Cultural exchange is a very important value for our school. “A Wider World View @DHS” is a broad program encouraging and nurturing intercultural understanding, school exchanges and online connectivity, using tools like Adobe Connect. Our most recent guests from India – Raghav, Parth, Aryan, Vasudha, Anjali, Vritika, Aishwarya, Miss Tanu and Miss Kajal – greatly […]
Cultural exchange is a very important value for the school I serve. “A Wider World View” is encouraged through hosting guests, especially from our region of Asia, as well as travelling overseas. This year we have students and educators from Indonesia, Korea and India involved in exchange projects. This week the Australia–India BRIDGE School Partnerships Project flowered […]
Sonia Chhabra, Headmistress at Bal Bharati Public School in New Delhi, is my exchange partner and made her home an open, warm and friendly place for me to live happily these last two weeks. Her husband Rohit and two sons, Siddant and Shaurya, are intelligent, creative men who shared their knowledge and ideas about life […]
“Travel is still the most intense mode of learning.” Kevin Kelly There’s many experiences I wish all students could have as part of their schooling. Going on overseas exchange, or hosting a visitor, is high on my list of absolutely life-changing events. Our school promotes this notion of ‘a wider world view’ by encouraging travel and […]
Our school runs a program – A Wider World View – that encourages students and staff to participate in exchanges and homestays. Currently 17 students and 3 teachers are enjoying Italy, particularly Perugia, in Umbria for a two week Roman holiday. Umbria, I am embarrassed to say, is not a region in Italy that I […]
Our exchange to Seowon High School, our sister school in The Republic of Korea, has been an absolutely superb, exciting and positive experience for the students, staff and parents who made the journey during the school holidays. For the last five years our school’s Wider World View @DHS program has encouraged students and staff to […]
A comment – as I negotiated customs at Sydney Airport with a large party of students on their way to visit our sister school in Korea – keeps swirling round in my mind. The official scanning bags engaged me in small-talk asking where we were headed. When I explained our excursion was to Korea to […]
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to […]
My time at Viborg Katedralskole is coming to an end in a few days, which saddens me greatly. The liberal Danish ethos towards education and the general willingness of the students to engage with learning and life has been a joy to experience. The staff are very collegial. I have enjoyed their company and appreciated the professional encouragement […]
Last year I wrote a unit of work, after my travels in Shanghai, that I would like to share with you. It is written for NSW syllabuses but it may be of some interest to any teacher interested in travel, Asia, teaching visual literacy, social media or organising a student trip overseas. Here’s the PDF […]
Mrs Ding, a community leader, invited our group to visit Cao Yang neighourhood for a day last week. This suburb is about 20km NW of downtown Shanghai and was established in the early 1950s. There are about 95 000 residents and they are served by a dozen primary and high schools, as well as a technical institute, hospital and a […]
Australian students with a Chinese background have long been respected in NSW schools for their diligence and conscientious attitudes towards learning and school. After my first experience of China, 12 days in the exciting metropolis of Shanghai, I can understand more completely why these students are excelling in our schools. To say that the Chinese […]
Shanghai has exceeded, my already very high expectations, over the last week – it is a great city and, as you can see from the featured photo of Nanjing Road, very paradoxical! I expected to update my blog daily but quite frankly, have been having too much fun and very little time on my laptop, […]
I have been lucky enough to gain a NSW DET scholarship to vist China, as part of the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program (NALSSP), next school holidays. Excuse the ‘outcome speak’ but, so you can help me out, this Teacher Education Visit (TEV) to Shanghai aims to: enhance NSW DET teachers’ knowledge and […]
Opportunities for professional growth and renewal are plentiful, if you work as an educator but rarely does one have the kind of opening to a new world that has presented itself recently. Carsten Søndergaard and I are exchanging our jobs for a term. Carsten is a Pædagogisk Inspektor at Viborg Katedralskole, establish in 1060, in, of […]