Reflections on my first 'I Am A Country' Week (1): what were we trying to achieve?

Last week we ran our 'I Am A Country' exercise at my school from Monday to Saturday. Each of our students was assigned a country for the week, and given a lapel badge on which to display the name and/or flag of their country. They were encouraged to fully identify with that country 24/7, to try to imagine the perspective of someone from that country in any situation they found themselves in. Heads of Houses and Coach Mentors (recent graduates who live in the boarding houses, supervising a set of mini-dormitories and acting as big brothers - or sisters - to a small group of students), in particular, were asked to help promote full engagement in the activity. Class teachers were asked to throw out occasional random questions to test students' research on their given countries in the context of their own academic discipline - Who are the most famous writers/artists/sportsmen/scientists from your country? etc. - and to address students, at least sometimes, by the name of their country - What does Sierra Leone think about this?

The activity was conceived of as a genuinely "inter-disciplinary" programme of study, with every subject easily able to create one or two lessons, or at least one or two short activities within a lesson, in keeping with the theme, while English and Geography, and perhaps also History and Drama, would devote themselves to it full time. Lasting just a single week, and coming early in our first semester, I didn't think it would cause too much of a clash with the unfortunate imperative of meeting other curriculum objectives for the year. And since our school follows the Middle Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate Organization, which has a key focus on the promotion of "international-mindedness" in its students, this seemed to be an initiative that everyone might reasonably prioritize for this one week.

But above all, I hoped it would be fun for the students - that they would enter into the spirit of it, fool around with the idea... perhaps start jokily quizzing each other about matters such as how common smartphones were in 'their' country, or teasing each other about whether the Muslim countries ought to be abstaining from pork for the week (hard to do in a Chinese school, where it is a central feature on the menu almost every day!).

A key ulterior motive underlying this initiative (aside from the positive learning experiences that the activity might engender of itself), unstated but not so very hidden or surprising, was to try to nurture more potential interest and enthusiasm amongst our students for extra-curricular activities such as Model United Nations (MUN) and the Global Issues Network (GIN). It is a particular challenge for our school - isolating a small-ish group of 14- and 15-year-olds from the rest of their school community in Hong Kong - that activities like these, which depend so heavily on training, mentoring, and organization by senior students, are unlikely to prosper here. Moreover, these activities tend to have rather limited appeal to teenagers: in our parent school - and in most schools of its ilk - only a relative handful of students become regularly involved in them. The 'I Am A Country' Week was planned as an experiment in whether it might be possible to inspire a much higher proportion of interest and participation in these activities within our very small cohort of students.



PS  It also provided the inspiration for the first of the 'Thought for the Week' quotations that I've begun writing on my board each week - a line commonly attributed to the great film director Stanley Kubrick, though I haven't been able to find a source for it.