I'm principal teacher in a small rural primary school, Muthill Primary, in Scotland and we've been partnered with a rural school in Ghana for 20 years now. The school is Juliet Johnstone School in New Tafo in eastern Ghana.
We only have 60 children at Muthill, three composite classes, but, although Juliet Johnstone is a rural school in Ghana, it's a bigger school. They have a nursery, a primary and a junior high school; we tend to work with the primary.
It was through a friend of a friend that I found out about this school and contacted them and they were really keen to have me come and visit.
And that was really the beginning of the story. It evolved from there. It was great because the children really bought into it and so did the communities in both Ghana and in Scotland.
When I first started, I wasn't sure what would happen, but I was excited to try. And I think because the community and the children were so excited about it in both schools, that made it worthwhile doing.
Getting started
At the very beginning of our partnership, we were led by the British Council as to what projects we worked on. We tended to look at cultural learning. For example, we did traditional stories and we looked at traditional playground games.
My class were learning to write instructions and directions and this was a real good piece of assessment. If you're writing clear directions and they [the pupils in Ghana] understand them and can play the games, then you've done well. So it provides a real context for children to learn through. It provides an audience for them, a very real audience, and it kind of raises the game a little bit because they know they're doing something for a real reason.
The benefits
The benefits for the pupils are short term and long term. Short term it gives them a relevant and exciting context to learn through, they learn with the Ghanaian pupils and it's just very real. It makes it motivating and exciting for the children and they can see a real reason for learning about the issues that we're looking at.
The benefits that you see very early on are the children's motivation and engagement. I have witnessed boys and girls who are quite switched off or not as engaged as others in the class suddenly come to life. And that's lovely to see. I think it might be because they realise this is real people and real lives that we're talking about. The children often don't even realise that what they're doing is work because it doesn't feel like work, it feels more like fun, but there is a whole heap of learning, incidental and explicit, that can go on when you're working with a partner school.
It deepens and widens their learning because they're not just thinking through a UK lens, but they're actually seeing things through an African lens as well. And that really does widen their perspective and makes them think more globally about issues.
Long-term, I think it has positive impacts on pupils as well. I've had young people come and tell me when they meet me in the street: you know, what we learned about Ghana gave me the confidence and the motivation to travel. They don't forget what they've learned about in primary school. It does have impact on them because it's real people, real lives that they're interacting with.
For the pupils in Ghana, I think it's the same benefits because they are extremely motivated working with the ‘obrunis’, the white people. We're so far away from one another, but connecting with one another.
