Partnerships to support global competencies in Egypt: Reciprocity in action

I've spent the past week in Egypt building the partnership that Laurier has with an international school in Cairo. It has been a tremendous week.

We've been able to formalize an agreement to support professional development for teachers at the school, engage in shared research, and foster opportunities for our Laurier Bachelor of Education students to have teaching placements at the school.

Meeting with school administrators.

A strong focus of our meetings has been on reciprocity.

Examples of this were three meetings I had yesterday with teachers and administrators at the school.

In the first meeting, I met a very creative teacher who is using technology to support global connections for her students. She engages them in a curriculum that includes developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes that reflect global citizenship (e.g., seeking to understand other cultures, collaboration skills, appreciation for diversity). We are going to work together to see how we might expose Canadian students and those in teacher education programs to the work she does ... thus supporting the knowledge of her students about Canada and supporting our Canadian students' knowledge about Egypt.

Two of the teachers I have worked with this year who are championing peer coaching at the school.

In the second meeting, I met with the English department coordinator. Dr. Zainab has a PhD in which she focused on neo-colonial literature of Africa (wow!) and who wants to develop her research skills. We mapped out a research project that will examine how literature that reflects a global perspective can support the global competencies of her students. I will also benefit from this project as it will provide a comparative perspective which might inform a similar project in Canada.

Dr. Zainab and I with a concept map of our new research project.

Finally, the day was concluded with a wonderful meal with the Egyptian administrative team. In my experience, I have found that food is the "great equalizer". It is around food that people learn to trust each other and to seek to better understand "the other." We enjoyed Egyptian delicacies and I was able to present them each with gifts of jars of Canadian apple butter!

Sharing tea together ... a perfect way to support relationship-building.

Opportunities such as this are tremendous reminders of the incredible privilege we have to work as educators across (and sometimes despite) borders. I remain deeply committed to fostering global perspectives for teachers - whether in Canada or Egypt or elsewhere - so that we might work toward building the global competencies of our students, building peaceful civil society together.

Our world needs more of this.