Sunday, March 24, 2013

First Meeting with Students

As I said before, there are no regular classes going on right now, but on Friday, Bonnee and I got to meet with the editorial board of the school's magazine, which comes out once per year and is sort of like our yearbooks. Both Bonnee and I are advisers of student publications--I advise the newspaper and Bonnee advises the yearbook at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia.

We started by sharing my students' newspapers and Bonnee's yearbook with the students and getting some reaction. Students were impressed with the depth of coverage in the Southerner and its focus on school-based issues.

Our conversation then turned to broader topics, such as comparisons between Ghanaian and US schools. The most obvious difference those of you looking at these photos will notice involves school uniforms and even mandated haircuts. The students at APGSS, and at most Ghanaian high schools, are not allowed to wear makeup or jewelry, nor can they have cell phones or their own computers on campus. The philosophy is that these rules keep them focused on their studies, and most of the students were pretty positive about the rules.

One question the students had for us right away was whether racism still exists in the US. I think this subject came up both because of the content of the Southerners the students were looking at and because Bonnee and I are African American and white, respectively. While we both have a similar analysis of race and racism in the US, our experiences are obviously quite different, and the students were interested in those differences.

I think the meeting with the editorial board challenged some of my preconceptions about the kind of student that the Ghanaian education system might create. I have read and heard a lot about rote learning and memorization, but these young women asked lots of thoughtful, critical questions.



3 comments:

  1. What interesting conversations, what had they heard about racism in the US before? Does Bonnee teach in Minneapolis too?

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  2. Interesting! Thanks for the idea of bringing school newspapers--I am my school's newspaper adviser, so I just wrote a note to myself to bring newspapers to India. Sounds like they had some very interesting questions, perceptions about the USA.

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  3. Did the students have thoughts about cultural/ethnic conflict or issues in Ghana (because of the way the boundaries were drawn (I'm thinking back to your post from the first days and the colonial "stamp" left on African nations))?

    By the way, I love the picture of students on the other side of the world reading South's newspaper!

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