When Elizabeth, an English teacher at Sir Samuel Baker in Northern Uganda, visited the United States as part of the Schools for Schools (S4S) Reciprocal Teacher Exchange program, she was surprised – and a little amused – by some of the misconceptions she encountered.
“The students had a lot of questions in their minds; they thought we had a lot of animals and bushes all over the place,” Elizabeth laughs. “I told them, ‘no, it’s organized in Uganda, the wild animals are in a park.’”
Last summer, teachers from the United States and Canada visited Gulu and taught alongside Ugandan teachers like Elizabeth. In January, Elizabeth and four other Ugandan teachers went to teach in U.S. classrooms. The Teacher Exchange program was started in 2007 to build the teaching capacity of Ugandan and international teachers and to provide an platform for sharing of ideas and culture.
While teaching in her San Francisco host classroom, Elizabeth observed her American counterpart engaging the students with ‘warm-ups’ before the class started. She liked the idea of a short, interactive group assignment to get students thinking right away, and has brought the practice back to her own classroom.
Transitioning back into her classroom in Uganda, Elizabeth found that her students also had misconceptions about the United States.
“Ugandan students think that the U.S. is all skyscrapers and concrete,” Elizabeth explains. In fact, Elizabeth was impressed to see the tree conservation efforts taking place in the United States while visiting one of the redwood parks in California. She makes an effort to teach lessons on conservation, worried that similar efforts are not being made to save the trees in Uganda that are being used for timber. “Conservation creates business,” she adds.
Elizabeth says that her time in the United States has inspired her to be innovative and open-minded, something she wants to pass on to her students. To encourage cross-cultural understanding, Elizabeth is having her students write letters to the class she taught in San Francisco. So far, several rounds of letters have been exchanged.
“As we meet people, we learn a lot. You should not be satisfied that you know enough,” Elizabeth said. Or, as the Acholi phrase goes, “never think your mother is the best cook.”
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