(Top, left to right): Yurie, Chiho, Toshi (Bottom, left to right): Megumi, Ami

May 11, 2009 – Five education students from Hokkaido are all a little wiser about Canadian ways of teaching, thanks to the Faculty of Education.

 “Ami, Toshi, Yurie, Megumi and Chiho have all spent a month with us, touring several of our schools and learning more about our ways of teaching,” says Gavin Peat, instructor and program facilitator with the faculty’s Division of Teacher Preparation.

 “Apparently each of them enjoyed the experience so much that not one of them wanted to go home.”

The students took part in one of the faculty’s well-established exchange programs. Established in the early 1990s by UofC Education’s Dr. Richard Hirabayashi, the program every year invites five Japanese students to spent a month visiting Calgary schools in March, then sends five second-year Master of Teaching (MT) students in May to Hokkaido for a reciprocal experience. Visiting students are billeted with host families who entertain them on weekends and acquaint them with city public transportation.

This year, the Japanese students toured Calgary’s Rundle Elementary School, the Calgary Science School, John Ware Junior High and the Alternative High School.

 “Everyone enjoyed the tours, but they were most impressed with Alternative High,” says Peat. Alternative High is a highly personalized and informal school for academically capable students who have not met with success in a regular high school learning environment.

 “They were particularly surprised by the fact that the Alternative students, many of whom had been street kids, were now happily working in a school where they felt they truly belonged. They were extremely courteous to the Hokkaido students, helping to show them around and welcoming them to an award ceremony.

 “In fact, our visitors were so moved by the experience that later, they all wept together about it – except for Toshi (the group’s lone male member). Most of them felt it was a shame Japan wasn’t more forgiving of its more ‘independent’ students such that it would support alternative schools like this one.”

At the Calgary Science School, the visiting Education students made cultural presentations to Grade 8 students on Japanese calligraphy, origami and Chinese characters in the Japanese alphabet. Their visit to Rundle Elementary was of particular interest to Megumi (“I’m very interested in teaching elementary education,”) and the group as a whole expressed surprise at the school’s broadly multicultural student body.

Back at UofC, the visitors spent time with Angela Rokne’s case class building free-standing models from books, paper cups, straws and marshmallows; in an MT class, “they learned to line dance and in return, taught us their ‘Squid Dance’,” says Peat.

One of the group’s musical students was billeted with members of the Calgary Civic Symphony; the two parents invited Ami to play her trumpet at their February 22 concert (“I played Superman and Raiders of the Lost Ark,” she notes).

On weekends, the students saw Drumheller and the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Banff and various shopping malls across the city. “And no one got lost in any significant way,” says the faculty’s Dr. Pat Tarr, who also works with the group.

 “The students have told us many times that they find Canadians to be very helpful and kind people. I’d say it was a successful tour, all the way around.”

For more information about this and other Education exchange programs, contact Gavin Peat at peat@ucalgary.ca.