I returned virtually to Ghana this year in the pen pal exchange I initiated with my 7th and 8th grade students. My colleague who teaches history focused on the history of chocolate at the start of the year. This opened students' eyes to the problematic labor laws that exist in the areas that are responsible for producing the world's chocolate in countries such as Mexico, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana. To accompany their study of chocolate, my students read The Bitter Side of Sweet by Tara Sullivan, a fictional story about an enslaved Malian child who works on a cacao farm in the Ivory Coast. However, I didn't want my students' takeaway about West Africa to simply be that there is a great deal of poverty and lax child labor laws that allow for slavery to occur. To expand their understanding, students participated in a culture study by looking at videos and readings written by locals and cultural experts from either Ghana, Mali, the Ivory Coast, or Burkina Faso.
To supplement and reinforce that cultural connection, I established a relationship with a private school teacher in Ghana using the #Gridpals feature on the website Flipgrid. For those who don't know, Flipgrid is a popular teaching tool to allow for students to share their voices in a video format to respond to teacher prompts. #Gridpals is a feature of Flipgrid in which teachers can connect with each other across the world and form these virtual connections. We created a "grid," which is the equivalent of a classroom and acted as "co-pilots" of that class, which allowed my American and his Ghanaian classes to have access to the same prompt and each others' videos. The teacher from Ghana and I worked to pair our students one to one based on common interests (as much as possible), and some of my students doubled up given that our class sizes were quite different. For his roughly 30+ student class, I had 22 total (which normally is split between two classes of 11 students).
Given that English is one of Ghana's official languages, this made the exchange of information much easier in the group. With countries like Mali or the Ivory Coast, my students would have needed to know French or one of the many African languages spoken in the region. My students were so excited to record videos of themselves sharing their interests and ask questions about their Ghanaian ePals. They got to be silly and authentic in a classroom setting in a way that they don't always get to be. Asking about the weather in Ghana seemed to be the most popular question. Do I sense a science learning opportunity here? Yes! If only I had capitalized on it sooner. I know as I continue to do more of these pen pal exchanges, I will get better at making them progressively more interdisciplinary.
After an introductory video, students were asked to discuss what life at school is like. It's always hard to sound excited about something that is a standard routine, so I needed to encourage them to share things like their schedule, information about the projects they've been doing, and extracurricular activities. My students went into varying degrees of depth. On the Ghanaian end, students faced the challenge of needing to share a lot of information in a brief amount of time since they were all using their teacher's phone to record the video. As a result, many shared similar information, but one thing that stood out to my students is just how early the Ghanaian scholars needed to arrive at school - 6:30 in the morning. They do this to clean the school in preparation for the day. It is clear that instilling a value of respect for your space is critical in this particular school.
After this second video, it was not long before we moved to distance learning. In the case of my school, we had a virtual learning schedule that students and teachers were expected to follow. For the Ghanaian students and teachers, the situation is much more tricky. While some students were very responsive to teacher emails to continue the connection with my school, others were harder to reach. This unprecedented response to the pandemic has hit the school hard, and their school year goes until August. We continued the exchange to a lesser degree using ePals through which students wrote letters to each other rather than sending videos. As distance learning continues to unfold, both of us as fellow educators continue to reach out to one another in an attempt to keep the connection alive.
