Making a genuine difference

Can the concept of Sharing our Humanity be realized through school activities, and how much can we really change in the world? The IB community gives its views

Doing your share

While considering how we can best share our humanity, I heard my four-year-old daughter, Zoe, singing: “Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere, clean up, clean up, do your share.”  The answer was given to me in kindergarten.

Rooted in the ‘clean up’ song is a core value cultivated in schools around the world. During my nine years teaching in overseas schools, I’ve seen the belief in ‘doing your share’ widen. Many, if not most, schools now have service hours built into their curriculum requirements. IB programmes have CAS and community service initiatives, while other schools have similar service projects.

While I understand the objectives and support the development of empathetic and caring global citizens, I also find it ironic that we ‘force’ students into community service labour. In January, I accompanied a group of students from Academia Cotopaxi in Quito, Ecuador, to La Casa Victoria, a restoration project to convert a 130-year-old house into a community building. As we travelled, I thought about what we were doing. Is this ‘bus stop charity’? Are students who give up a day of school – rather than, say, one of their days off from school – truly giving their time?

“It’s about working for other people, working together to make it better.”

I asked volunteer and project treasurer Bill Swenson what school groups could contribute to the project: “It provides us with 120 working hours in one day − that’s two weeks of work for us.” So perhaps sharing is sharing, no matter whose time it is on. I can see with my own eyes that Casa Victoria has come a long way. That good old-fashioned kindergarten belief in ‘doing your share’ really does benefit the community.

Academia Cotopaxi has a successful service learning programme. In addition to community service site visits, the school organizes an annual Habitat for Humanity project in Tosagua, Ecuador. It’s not only the ‘needy’ who benefit, but the already advantaged, who need to learn how to share – and I can think of no more inspiring way to do so than through action and concrete outcomes.

As one of our senior students said during the memorable visit to Casa Victoria: “It’s about working for other people, working together to make it better.”

The great outdoors

My experience during 20 years of activity trips with IB students – whether hiking, kayaking, rock-climbing or skiing – is that challenging outdoor settings provide real opportunities for shared-humanity learning experiences.

From the start, it is clear that cooperation is a pragmatic necessity and that individuals simply cannot operate independently. Those who struggle require assistance, and when conditions are unpleasant, discomfort is shared. We learn that we can all be resourceful at different moments.

Outdoor situations encourage and enable us to share ourselves and our resources more readily, and with less embarrassment, than in our daily lives. Challenging experiences promote moments of felt commonality across boundaries of language, gender, nation, race and ethnicity. A hand offered to warm another’s conveys and reinforces perceptions of commonality more deeply than many a crafted argument. In such contexts, the category distinctions that divide us by promoting perceptions of difference dwindle into their true insignificance. 

A hand offered to warm another’s conveys and reinforces perceptions of commonality more deeply than many a crafted argument.

I recently joined students for a ‘snow, cave and ski’ expedition in the mountains of western Norway as part of our Project-Based Learning Week. After hiking up the slopes on skis, we sat in the snow cave we had excavated the day before, watching as western Saharan student Mustafa carefully prepared some Saharawi tea (above). As we passed round glasses of the strong, sweet beverage, we exchanged Islamic, Christian and secular perspectives on traditional rituals and talked about the long-standing refugee situation of western Sahara camps in Algeria. This cultural sharing was made all the more special by our location. It is such simple but rich experiences that provide the most memorable reminders of common humanity.

A discovery of self first

Only when students have gained a sense of who they are as individuals can they begin to distinguish not only the differences between people, but the underlying similarities. When it comes to self-discovery, the middle years can be particularly important. Research shows that adolescents are risk-takers. By offering our students choices, we encourage them to take the educational risks that will help them discover their strengths and their potential to contribute to the wider community.

School activities provide the starting point for involvement in the local and global communities. Our school newspaper gives updates on student-led clubs and meetings, introduces visiting students from other countries and covers topics related to student environmental action. In what can seem an overwhelmingly large public school, after-school clubs bring together smaller groups of students for shared purposes. Our Knitting for the Kneedy and Green Team groups combine club membership with community outreach projects. Knitters create scarves and colourful blankets for donation, while Green Team students prepare gardening beds, sow plants, harvest herbs for the cafeteria and collect litter for recycling.

“How can people sustain themselves when times get tough?”

In addition to helping the Austin community with projects such as canned food drives, when a disaster occurs elsewhere in the world, the school springs into action. In art classes, students make ‘care cans’ or  ‘care bags,’ which are filled with donated toiletries. When a group fleeing the Burmese civil war recently arrived in the area, we invited the children to play basketball and have lunch with some of our students. Parents provided food and, as the Burmese were leaving, each received a brightly coloured care bag filled with useful travel items. In return, they showed us the beauty of shared humanity with their smiles and laughter on the basketball court.

“How can people sustain themselves when times get tough?” is a question that recurs in our syllabus. We hope our students come to understand that their individual strengths, skills and interests can provide that sustenance. Middle school is the time for discovering these elements of themselves – and discovering the international community and the humanity we all share.

Seeing with many eyes

We share our humanity every day in school by formulating opinions, asking questions and bettering our understanding of key personal and world issues. We challenge our intellect by exploring new ways of expressing ourselves, while debating who we are, who we want to be and – most importantly – how to get there. Do we want to be a person who accepts differences or one who honours them?
A person who helps others follow a pre-decided course of action, or one who helps them become independent in choice-making? A person who sees things through two eyes or who sees through many? Once we start to answer these questions, we have a better chance of sharing our humanity in a positive way.

“One thing you need to remember is that it’s not about you,”

Our humanity is the one thing that sets us apart from other living beings. Our ability to reflect and think outside ourselves, and our immediate community, allows us to evaluate our global climate and become proactive in bettering, maintaining and restoring it. As humans, we have the potential to do the most good, but also inflict the most harm.

I was recently given the opportunity to travel to Cambodia and house-build with the Tabitha organization. If one moment stands out from the experience, it’s a piece of advice given to us in our orientation before entering a village. “One thing you need to remember is that it’s not about you,” Janne Ritskes, founder of Tabitha, told us. It was a lightbulb moment for me.

Sharing our humanity isn’t just about me or you, or even my class or my country. It is about everyone in our world. It is having knowledge and understanding that there is always more knowledge to be sought. It is also respecting the differences of other countries, cultures and perspectives and knowing that not everything has to be the same everywhere.

What a boring world that would be.