IB World

www.ibo.org/ibworld

The magazine of the International Baccalaureate

£6 US$12 Free to IB World Schools

September 2012 | Issue 66

The International Education issue

+

Rethinking global The teachers applying a radical new philosophy to international-mindedness Inside the IBCC A pilot school shows the IB’s fourth programme in action

The world’s greatest teacher

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed on how he put 9.2 million students through school

international education

cover story

10 • COVER STORY: SIR FAZLE HASAN ABED

The Bangladeshi entrepreneur on how he changed education in his home country for good

14 • EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG…

How schools have rethought what international really means

“Don’t teach them to think like you.”

18 • GLOBAL CITIZENS

Teachers explain how to deliver international-mindedness

20 • OPINIONS

Four different perspectives on international education

Teach them to think for themselves” Picture credit Andrew Shaylor Photography:

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed’s mantra sounds simple.

But delivering it in 37,000 threadbare Bangladeshi schools is miraculous, as Robert Jeffery discovers

10 IBWorld

S

ir Fazle Hasan Abed doesn’t exactly bound into the room. At 76, he can be forgiven for taking his time. But with a cup of tea on its way, he’s very quickly holding forth with considerable vim on his favourite subject: education, and in this case the IB Diploma Programme, which his daughter Tamara studied in India. “A great programme,” he says, settling into his seat in the UK regional office of his global charity, BRAC (www.brac.net), where he has jetted in to catch up on operations.

Coming from the 76-year-old Bangladeshi entrepreneur and humanitarian, it’s quite an endorsement. Sir Fazle can reasonably claim to have educated more students than anybody else in the world, with 9.28 million graduates from BRAC’s 37,452 schools in Bangladesh alone, as well as its educational initiatives in Haiti, South Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

BRAC is, by most measures, the largest NGO in the world, with a staff of more than 120,000, yet it shuns celebrity endorsements, preferring to concentrate on delivering real aid on the ground, including microfinance, agriculture and health initiatives.

The organization began life in 1972, when Sir Fazle – then a British-educated high-flier in oil giant Shell’s Pakistan operations – left his job to help disaster relief efforts in his war-ravaged homeland. In 1985, having already introduced microcredit initiatives that helped hundreds of thousands, BRAC began building and taking over schools across Bangladesh as part of its mission to lift the country out of poverty, providing teaching for students who had dropped out of the state sector, or those too poor or remotely located to find a local school.

Along the way, it revolutionized the way education is organized and delivered across the developing world (test results show the schools regularly outperform the state sector). As IB World considers international education, we asked Sir Fazle for his perspective on how more effective schooling can help solve global problems.

Why did you decide to make education so central to BRAC’s mission?

Education is the most important development intervention that one can make to a human life. I have worked on IBWorld 11

international education

the schools’ stories THE ISOLATED SCHOOL

MGIS students relax and get to know a French exchange visitor

What does global mean?

How can schools from diverse backgrounds teach a global curriculum? Four institutions explain how they make international education work 18 IBWorld

THE HOMOGENOUS SCHOOL

Mahatma Gandhi International School Ahmedabad, India

Mahatma Gandhi International School (MGIS) may have a predominantly Indian intake, but for the staff and students, identity is about more than the country you come from. “For us, internationalism means diversity,” explains IB Diploma Programme Coordinator Ravinder Kaur. “Not just in terms of cultures, but in backgrounds and socio-economic class.”

MGIS offers an IB education to a mix of students, including those from very poor backgrounds (20 per cent of students are on full scholarships), pupils from India’s many

Crêpes on the menu at the MGIS cafeteria

sub-communities and a small but rising number from other countries.

As the first IB World School in the Gujarat region, MGIS has worked hard to embed international-mindedness, but it hasn’t always been easy. “Parents resisted initially,” recalls Ravinder. Workshops and engagement sessions helped to change attitudes.

“Internationalism should not be an isolated activity,” says Ravinder. “It needs to be integrated into everything.” That includes lunchtime; students run the cafeteria and explore different cuisines from across India and the globe. Mother tongue support classes in Indian dialects and other languages also keep diversity high on the agenda, while international speakers engage students on global issues. Exchanges with schools in France and Australia mean students who might not have travelled abroad before get to experience different cultures first-hand.

Such a focus on internationalmindedness has led to many students choosing to study outside India, while a deep love for the school draws them back. Many return to teach during the holidays, and some stay for good: three members of staff are ex-students. All of which creates a circle of global thinking that gets bigger each year.

THE NEW SCHOOL

UWC Red Cross Nordic Flekke, Norway

John F. Kennedy School Maryland, USA

In the frozen wastelands of the shores of Flekke on the Western coast of Norway sits perhaps the most geographically isolated IB World School. Not that it stops UWC Red Cross Nordic (UWCRCN) celebrating the global at every opportunity.

As a United World College, UWCRCN works to use education as a force for peace.

Given its remote location, the school’s residential students from more than 80 countries have no choice but to get along.

“We want to celebrate aspects of where everyone is from, but we are mindful of the limitations of nationalism,” says Alistair Robertson, Director of Education. As UWCRCN is fully funded by the state, the leadership team are able to strategically choose students from all over the world, creating a multicultural melting pot. As in all UWC schools, dormitories house students from five different countries.

“That’s where much of the learning happens,” says Alistair, “when you wake up and there’s someone praying to Mecca.”

Some students have strong religious views, which can create issues around subjects like sexism or homosexuality.

“Respect is culturally relative,” says Alistair.

“We have to be mindful within these limits.” Running sessions on controversial topics, offering conflict management programmes and promoting informed discussion helps UWCRCN overcome these issues.

By the end of their experience, some students have formed unlikely friendships.

“A Chinese girl and a Tibetan girl have become so close I think they will be friends for life,” says Rector John Lawrenson. “And after meeting Palestinian students, Israeli students become more understanding about people who they had previously seen as enemies.”

“It’s been an exciting ride,” says Stacey Warham, IB Diploma Programme Coordinator at the newly IB-authorized John F. Kennedy High School. Since becoming an IB World School, it’s been able to take international-mindedness to the next level.

“The kids have become more outwardlooking,” says Stacey. “The seniors recently organized a Cherry Blossom festival celebrating Japanese culture. That wouldn’t have happened without the IB.” Staff have been keen to involve global thinking in all areas of the curriculum. “It is more natural to some subject areas than others,” admits Stacey. “Foreign language teachers have had no problem, but it’s

“Students often hear a single narrative of the Middle East.We get them to think from a wider perspective” harder to figure out what internationalmindedness looks like in the maths classroom. But we soon realized that maths is an international language, one of the few things all people can understand without sharing a linguistic vocabulary.”

In Theory of Knowledge, students are looking at how the world views the USA. “We’re not the centre of the universe,” says Stacey. “We need to look at not only how we see the world, but how the world sees us.”

JFK’s journey to global school is just beginning. “I want our students to go further than cultural exploration,” says Stacey. “I want them to think about conflicts and beliefs, taking things to the next level.”

Cultural differences are explored openly at UWCRCN

JFK students try out Japanese brush painting

THE POLITICALLY CALLY AWARE AW A WARE WA SCHOOL

Ahliyyah School for Girls Amman, Jordan

Conflict in the Middle East has created talking points across the world. But what is it like to be a student in the region, trying to look outwards? For the girls at Ahliyyah School for Girls (ASG) in Jordan, there’s no way of escaping international-mindedness, according to Head of Global Issues and Humanities Kariman Mango.

“Our students, whether they like it or not, are involved in what’s going on in the world,” she says. “They are bombarded with information and politicized from a young age. The issue for us is: how do we channel that and turn it into a positive, rather than stressful, experience?”

At ASG, the main focus is on empowering students, making them aware of major events. Using IB courses like the Global Issues programme and being involved in the Model UN help to give a more balanced perspective. Healthy debate is encouraged.

“Students are too often exposed to a single narrative of what’s going on in the region,” says Kariman, “When it comes to the Arab-Israeli crisis, for example, we have students whose grandfathers remember having to leave Palestine. That creates a onesided view. Our biggest problem is getting them to think from a wider perspective. In the Middle East, it’s often not okay to have different perspectives, but we want to give them the opportunity to debate.”

ASG has a largely homogenous Jordanian student body, which can make drawing out different viewpoints tricky. “It is a challenge to get them out of the habit of thinking as a group,” admits Kariman. “They share so much. But I don’t think we need more international students to be international.”

Frequent video exchanges with a school in the USA helps bring other parts of the world to Jordan. “As teenagers, I think they’re more international than we are,” says Kariman. “They’re totally connected online.

Middle Eastern teenagers tend to have one foot in the east and one in the west. And we’ve found that wherever they’re from, young people can understand each other.”

IBWorld 19

international education providing primary, secondary and tertiary education to millions of Bangladeshi children who wouldn’t otherwise have access to education. Our schools are particularly aimed at poor children and they are one-teacher schools – one teacher, 30 students in one room in a village.

We look for children who are eight and above who have never been to school, or have dropped out of school, and we give them a second chance. They are like the prairie schools in the US in the old days, except those were multi-grade schools whereas we teach a single grade. We finish the five-year primary curriculum in four years. We have set up nearly 40,000 schools with 1.2 million children at any one time.

Many of our graduates go on to secondary school. Many turn out so well that they go on to university – some are now in China studying medicine. They would otherwise have been illiterate. Even those children who don’t go any further than primary education do not remain illiterate. They are able to operate as functional individuals in Bangladeshi

cover story society. I believe the quality of education we provide is superior to what they would have received in the state system How do you begin organizing almost 40,000 schools into an effective system?

Every child is monitored. Every 10-15 schools we have a supervisor with a motorcycle who visits each school twice a week to check whether the teachers are teaching in the right way, whether the children are learning, whether they are absent. If a child isn’t coming to school, it often means the parents want them to do work at home – we try to get the parents to understand the children need to go to school.

We decided early on that our schools would give preference to girls, because boys get a preferential education in our society. Every BRAC village school has to be made up of 70% girls – as a result, Bangladesh is the only country in the world where more girls get an education than boys. But we wanted them to not only get an education, but to get a quality education

AC Grayling explains international education Philosopher AC Grayling (left) is one of the world’s foremost thinkers.

He has written more than 20 best-selling books that seek to bring sense to the world around us, and is Master of the New College of the Humanities (www.nchum.org) in London.

I don’t think international education has failed just because we still experience conflict. The concept has only been around for half a century but we’ve had conflict for the whole of human existence. The more people travel, the more they study in international institutions, the more likely they are to see the differences between people as reducible.

International education is essential for our growth. We already live in a globalized economy, but the economic life of any individual is only 8-10 hours in a day. People are also travellers, parents and neighbours, and those roles are actually more important. Education impacts on all of them. The IB, by the way, is an excellent way of educating – instead of forcing people into a specialism it offers them a view across the whole spectrum. It asks people to understand something about the social aspects of life.

Conflict comes from religious, cultural or political differences. I recently did some work with the Human Rights Council in Geneva and also at the CERN laboratories in the same city.

You couldn’t have a greater contrast between all

12 IBWorld

the different nationalities working together on something objective at CERN, while those same nationalities are all at each other’s throats at the Human Rights Council. To me, it shows that knowledge can bring people together even when cultural differences drive them apart.

At best, national identity is an unhelpful concept. Cultural identity is much more useful: within each national boundary there will be different cultures and that doesn’t have to divide people. It could bring them together.

Remember, too, that although our media is full of conflict, that’s because conflict is news. In every city, town and village there are millions of acts of kindness every day, and that’s the bigger story. Our societies put a lot of effort into teaching people about their differences, but young people are very quick to get over that.

The two biggest differences between people are political and religious ideology. If you came together and studied a truly international curriculum including sciences and humanities together – so you knew, for example, that scientists had been influenced by poets – you would find a great deal of commonality. When the IB teaches about religion and politics, I know it does it in context.

Technology is a mixed blessing in education.

It gives people a way to get started. It means countries can leapfrog educational infrastructure.

But it has a limit. All the basics can be delivered online, but when you’re talking about the highest levels of education the things of value are caught, not taught, and that’s all about interaction.

– so child-centred teaching became our hallmark.

How do you make education studentcentred without a huge professional development budget?

We look for women aged 20-30 with a number of years of education, mostly housewives. We don’t want young, unmarried girls because we think they will be married off to a different village. We want somebody who will complete at least one cycle of teaching. They are given two weeks of basic learning to explain what child-centred learning means – it’s not about you teaching, it’s about what the child wants to learn.

Each day’s lessons are worked out in advance, and no homework is given except work the children can complete themselves – many of them come from families who are illiterate and can’t help out. One day a month the teachers come to one of our centres, with their supervisors, for refresher courses. The teachers feel a sense of pride, and they can get a bit competitive, which is good – whose children are learning better?

Why is so much education in the developing world didactic?

In third world countries, most efforts go into getting more children into school rather than looking at the quality of education. My grandfather was minister of education in the government of Bengal in Calcutta, in 1941.

He always said his job had nothing to do with education. It was the schools, colleges and universities he had to worry about – which one should get which grant, which one is doing well in exam tables – not the quality of learning.

We discouraged rote learning right from the beginning. You’re just teaching someone to memorize, and you don’t need to come to school for that. We try and get children to think. At the end of the first year, when they are just learning to form sentences, we give them an essay: to write about their mother.

They’re not told what to write. None of the children’s essays will be the same, of course, because they are thinking about their own mother. We always tell teachers: “Don’t teach them to think like you. Teach them to think for themselves.”

What was the hardest part of building your network of schools?

The teachers themselves, changing their ideas about what good teaching means.

They have themselves been taught in a rote learning system. They have to learn how to grade children who think for themselves.

Most rote learning systems give you more marks if you write exactly like the textbook rather than constructing your own sentence that might not be quite as elegant.

We also had to get the teachers working harder. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to teach

Girls at a BRAC development centre in South Sudan, one of many bold educational initiatives from the NGO

by rote. You don’t have to use your judgement. But as soon as they all write those different sentences, it’s hard work, and a lot of people don’t want to do that.

Are you optimistic about the potential of technology to transform education?

Technology will eventually be available to all societies and I hope it will make education much more democratic – available to every child, rather than just the best children in the best schools. It is quite cheap to provide education via the internet: even in the remotest parts of Bangladesh they will ultimately have access to websites.

I hope that within the next 10-15 years, most of the world will have access to digital information, so our job will be to develop materials for teachers and students. In the poorest countries, not every child will have access to a computer – there might only be one per classroom – but that will happen within the next generation or two.

Are you in favour of private providers entering the market for education, particularly in the developing world?

If you look at history, the state has only provided education to its citizens for around 130 years. Before that, it used to be the role of the church. It may be that ultimately education becomes something that is provided privately rather than by the state.

In the United States, the Republican Party wants to get rid of the Department of Education altogether.

I personally believe the state should be responsible for educating all its citizens. In some of the Nordic countries they do this very well and they hardly have any private education. But not all societies are like Sweden or Norway, of course. Each country will have to decide its own priorities. There is scope for large providers to come into the market and provide education at a cost, which is happening quite a lot in Africa and parts of Asia.

“In third world countries, most efforts go into getting children into school, not the quality of education” Are you worried about Western governments cutting aid to programmes such as yours?

We don’t expect foreign aid to rise over the longer term. In some of the education programmes we are currently running free of charge, we will have to start charging a small amount to cover some of our costs.

But in Bangladesh, we are currently

spending 2.2% of national GDP on education and that has to go up, so we are putting pressure on our own politicians to provide greater resources. We shouldn’t be dependent on donor money to educate our own citizens.

What aspect of your work gives you the greatest satisfaction?

One of the wonderful things about education is that it gives the very poorest families something to aspire to, and people understand that now in a way they didn’t in the old days. Education is perceived as the only way to get out of poverty in places like India and Bangladesh, and that is good for those societies. In India, they will make a lot of sacrifices to educate their children because they value education. I don’t think the poorest 10% of people in the USA think the same way.

What can teachers and students in IB World Schools do to help fight inequality across the world?

If they could somehow – perhaps through technology – make some of the materials and the best teaching they have available to children throughout the world, that would be the most wonderful thing. MIT now makes every lecture it does available via the internet. When you are self-assured, you can share everything you have with the world.

IBWorld 13

alumna

Randa Abdel-Fattah

Breaking the mould The graduate turned author who wants to challenge our assumptions about identity

R

anda Abdel-Fattah was in sixth grade when she wrote her first novel.

“It was a rip-off of Roald Dahl’s Matilda,” she says. “I even traced Quentin Blake’s illustrations. My teacher bound it for me and let me read it to the class. It was a moment I’ll never forget.”

Now aged 32, Randa hasn’t been able to shake the writing bug. Her first novel Does My Head Look Big In This? was published in 2005. A semiautobiographical look at a 17-year-old AustralianPalestinian Muslim girl struggling to get to grips with her identity, the book was based on a draft she wrote at 15.

Since then, Randa has had five other stories for children published, and is just about to release her first book for adults.

She has won national book awards and speaks to around 2,000 young people every year about human rights issues.

And she works part-time as a litigation lawyer in Sydney.

Action Images/Matthew Childs Livepic

We need your help IB World welcomes ideas, suggestions and pictures from educators around the world.

Email editor@ibo.org and tell us what you’d like to see in the magazine. Here are some pointers to get you started: January 2013 Collaboration Students are expected to work together to achieve results – and increasingly, schools

30 IBWorld

Randa Abdel-Fattah juggles legal work with her writing career – a “challenging” experience she hopes to continue

“I write when and where I can,” she says. “Inspiration comes at random moments.

I have a long commute to work – the train is a wonderful place to hear unique expressions.

Relationships play out there.”

It’s a jam-packed life, and one that studying the IB Diploma Programme at the Australian International Academy prepared her well for. “I was in the first cohort of IB students,” she says.

“There were three of us ‘guinea pigs’. I’ve always been up for a challenge and the international flavour of the IB really connected with my personality.

“I keep rejection letters I got from publishers aged 15, to show students” We live in a global village now.

We need to understand the world in a global context, not a national one.”

At school, she was a “proud nerd” who worked hard to get the grades for law school: “I remember feeling sick about how much there was to learn, but also excited. It wasn’t just about passing exams – I felt like I was growing.”

Her experience as a student has fed into her novels, which look at issues of multiculturalism, identity and belonging. “I’m trying to shake up what we think of as mainstream,” she explains.

“Just because a writer isn’t white doesn’t mean they are exotic or a deviation from the norm. But I don’t preach. I want to provoke thought and make people laugh.

“Nothing has given me more pleasure than writing from a young person’s perspective. It’s an indulgent way to celebrate your memories and be a child again.You never feel as intensely again as you do as a teenager.”

As well as writing and practicing law, Randa regularly visits schools to talk to students about issues like asylum seekers and conflict in the Middle East.

“I try and use my platform as a writer to draw attention to these issues,” she says. “I want to provide an alternative view to what people are exposed to in the media, which tends to be one-dimensional caricatures.”

With so many commitments, does she ever find time to relax?

She admits to being “obsessed” with BBC period dramas, watching them with her husband and two daughters. “It goes without saying that my children will study the IB, hopefully from PYP onwards,” she says. “It sets you on a lifelong path of inquiry.”

Randa is happy to continue her rather frantic double life. “If you want to do exciting things in life, it’s going to be challenging.

I keep rejection letters that I got from publishers when I was 15; I show them to students to prove that if you want something, you’ve got to keep trying.”

Join Randa and fellow alumni in the IB alumni network, by visiting the IB alumni network blog at blogs.ibo.org/alumni, where you can learn more about this growing community and ways to get involved.

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK… are following suit by opening themselves up to the wider world through a variety of partnerships. We want to hear about formal and informal collaborations with other schools and external organizations – what makes them work, what happens when they go wrong and what benefits they bring for teachers and students.

Plus, we want your views on the best

online collaborative tools, across all channels, and how you’re using them in the classroom.

Deadline: 3 October 2012 Future issues Areas of interest include: l Schools tackling online learning in forward-thinking ways

l Teachers with unusual or unexpected extracurricular interests and achievements l Innovative sustainability initiatives l The challenges of providing access to education in Africa To discuss your ideas, please email editor@ibo.org.