Opportunities with a global flavour - Scotch College

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Opportunities with a global flavour

The opportunities Scotch boys have to interact with overseas communities nurture minds receptive to change and adaptable to difference.

principal2011

Around the start of Term 2, with marble season in full swing along Callantina Road, I attended an assembly in the Junior School where our Head, Jon Abbott, spoke (excellently, I might add) to the boys about the need for fair play and respect for the feelings and possessions of others. Visualising the sort of games and interactions likely to be taking place about the Junior School play areas, my mind flashed to my educational studies and Piaget’s Marbles where the ‘Great Observer’ considered the place of rules in children’s games.

Piaget proposed three main stages of awareness of rules for children: the absence of any consciousness; their place as immanent in origin and immutable in being; and, finally, consciousness of rules as the product of mutual agreement among those involved. In short, when we are very young we can’t handle rules in games, then we think the rules define everything about the game and can’t be changed, until finally, as adolescents, the realisation that it is we who set, and can change, the rules by common agreement. And so it is in the world beyond onion skins, cats’ eyes and clearies, where we want boys to grow to awareness that rules and laws exist because we allow them to exist, and simple adherence to them does not provide absolution from responsibility.

Whilst rules, laws and ‘facts’ provide a skeleton, it is, perhaps, context which delivers the flesh and is at least as likely to determine interpretation, opinion and outcome. Many factors contribute to context, but not least, the quirks, foibles and principles of us all. To ignore context and seek change solely through altering rules, passing laws and stacking up ‘facts’, I believe, ransoms us to short-termism, conformity and, ultimately, mediocrity. Such an approach in education might seem attractively expedient, but without an understanding and shifting of context, its very convenience can carry the roots of ultimate failure. Lasting, meaningful change in education needs to take place at the level of individuals, at critical periods when minds are most receptive, in those moments which exist between our thoughts: moments of risk and creativity, where all inputs are mixed and melded and all can be made possible. This is far harder to achieve, not least because of the challenge it poses to comfort, but the rewards are there for all:

This is the word tightrope. Now imagine
a man, inching across it in the space
between our thoughts. He holds our breath.

There is no word net.

You want him to fall, don’t you?
I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.
The word applause is written all over him.

Talent, Carol Ann Duffy

It is the challenge of the teacher to maintain this ‘moment’ for as long as possible and to propagate an environment in which it readily and freely occurs. A key lever is exposure to, and awareness of, difference, and the thoughts, stories and experiences of other people and their cultures. What they deem to be important; what they feel constitutes a successful life; the role of the individual within a family and community; what has driven them to create; the nature of their big, unresolved questions; what they find funny; where they see threats and danger. Such stimuli feed the moment between thoughts.

The opportunities we provide for Scotch boys to interact with communities beyond our boundaries and borders nurture minds receptive to change and adaptable to difference. Over the mid-year break, in addition to the challenges provided through a Year 10 Outdoor Leadership camp amongst the snow, fog and rain of Howqua and a Year 9 football tour to Adelaide, Scotch boys had their minds stretched with a range of diverse experiences reaching across the international setting. Athletes were in camp amongst Olympic hopefuls and local schoolchildren in Iten, Kenya, while our badminton players took on New Zealand’s finest. Crossing the UK in search of runs and wickets, our cricketers were soon submersed in the conversations and distractions which dominate when rain stops play. On the River Thames, our rowers tasted another slice of English summer festivity at the Henley Regatta where they reached the semi-finals of the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup.

Away from the catalyst of sport, the Eurasian Debating Competition took Scotch boys to Istanbul; classical journeys were pursued in Greece and Turkey; and kayaks were employed to explore the remote landscape and communities of Prince William Sound, Alaska. In what is certainly one of the more defining experiences for our boys, a group once again worked, through Global Village, building homes for local communities in Cambodia. Closer to home, boys from our Indigenous Partnership Programme shared time, thoughts and dreams with communities in Arnhem Land.

We are increasingly involving boys in opportunities with a global flavour where the newness and intensity of each experience reaches over a lifetime. In addition to the growing diet of international trips and tours, we continue to increase the number of overseas exchanges for boys. These provide an ‘out of comfort zone’ experience to sharpen the senses within the familiarity of a School setting, whilst bringing boys from across the globe to enrich our School.

Bringing current world issues to the heart of our curriculum, this year we added the Global Perspectives course, run through University of Cambridge International Examinations, to our Year 10 suite of electives. As part of the TiltShift programme formed through the Raffles Institute our boys have worked in Singapore with students from across the world, seeking local solutions to global issues. A number of boys continue to be involved in similar themes through United Nations Youth Victoria, and the United Nations Youth National Conference. Not only does debating take boys physically overseas, through computer software, debaters from Years 8 to 12 regularly engage in live contests with students from across the continents.

It was in such global spirit that, over the mid-year break, Scotch hosted the 19th Annual Conference of the International Boys’ Schools Coalition. For four days our School became home to some 480 delegates and 70 partners from some of the world’s leading boys’ schools. Under the theme Unearthing Creativity, keynote speakers from across education joined with teachers from member schools to deliver the fruits of current research and the best of world practice. It was, I believe, a highly successful gathering of like, and unlike, minds, the impact of which will continue to ripple through the lives of generations of Scotch boys.

A diverse landscape of engagement forms a context of openness and adaptability, keeping heads high and minds alert. It enables teachers to work in the moment between thoughts to create opportunities, develop interests and bring about improvement and growth. Such a landscape nurtures curiosity, independence and responsibility. It opens minds and stirs young people to embrace creativity and difference rather than live in fear of it. It inspires free, critical thought and a desire to robustly challenge each law, rule and ‘fact’. To do otherwise, I would contend, is to remain in the world of Junior School marbles.

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Global Perspectives students with Ms Suzette Boyd and MS Ranj Samrai from the Global Foundation.