse views as well as concerns or questions. I wondered what role culture, and gender played in this situation and how I might work with both students involved to ensure they benefitted maximally from their involvement in our regular group meetings.
To learn more about this scenario, including the author’s own response, please attend the Intersections of Diverse Teachers and Diverse Learners at CSSE 2013, or stay tuned to the DiT website because we will be posting those details in the near future.
Until then, please leave a comment so that we can read your responses to this scenario. Here is a question to consider interacting with each other and the author (Dr. Antoinette Gagne, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto) about:
Incorporating diverse learners’ cultural knowledge in the classroom
Culture is far deeper than the externally obvious components of celebrations and festivals, food, clothing and language. Culture is how we see, understand and interpret the world around us. Our background knowledge is based on our cultural worldview. Learners often bring knowledge to the classroom that is very different from that represented in the textbook.
For example, you are teaching a unit on modes of transportation in a metropolitan area of North America. Your class is made up of 40% immigrants and 60% locally born students of various ethnicities including mother tongue speakers of English. In preparing the unit on modes of transportation you want to build on the background knowledge of all the learners in the classroom rather than limiting the lesson to the textbook representation of bicycles, motorcycles, cars, buses, trucks, trains, boats, ships and airplanes. Your predominantly Asian learners are also aware of other modes of transportation such as jeepneys, bullock carts, calesas (horse drawn carts), rickshaws, kuligligs (rototiller–turned-tractor with trailer used for transporting people, animals and produce), tantalaks (homemade gravity propelled carts), bangkas (a boat larger than a canoe with outriggers) etc. as well as various animals used for transportation.
To learn more about this scenario, including the author’s own response, please attend the Intersections of Diverse Teachers and Diverse Learners at CSSE 2013, or stay tuned to the DiT website because we will be posting those details in the near future.
Until then, please leave a comment so that we can read your responses to this scenario. Here is a question to consider interacting with each other and the author (Diane Dekker, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto) about:
Mom, I just can’t understand my teacher!
As an “inclusive” teacher educator I have worked hard within my institution to diversity the teacher candidates admitted to our programs. In addition, I have advocated for new program supports to ensure that this more diverse group of future teachers could be successful. As a result, when each of my three children came home on different days, from different schools and grades announcing they could not understand a particular teacher, I tried to deconstruct the situation. I wanted to find out if their struggle to understand a “new” variety of French or English was really the issue or if it was something else more insidious connected to having a teacher from a cultural, religious, or racial background different from their own.
In each case, I followed up with a face-to-face meeting with these teachers. I was saddened to discover that in one case, I also struggled to comprehend what the teacher was telling me about my child and the curriculum – and this, in spite of more than 30 years of experience as a language teacher working with students from many language backgrounds.
I felt torn in my role as parent and advocate for my children and my role as teacher educator and advocate for immigrant teachers trying to establish themselves in Canadian schools.
To learn more about this scenario, including the author’s own response, please attend the Intersections of Diverse Teachers and Diverse Learners at CSSE 2013, or stay tuned to the DiT website because we will be posting those details in the near future.
Until then, please leave a comment so that we can read your responses to this scenario. Here are some questions to consider interacting with each other and the author (Dr. Antoinette Gagne, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto) about:
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