First impressions on a school exchange to Singapore

What did I know about Singapore before taking eight students there on a homestay exchange in our partner school in February, 2010? Scattered facts only, really. I was aware that the tiny city state had almost the same population as Finland, so I was expecting to be overwhelmed by crowds. The teachers I had got to know over the years of AEC-NET collaboration had struck me as highly efficient, hard-working and dedicated to their mission. Having visited Malaysia a couple of times, I had been told that the ethnic make-up of Singapore was quite similar, with the exception of English being the official language of Singapore, and Singapore not being a muslim state. Further, during a stop-over at Changi airport on my way to Indonesia, I had been impressed by the shiny, airy, well organised and extremely clean environment. No wonder, Changi was voted as the world's best airport this year! And of course, I had heard about the 'no chewing gum' law, and been warned about their strict fining culture by the local Finnish Embassy. Oh, and I had heard of the famous Singapore sling coctail at Raffles hotel.

On the first morning at Pioneer Secondary School, we were greeted by the 4 main languages of Singapore right at the school gate: Malay, Chinese, Tamil and the official language of education, English. Each student also attends lessons in their home language, so most of the students are at least bilingual, which is quite impressive.

Each school day starts in the school yard, with a tangible community spirit, often missing in our school. All students, dressed in their white uniforms, in orderly lines, watch the flags go up, sing the national anthem and say the pledge. The first morning, there was also a welcoming ceremony for us foreign visitors.

After this routine, there is a quiet reading session for half an hour, during which all the students sit on the ground, and read something in English. Teachers go round checking that everybody has the right texts, and if not, they are sent to stand and be ashamed at the back of the yard. Obedience, impeccable, gracious behaviour, knowing your role and place - at first glance, at least these struck me as driving values in this school.

Our students really stood out like sore thumbs in the orderly white crowd. In fact, they had considerable trouble seeing anything positive in school dress codes, which are almost non-existent in our school. Girls having to tie their hair back, no flip-flops, no revealing spagetti straps - it was finally beginning to dawn on them that this really was not a holiday in an exotic destination but a working trip to represent our country and to respect the culture of the host school. An excellent lesson for our students coming from an individualistic, relatively free and easy, express yourself and your individuality, do as you wish school culture.

Not only were the school values implied by the daily routines but they were visibly present all around the school. You have already seen the vision of the school - Passionate learners, gracious citizens - in previous photos. Behind the podium you can read the school mission: We provide opportunities for students to develop their potential and be competent, caring and responsible individuals who will contribute effectively to society.

The underlying school values were high up on another wall around the main school yard.

And even above the main entrance there were words to indicate what the role of this school is in society.

I liked this idea of prominent, transparent missions and values. It's in great contrast to our system, where similar words may be written in a curriculum that dusts away in a folder that nobody ever looks at. The place and role of education in our society is largely taken for granted, and only implicitly present all the time. It might not be a bad idea to try to crystallize and publicly announce certain ideals to the school community and society at large. Interestingly, our students thought that having so many written slogans around the school was rather propagandist brainwashing, and they wondered if anyone ever truly looked at them or read them. Once again, two very diffirent cultural practices collided.

The concept of learning environments is big in Finland at the moment. Our Ministry of Education is currently generously funding projects to develop and diversify the learning environment. In Pioneer Secondary, I observed many great initiatives that seemed to be a natural part of Singapore schools without any separate projects. For example, all the schools we visited had a green, open plan - for obvious climatic reasons.

As we are closed inside the school building to keep warm half of the year, being able to sit outside all through the year, seemed a lovely idea. We realized very soon, though, why Singaporeans would rather escape into air-conditioned buildings in a constantly hot and humid climate.

Singapore schools seemed to be very target driven, from top to bottom, and all their achievements were proudly displayed around the school.

Instilling the community spirit was also enhanced by allowing students to contribute to their physical school environment.

I was truly impressed by all this student team effort, and convinced that it really improves the students'

ownership of their learning environment.

One more thing that caught my attention, like in many other foreign schools before, was the involvement of parents in the school community. In a Finnish high school (for 16-19-year-olds) parents have no role whatsoever, other than coming to school once a year for a formal information session where they are, to a large extent, just passive recipients listening to the teachers' lectures. In Pioneer Secondary, we saw some parents at school every day, they came along to some of our excursions, and some of them ran their food stalls in the school cafeteria. This mother's noodles were the favourites for many of us.

Naturally, our students were surprised by the school lunctime routines, which were so different from our standard, one-course, free of charge school meals. Having a choice of all the different ethnic cuisines really appealed to them, although they did realize that the variety and choice came at a price.

In hindsight, now, I feel that despite the major differences highlighted in this post, there were surprisingly many similarities in the working cultures of Singaporean and Finnish schools. But those will be the topic of another blog post.

I miss the buzzing, lively, pastel-coloured Pioneer community that opened the door to Singaporean culture to us and welcomed us so heart-warmingly. In a week, you can only scratch the surface, so I am looking forward to another visit to this fascinating city state - to find the time to try the Singapore sling, too, which I missed during this first visit. While waiting for that chance, I can reminisce by looking at this beautiful batik painting by one of the Pioneer students, which was presented to us, and now brings colour to the wall of our school hallway.

Hovering between languages and cultures

The title of this post comes from one of my comments to Silvia Tolisano's recent post in her Langwitches blog. The post really resonated with me and made me think of where I exactly fit in in this global educational conversation - if anywhere?

I've been blogging on and off for a little over two years. I started out of curiosity, and the desire to get familiar with social media and the related tools before introducing any of them to my students. I reckoned that to have any credibility in integrating technology in my course plans, I should at least have some digital footprint myself. When it comes to using technology, my mantra is learning by doing, and getting motivated on a needs' basis. At least it has worked that way for me. I have kept learning new things to meet a particular need - find better and more suitable platforms for online intercultural school projects, for example.

Blogging urged me to read edubloggers around the world to learn from the more experienced. I am so grateful to all the marvellous teachers whose wisdom I have had the chance of benefiting from online. In these two years I have learned far more than I would have done in any in-service or other training course, simply because I have been able to find the guidance and answers exactly the moment I needed them. In addition, my net surfing has serendipitously led me to many unexpected wells of inspiration, too.

All this time, though, I have been rather hesitant about commenting on other people's blogs, nor have my ramblings in this blog attracted many comments from others. Two sides of the same coin, I'm sure. It is active participation and reciprocity that are called for in an attempt to build a lasting online learning network. Mine is still heavily under construction. Even though, over the years, I have managed to form quite a wide network of foreign colleagues through organising face-to-face student exchanges, unfortunately, hardly any of these teachers happen to be very active online, so I am starting my online PLN from scratch.

One of my problems all along has been the need to keep explaining my particular circumstances and background in a marginal (from an English-speaking perspective), rather unknown nation and culture. I keep wondering how many cues are totally misinterpreted in global educational discussions, due to linguistic and cultural differences. Speaking the lingua franca English easily creates a false sense of understanding, but as many nationally/culturally/linguistically-bound concepts and ideas are thrown in, are people really talking about the same issues?

Let me give you an example. Just recently I have been looking for people to follow on Twitter. People might mention 'my yr10 students' or 'K3 students'- which, for me, don't automatically give any indication of the type of school these students go to or how old they might be. If I was to take part in that conversation, I would find it essential to first explain how schools are organised in my country to make my viewpoint clear. This would probably make me sound like a hopelessly uninteresting babbler. Should it be taken for granted then that, if you want to participate in educational dialogue in English, you should also familiarize yourself with the school systems of the major English-speaking nations in the world? Possibly. But still, where would I fit in in that discussion, if the English-speaking world didn't see any relevance in where I was coming from? I'm even beginning to doubt whether I, a non-native English teacher, had better not butt in on native-English teachers' discussions, no matter how interesting they might appear.

On second thoughts, even when teachers from different cultures simply talk about 'students', they are not really talking the same language, are they? I am referring to my 16-19-year-old students here in my country, in a school system that is based on almost solely state schooling (ie. no private school system), learning English as a foreign language and speaking a structurally totally different mother tongue that, to a considerable extent, affects their learning and my teaching practices, plus living in a culture where TV programmes and films are not dubbed but subtitled, which means that they are exposed to authentic English and American every day. Plus add to all that the average number of English classes a week and the fact that I can only teach each group for 7 weeks, before the students are reshuffled again, because in our senior high school system they make their own timetables and change from teacher to teacher five times a school year... You see, here I go again! If colleagues, say from Germany or South Korea, talk to me about 'students' it becomes a drastically different word and concept.

Why did I start blogging in English then? It was a natural choice for me for two clear reasons: first, I am an English teacher and have always wanted to meet colleagues from around the world and second, at home I live in a bicultural Finnish-British family, and often feel slightly outside the monocultural, monolingual Finnish contexts - a feeling of 'lost in translation' almost anywhere, which, apart from liking the film by the same name very much, led to the name of my blog, too. And yes, a third reason - most of online communication is in English anyway.

However, just as Sylvia Tolisano, in the above-mentioned post, I am acutely aware of the 'missing voices'. I have tried to find my voice, but what if it keeps falling on deaf ears? It is not only a linguist barrier, but also a cultural one. The largely western, Anglo-American blogo- and twittersphere sometimes excludes not only those who struggle with English, but also many others who are linguistically fairly competent in English, but just fall outside that particular cultural sphere.

Photo: sunflowers by georgia.g on Flickr