Situating Myself

In three days, I'll be flying to Ghana to meet my host teacher at the Archbishop Porter School for Girls in Takoradi and exchange ideas about education with teachers and students there.

My trip is part of a program sponsored by the U.S. State Department called Teachers for a Global Classroom.  The aim of the program is to spread ideas about global education throughout American schools by training teachers to globalize their curricula.  There are 80 teachers involved from across the U.S.  We all participated in an online course last fall, and we'll all be going on international field experiences this spring and summer.  Twelve of us are going to Ghana this weekend.

As I've prepared for this trip, I find myself thinking more about where I'm coming from than where I'm going.  At the beginning of the program, the idea that teachers would need to be pushed to globalize their classroom seemed absurd to me.  Here at South, the globe has come to us, in the form of students with a huge range of geographical, cultural and religious backgrounds.  Globalization is a fact of life, not a distant idea that might "enrich" our curriculum.

But we've had a rough winter here at South.  Several events, planned and unplanned have confirmed what we already know: bringing many cultures, languages, histories together in a building does not automatically create a truly integrated and diverse environment.  What we need and what we're working toward is real cross-cultural competence on the part of our staff and our students, as well as an honest understanding of the way race and racism have shaped history in this country and still impact all of our lives.

The shining stars at South as we work through these issues are definitely the students.  When I go to Ghana on Saturday, I will carry with me the most recent issue of our student newspaper, The Southerner, which features articles about the many ways students are confronting important issues: the All Nations student walkout on March 11, demanding more culturally relevant curriculum and less isolation; and the efforts by student allies for racial trust (s.t.a.r.t), aimed at creating cross-cultural understanding among students.

I'm creating a video to take with me to Ghana that will attempt to capture some of the complexity that is South High School.  I'll post it here when I'm done.  As I've asked people to speak on camera about the most positive and most challenging features about South, our cultural diversity comes up in both categories.

Teachers for a Global Classroom asked me to develop an essential question to focus on while I'm in Ghana. I wrote the question several weeks ago, and in the time since then, it has become more and more relevant to both my home and my travel destination.

Like much of Africa, the current boundaries of Ghana were drawn by European colonial powers without the input of the people living in the area.  As a result, the country today contains dozens of different ethnic groups.  English is the official language, but Ghanaians speak more than 50 languages. Since independence from Great Britain in 1959, one goal of the education system has been to create a sense of Ghanaian identity across people from different tribes.  So here's my essential question:

What role do ethnicity and connection to traditional cultures play in a united Ghana?  Does emphasis on a unified Ghanaian identity repress or celebrate connection to indigenous religions and cultures?

This is the group of teachers I will be traveling with to Ghana.  Bonnee (on the far left) and I will be paired with the same host teacher in Takoradi.