Recently, I'm starting to realize that a much more interesting question and subject area is studying what the other volunteers learn about teaching and children, during their experience. The people who volunteer for this project come from numerous educational levels, age groups, countries, cultures, occupations, etc. During my last experience, I taught next to a 19-year old woman from England who had not even started college yet. With no instructional training, she was a great teacher. I learned a lot from her.
I noticed this repeatedly that people who were not teachers and had little experience with children or teaching, came to this project and developed skills necessary for successful teaching. This project seems to level the playing field. I, the supposed "expert," feel on par with the rising junior teaching across the bamboo wall that divides our classroom. I like this feeling. I'm part of a team, not a hierarchy.
Last Friday, I had an interesting conversation with a volunteer from Australia. She's in her 40's and is taking 6 months to travel around Central and South America and volunteer with the GVI projects. She doesn't have kids and she admitted to me that she had never taught before or worked with children. She had been teaching for 4 weeks, and was telling me about some of the things that she was doing in the classroom to improve behavior and learning. She talked about being consistent, being firm but fair, not letting kids get away with things, introducing more hands-on activities, finding interesting songs that the kids loved, etc. The classrooms are humble and spare: no technology and a hardened dirt/concrete floor. In order to help her 1st grade students learn letters, she used chalk and had them right all over the floor, use their fingers to write it in the air, and to practice it in their notebooks.
Everything she shared with me was something our Department of Teacher Education at Lander tries to teach our students. We make it part of our curriculum. If one of my students shared with me what Karen shared me, I would feel proud of what we had "taught" her. This brought up a question I had been formulating for some time: how is it that someone with no experience or training, can learn so much about quality teaching in 4 weeks?
I had an intuitive answer, but I needed someone else to say it out loud today, for me to believe it. Over the lunch break, I had a talk with one of the interns here, Lynda. Lynda is an IT manager from the UK who, after working multi-million dollar projects, comes down to Guatemala and works as a volunteer intern at the school for 6 months or more. Its quite a contrast. This is her third time back to Guatemala and we talked about some of the things we had learned about teaching, ourselves, and this group of kids. During our conversation, she said something that I hear many of these teachers saying, "Well, I don't know anything about teaching, but..." and then proceed to tell me what she does (which shows a definite intuitive understanding of what good teaching is).
I told her that I was curious about her statement and how impressed I am with how quickly people rise to the occasion and find very successful (and sound) pedagogical strategies.
Her answer was quick. She said, "I think it's a heart thing. If you REALLY want to teach these kids, you'll do anything to find something that works."
I couldn't agree more. It completely aligned with what I saw in Karen's experience. You could tell she loved the kids, was engaged in this program, and wanted nothing more than to find things that would interest her kids and teach them successfully. Perhaps her lack of "teaching knowledge" was an asset. Because her perceived lack of experience and pedagogical knowledge, she felt free to try anything to be successful and knew she had to work hard to do it. If all of our students came out of our program with this disposition, we'd be happy.
This is a big question, how is it possible for people to intuitively teach with success? In this project, it is easy to just concentrate on teaching. All of our meals are taken care of, we don't have to drive anywhere, don't have to mow any lawns, clean the house, walk the dog, etc. You just get up in the morning, have your prepared breakfast, walk to the bus stop, get in the van, go to school, teach, come back home, plan a little, eat, and go to bed. The immediate distractions of home, do not interrupt us here.
Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts and questions about this topic and hope to have more in-depth conversations with other volunteers while I'm here.
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