Well, it
went. It happened. Which, given how much else was going on in our little school at the time, was not far short of a miracle. Things have been frenetic for us in these first few weeks. The metaphor our Director has become fondest of using is that
"We're building the plane as we're taking off." And -
amazingly - we are now airborne... sort of, just about.
But it was very difficult - foolhardy! - to attempt to launch something novel and ambitious like the
'I Am A Country' Week in the midst of such barely controlled chaos, and I have to admit that most of the high hopes for the activity that I outlined in that earlier post a couple of days ago went unrealised.
One key tension we struggled to address adequately involved the question of timing. I wanted to do it as early in the term as possible, both to maximise the potential benefits flowing from the activity through the rest of the year in, for example, kick-starting things like
MUN or
GIN groups at the school, and to avoid being seen as 'disruptive' by subject teachers who would soon have settled into a normal pattern of teaching their regular curriculum. However, that gave us very little lead time to set the thing up.
I had originally been aiming to run it in our Week 3 - which required that students' research and preparation would have to occur during Week 2, and country allocation would have to be completed by the end of Week 1. In fact, our first week was so chock-full of other business that we soon realised we'd have to bump 'I Am A Country' back until at least Week 4. And my colleague handling the country allocations fell behind schedule on that, not starting on the process until the end of Week 2, and not finally getting it finished until the end of Week 3 - which didn't allow the students much in the way of preparation time (although most of them had known which countries they would represent by the middle of the week; and I gave my English classes an extra 'library period' on the Saturday to do research).
I also failed to sufficiently carry along my colleagues - who were preoccupied with their own curriculum concerns at this hectic time and, while applauding the ideals of this exercise, did little or nothing to participate in it within their subjects.
The use of country name-tags fizzled a bit as well. It was surprisingly difficult to get hold of suitable tags in the first place, and I had to settle for quite small ones (which didn't really provide room to display a country's flag as well as the name, and couldn't be read from any great distance); it was difficult to distribute them (another last-minute rush, as the stationery supplier had only delivered them at the end of our Week 3; in China, "48-hour delivery" often seems to take 6 or 7 days!); and it was next-to-impossible to get the kids to wear them regularly (again, the non-participation of other subject teachers was a major problem here; students easily got into the habit of thinking that this was an activity for the English classroom only, and would only put their country-tags on for me).
Nor, unfortunately, are we likely to see the hoped-for pay-off in terms of promoting students' engagement in international affairs - such as through the formation of MUN or GIN clubs, or debating or human rights clubs, or finding expression in student journalism or other forms of student-led publicity campaigns. I think the potential may have been there in some of the students immediately after the 'I Am A Country' activities had finished, but it ebbs away quickly and will, I fear, soon have disappeared. There's so much going on here at the moment, so many programmed activities being thrust on the children, that we're really not leaving them any free time to develop self-led, self-motivated extra-curricular activities. We will try to return to the idea of launching an MUN Club or a Human Rights Club later in the semester, but by then the impact of this 'I Am A Country' experiment is likely to have been forgotten by most.
The distribution of countries also ended up being somewhat non-ideal. I had wanted to exclude the G20, to give the exercise a focus on the developing world; but my colleague handling the allocation only left out the 'big 5', the UN Security Council permanent members.* He also decided to give the students a free choice of countries, contrary to my inclinations. My feeling is that this may work well enough when we have a full cohort of students here in a few years' time: almost every country in the world can then be covered, and many students will have to accept country allocations that would not have been one of their top choices. With only 57 students this year, there were large gaps in our geographic coverage, and it became a little tricky to run some of the activities I'd planned where students would discuss a global problem in regional groups (I had to resort to using categories such as 'small nations', 'island nations', and 'rich nations', rather than relying simply on geographical proximity). Moreover, while there were undoubtedly some benefits in terms of engagement and personal knowledge where students chose a country they had visited or lived in, I felt that on the whole I would have preferred to move them away from the comfortable and familiar, to force them to research a place that was completely alien and unknown to them. The most interesting observations tended to come from students who had been unlucky enough to be assigned a low-ranked choice of country or had just randomly plumped for somewhere like... Rwanda, Nigeria, or Serbia.
Despite all these challenges and disappointments, quite a lot of good work was generated by the activity. In my English classes we had general introductions of the chosen country, mixing social, political, and economic background with a few more quirky 'fun facts' (and a supplementary homework challenge to find one of the country's distinctive dishes); an oral presentation of 'A day in the life' of a typical citizen; a similarly themed piece of imaginative writing describing someone's life in the country; and some round-table discussions on regional and global issues.
And my Film classes spent a couple of lessons introducing short films they'd found that they felt were interestingly representative of 'their' country. Most chose blandly pretty montages produced by national tourist boards, but a few came up with more unusual and revealing fare - film documentaries, TV programmes, or satirical skits.
I think there is a lot of potential in this activity, and I'd like to try to make it into an annual event for us in this school. Next year we will do it better. With a little more lead time (and without the bothersome distractions of trying to fly a half-built plane!), I think I should be able to get more colleagues on board with the idea. We need to try and plan and timetable each subject's contribution to the week before the start of term, promote the activity more heavily to students a little in advance, and make more effective use of our Coach Mentors to encourage the students to regard it as a 24/7 activity rather than something that is confined to the classroom. If we can manage that, I believe 'I Am A Country' Week could produce some profound and lasting impacts.
* I wanted to avoid any explicit connection between this activity and MUN. The discussion exercises were entirely free form, not modelled on UN procedure, and avoiding topics that have been high on the Security Council agenda. I was worried that even the decision to exclude the five permanent members of the Security Council might call the United Nations too prominently to mind. One of my objects in this exercise was to give students a taste of - and perhaps a taste for - MUN by stealth. MUN demands intensive background research by its participants, and the complex procedural rules that it follows can be rather intimidating, alienating to the uninitiated. Hence, it tends to have rather limited appeal to students of this age, and is typically the preserve of a nerdish minority. In our small community, such a minority might be only two or three people - not nearly enough to support an active MUN group. So, I was hoping that a week of consciousness-raising about global issues, and a week of imaginatively entering into the national perspective of an unfamiliar country, might help to make MUN seem accessible and intriguing to a much wider spectrum of students. We have yet to test how successful the inaugural 'I Am A Country' Week may have been in this regard.
