Ghana: Interview with Kankam on Pen Pal Exchanges

Kankam Mensah Felix

Now that you've heard my perspective on my exchange with the classroom in Ghana, I'd like to share that of the Ghanaian teacher, Kankam Mensah Felix. I had the opportunity to speak with him about his experience as a facilitator of global pen pal exchanges and the impact it has had on him and his students. He works at the Lillian and Abraham Memorial Academy situated in a suburb of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. The suburb is known as Mallam. His role in the school is three-fold: he is the international relations officer, librarian, and he also teaches the Ghanaian language of Asante Twi. Read on to learn more about what Kankam is doing to improve education for his students and connect with other teachers. 

Note: If you'd like to listen/watch the interview, click here: https://youtu.be/acXH9fUzoJI

Q: Can you share how English and other languages are taught at your school?

A: Thank you so much for the great question. In Ghana, English happens to be, let's say, our first language. So students in Ghana start learning English and French. But French is not mostly taught in more schools. English is taught from nursery to grade 9 and to the university level. It's treated the same way as mathematics, social studies, and science in our classrooms. So depending upon the timetables or the schedule for the day, a class can have five periods in a week. For instance, on Monday, students will always have an English teacher going into the class.

So we have the three languages: English, French, and Ghanaian languages. The Ghanaian languages are Asante Twi and Ga. Everyone is expected to learn English and French. When it comes to Asante Twi, that is for the people who are natives of the Asante Empire or Asante Kingdom. These are the people from Kumasi. The Ga’s from greater Accra speak the Ga Language. Accra happens to be a mixed culture. We happen to have people migrating to Accra, so we have different people from all parts of Ghana. So we give them these languages to select from their own choice.

Q: Have you ever done a pen pal exchange before with your students? If so, what was that experience like? If not, what made you decide to start this year?

A: Thank you so much. When I came to the school, I introduced the pen pal exchange to my students because I used to work with the British Council way back in Kumasi, and one of my motivations to establish this programming in the school was to give students the exposure to learn what was happening outside of the classroom and outside our country. I tried to search for schools around the world and we would do a collaborative project together. We joined an organization called Yo-Ghana (exchanges for transformation). With this organization, the students were able to connect with schools in Oregon, United States.Then we also tried to talk to schools in France, in the UK, in Argentina, in Uganda, in the United States. This experience tried to broaden the scope of both the teachers that were part of the project and the students to have a sense of togetherness - a sense of feeling that "OK, we are learning here in Ghana, we have something similar with what others are learning, around the world." It gave my students, myself, and the teachers on the platform the confidence level that we are not doing something wrong. We are also doing something that the whole world is doing. It boosted our students' level of writing skills, speaking skills because there were times when we would do video recordings of some presentations that had so much impact on our students.

Q: What were your students’ initial reactions to starting the pen pal exchange with my class in the US?

A: They were so happy because one of the biggest challenges for us two years ago was access to computers and the internet. But with the help of the Helping Africa Foundation and the Friends of Yamoransa, we were able to get a 35-seater computer lab. But still we have challenges with internet connectivity. So what I mostly do is a paper exchange. My students would write, then I would scan them, and send them to the recipient teacher. They do the same thing, back and forth. So our experience with your students was so exciting! And then we were not lucky when COVID-19 struck, and we had to go back home. Then communicating with students became a challenge for me and them. But we are eager that when COVID-19 goes down, we will be able to continue our connection with you and your students.

M: I can imagine that this would make things much more difficult.

Q: So since this was a little different that they were recording Flipgrid videos rather than writing letters, how did you prepare them for the Flipgrid videos?

A: One of the things I always told them, especially when it comes to the video, is that the whole world is going to watch you. Whatever you are going to say should be very important. You have to stick to the instructions that the teacher or instructor gives. Don't go outside the box. Try to be perfect. Give the best answer you can give. Have the confidence, and speak and share your ideas because your voice means a lot to us in the world.

Before introducing Flipgrid to them, I shared a story of Malala with them. This is a young girl who tried to advocate for girls' education. We saw how powerful she was, how strong she was standing in front of delegates of awards and all sorts of platforms. With that video of Malala, it gave them the spirit to also pick up the phone to also share their messages on Flipgrid. [Note: Students in Kankam's class recorded their videos using his phone and later uploaded them to Flipgrid for my students to see.]

Q: How was ePals introduced to them? Especially since typing on a computer is very different from writing by hand.

A: We are moving away from the old, traditional way of learning to the new digital way. So one of the introductions was I told my class that we can't always use paper to write letters. The time has come where we have phones, computers, and tablets. So let's engage ourselves. We can't type as fast we can, but when we keep practicing, one day we will be typing so fast that we will be able to give our friends good information. 

My students also love the ePals platform because the teacher can moderate the incoming and outgoing messages unlike the normal email services that we can use. ePals happens to be one of the places my students love so much. I think that the biggest challenge for us is when they go to the house, most of them don't have access to computers. Then those who also have computers, don't have access to the internet. That is the challenge in communication for us on ePals and other things that we do. 

Q: Did you hear any feedback from students about this exchange before they left the school? If so, what did they say?

A: Yes. Most of my students loved writing and making friends and sharing ideas. Those students gave me the motivation to do the things that I do. One student even told me, "We are going to miss our friends." I said, "OK. We are going to lose them with a distance, but we are not going to lose our connection with them. So I'm going to try to build my connection with a teacher." And I know that when all things work perfect for us, we will be able to connect back to them again. 

M: Yeah, I really would like to keep the exchange going. 

Q: Were students’ families involved in helping students write the letters at all?

A: Yes. Not all of them, but a few of them whose experiences are mostly interested in what I do and they are educated, and they want their kids to get exposure. Some parents don't give so much interest. Like in the United States maybe you have to ask permission from the parents to do stuff. Over here we just do things like the normal type like bring the program to the school. The headmaster or the board agrees to it. We hardly seek the consent of parents to do anything we do here in Ghana. 

M: Yes, that's very different here in the US. If we take students on a field trip or plan to make any changes, parents always need to know. It's interesting that you don't do that there.

K: It's something that is good that I do. I try to design a template that whenever I'm doing a program, I tell the students, "Give it to your parents for them to be aware of the things we are doing in the school." It's something that I learned from my colleagues, especially my colleagues in the United States of America. 

M: That's why I think these exchanges are so useful because you take the best from different cultures in order to improve yourself and your school.

Q: Given that the pandemic cut our time in the school building short, what are you doing to keep students engaged in this exchange from home?

A: It's so sad that my school has not engaged our students during this pandemic yet. But one thing that I proposed to the administrators of our school is the use of Zoom, or Google Classroom, or Edmodo, and then Flipgrid that we can use these platforms to engage our students. But the challenge comes with the lack of the tools, that is the computers, tablet, phone, and access to the internet, so we are still trying to figure out [what to do]. There are some schools that are of higher grade like, I don't know, the graduate schools that are doing that. But in my school we are not engaging the students now.

One of the things that a few teachers, like myself, do is we call some of the parents just to check on how their kids are doing, if they are reading on their own. But to engage them on a learning platform, we are not doing that yet.

M: I wonder if it's possible that when the number of coronavirus cases goes down, if it would be possible for teachers to meet with small groups of students outside somewhere, and see each other, and you can teach them that way in smaller classes around different parts of Mallam or different parts of Accra.

K: Yes, one key thing is the government doesn't instruct us that we should go back to school. And if you start doing any sort of engagement with students, and a student gets COVID-19, we will be held responsible. So we are still waiting for the COVID-19 cases to drop down. One thing that I've designed that when we go back to the classroom, the first months I am going to introduce all of these platforms to my school. That is very important that we know how to use all of these platforms so that we can engage with them. That is one thing I believe that when we go back to the classroom, as teachers, we need to do - to introduce our students to the virtual platforms so that in case we experience any COVID again, or any pandemic again, we are familiar with the tools and we can use them. Even though we will have some little challenge with internet connectivity, even if they have the resources, the tablets or internet, how to use the platforms will be a challenge for most of them. We need to continue to give education on how to use these virtual platforms as well.

 

Q: What have you learned personally as a teacher about this process? Would you do this again? If so, how might you organize it differently? 

A: Thank you so much. I am always happy to connect with other educators around the world, and I'm always learning. I'm going to share this message with you: I met these two great educators. One in Australia called Joyce Bronwyn, who is the founder of Education Elevators. She has been so helpful to me, and she introduced me to a lot of educational platforms that I used to learn with her and her students. And then there's another educator from Tenafly, New Jersey from the United States called Mark Hyman. This teacher introduced me to what we call "global citizenship." So these are some great educators. I've met a lot of great educators for the past years. Gonzalo in Argentina, I've met Fabula in Argentina, I've met Michael in the US, and yourself! I've met you. So connecting with teachers, as I always say, I learn different tools of teaching, different methods of teaching, different skills of teaching, different approaches of teaching, and sometimes even personal issues. We sometimes share personal issues about things going on in our families as educators. So I'm always going to do this unless maybe I stop teaching, but I love teaching, so I'm not going to stop teaching. I'm going to continue this program because it helps me expand my level of connectivity with other people around the world.

Q: Let's say we continue this exchange next year, what might we do differently to make sure that the connection stays strong?

A: One thing that I'm going to do from my end is to make it a habit. Then I'm going to tell my school because it's like a "me and the students" program, but not a school program, so the children don't add more seriousness to it. But if it's a school program and it is part of the school, they are going to add more importance to it. That's what I'm going to do when we come back so that even though we have challenges of technology, they will give us access to the computer lab every week or every time that we need to write our messages so that the communication will keep back and forth so that there wouldn't be so much of a delay in replying back to you and other friends around the world. 

M: That's a good idea. I'm also doing this with my students. It's not a school program for us either, so it might be good for me to think about doing that to make it more a part of the culture of the school to do this sort of learning. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. You really helped me think more about the importance of making these connections.

Note: The names you see are the real names of the teacher and school, and are used with permission.

Ghana: Beyond the Chocolate

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.

A Ghanaian Exchange

As a teacher, I always strive to expand my students’ thinking about the world we live in. While working at a residential school for high school students with severe social, emotional, and behavioral disabilities, I discovered a website called ePals where teachers can create profiles and connect with other teachers from all over the globe. You can read other teachers’ profiles, which include a description of the school they work in, the age of their students, how long they’ve been teaching, and what languages they speak.

A teacher from Bolgatanga, Ghana expressed an interest in connecting his classroom with mine. He is a technology teacher who seeks to show his students the positive role technology can play. My goal was to excite my students about the opportunity to practice their social skills with new people outside of our small school, and develop an understanding of a new culture. I messaged him through ePals and eventually we exchanged Skype information. The teacher and I video chatted and discussed the plan for how we were going to bridge the gap between our two classrooms and countries. We shared some information about each other and I spoke to my students about the possibility of this connection happening.

To prepare my students, I showed them where Ghana was on the map and gave them a little context regarding the environment there.  So often we get a singular view of Africa and I thought this would be a great opportunity to break down those stereotypes and meet real people from a country in Africa. As the Special Education Teacher, I was responsible for teaching every subject to this group of seven students. I used it as an opportunity for interdisciplinary work. For reading and writing class, we read a short story by a Ghanaian author. In history class, we read current events articles about Ghana and for science, we read a blog post from a traveler who went there and visited the region in which Bolgatanga is located (Upper East). The blog writer described a great deal about the warm climate and the technological resources available in Bolgatanga. In math, we imagined ourselves preparing for a trip to Ghana and considered all the costs that would go into making such a trip using real airfare prices and tour costs. We had to take the exchange rate into account as well: US $1 = 5.43 Ghanaian Cedis.

After a little over a month of preparing, we were finally able to set up our first Skype call. My students huddled around the computer and eagerly introduced themselves to the students from Ghana. They sat with their hands folded quietly awaiting for the Ghanaian students to pick up the call. We were fortunate that there is only a four hour time difference and the students there are attending a public residential school, which is common for secondary students who have passed the exam and wish to go on with their education. In fact, Ghana prides itself on having a strong education system compared to some of the surrounding countries in Western Africa.

Finally, the Bolgatanga students answered the call. They asked each other questions about their schools and the weather and what kinds of sports they play. There were moments of laughter and enthusiasm that really transformed the atmosphere in the classroom for those 40 minutes while we were talking. In the second half of the call, the students connected over music and sang songs to each other. After each song, the other group of students applauded and cheered for them! Given that the majority of my students at that school were students of color, it was special for them to meet Africans who looked like them and took an interest in them. They realized that they have quite a bit in common with each other - particularly when it comes to their musical interests. They were not being judged for being in a special school or for their work ethic, but instead, were being celebrated for their social abilities.

When meeting separately with their teacher later on over Skype, we discussed topics to cover for our next meeting and decided on music – given the strong interest the students demonstrated. Both the teacher from Ghana and I asked our respective students what their favorite songs and artists were and shared that with each other. We listened through the songs and made comments about what we thought of them. We planned to have a second meeting and had scheduled a time to do so, but unfortunately, government circumstances in Ghana prevented it. I learned much later from the teacher that students had to be sent home for a few months because of the lack of food. Given that it was a public school, the government was responsible for providing not just a quality education, but also nutritional value, and it turns out they were in debt. The leader had gotten behind on payments for the food leaving the school with no other choice. It was hard for me as an American educator to fathom such a circumstance in which students would be deprived of an education because the government couldn’t afford to feed them. I wondered if there was a way to continue the learning from home for these students. This was definitely a teachable moment for me and for my students to truly value the education we have. I imagine the students there were grateful when they were able to return to the school again.