Nearly 85 sixth-graders at Sequoyah Middle School have written letters to students in Morocco and are learning about the importance of having a global perspective, thanks to social studies teacher Amy Heritage-McDonald.
A National Board certified teacher, Heritage-McDonald created the pen pal program after she was picked to join the national Teachers for Global Classrooms. She was one of 80 to participate in the program, which is part of the nonprofit International Research Exchange.
“I tell my students all the time that the world is getting smaller,” Heritage-McDonald said. “It’s really important they have that global perspective and forming relationships with students in Morocco is a stepping stone to seeing the world as a global community.”
Heritage-McDonald underwent an “intensive” online professional development course on global education for three months before she prompted her students to write pen pal letters. In February, she and her principal Springy Yamasaki attended the Global Education Symposium in Washington DC. Heritage-McDonald then traveled in March to Rabat, Morocco to deliver the letters.
“The Moroccan students just started learning English,” she said, adding that they were of high school age. The letters consisted of introducing themselves and explaining what their favorite music, sport and subject are.
Heritage-McDonald partnered with a Moroccan host teacher and gave presentations about eduction in Federal Way.
Although some students still correspond with them, Heritage-McDonald said many have contacted each other on social media, such as Facebook or Instagram.
“That medium is a little more comfortable for kids,” she said. “We’ll keep doing pen pals as long as we get pen pal letters back.”
But Heritage-McDonald said the school she visited is “pretty poor” and all of their teachers only work 20 hours a week.
“They had a library with not a single book in it,” she said.
Although the high school has grades 10-12, the education system in Morocco is very different. Students go to school from 8 a.m. to noon, go home for two hours and then come back from 2-6 p.m., but not every day.
“It’s a college schedule, they only have classes some days,” Heritage-McDonald said, noting there’s no cafeteria, no buses, or extra curricular activities.
Students also choose their majors. She worked with students in the math/science track.
“Generally math/science students wear white lab coats as part of their uniform,” she said.
In the public school, students also learn about Islam, as Morocco is an Islamic state, however, Heritage-McDonald said that it’s not “super fundamentalist” and is an open society.
“One thing that was really interesting is the host teacher’s English class,” she said. “The curriculum is geared toward global competency more than what most American’s curriculums have. We tend to be a little ethnocentric.”
American students don’t learn about other countries as much as they should, she said.
“These students are studying things like the brain drain, women’s rights and other social issues,” she said, adding that the brain drain is a phenomenon of highly-skilled students who emigrate to more prosperous countries to have a better life for themselves and their families, but, subsequently “drain” their country of well-educated people. “They’re curriculum is very globalized.”
Although the school district has stressed the global initiative, Heritage-McDonald said no Federal Way Public Schools funds have been used.
Teachers for Global Classrooms is a program designed to help teachers globalize their instruction in the classroom so that students’s world views, literacies and identities are shaped to understand global interconnectivity.
