Interview with ASEF ClassNet School Collaboration Coordinators -Mrs Juliette BENTLEY (Australia) and Mrs Maria Da SILVA (Portugal)
ASEF ClassNet Team: Maria, could you briefly tell us about the ASEF ClassNet School Collaboration you and Juliette are jointly coordinating?
Maria: The ASEF ClassNet School Collaboration that Juliette and I are currently coordinating seeks to challenge students from ASEM countries to look at the world around them through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda for 2030. We have especially focused on the topic, Gender-equitable AI and AI for Gender Equality.
One of the key aims is to inspire students to create positive change locally and globally by writing and sharing essays in blogs, creating resources on the topics, participating in community programmes, or creating digital solutions to address global issues locally. Teachers and students have been registered on the project’s Twinspace, a virtual collaboration platform that provides communication, collaboration, and editing tools, which allows participants to take an active part in its construction by adding content to it. Through its pages, you can tell the story of the project!
You can check the collaboration’s ASEF Project 2020 web site and AI website pages, as well as the Covid-19 response page to know more. It is also on the Erasmus E-Twinning platform.
ASEF ClassNet Team: What motivated both of you to take up this school collaboration project?
Juliette: I believe that it is incumbent upon us to help students view their world through a participatory lens, empowering them to be both advocates and activists. Providing students with an arena to learn from one another and to recognize that geographical distance does not preclude collaboration, is very motivational. Students can also see that they share concerns and that together, they can advocate for them.
Maria: There are a few key reasons that motivated me. Firstly, this collaboration is a continuum of the work I have been doing in implementing SDG-orientated projects to empower my students to make informed decisions and responsible actions for a more sustainable world. Secondly, the topics can be easily integrated within the subject you teach, which will allow connecting what is being taught in class with real life, giving a sense of purpose and authenticity to classroom tasks. Thirdly, the project is very flexible. It can be as limited and focused or as broad and ambitious as you like, depending on your context, experience, resources, and constraints. Fourthly, it is an honor for me to have been trusted with such a challenge to connect European and Asian schools to address significant issues that concern the SDGs.
Finally, this collaboration generates learning experiences that go beyond the classroom walls and provides non-English-speaking students with opportunities for authentic communication with an actual global audience.
ASEF ClassNet Team: How would you describe the overall involvement and engagement of the network of this school collaboration?
Maria: Due to the circumstances of the pandemic, sadly, not all participants have been active in the project. But those who continued on the project have collaborated in the construction of the Twinspace by involving their students in the writing challenges proposed in the Write the World website and the discussions held on the Flipgrids’ topics related to Sustainable Development Goals and Artificial Intelligence initiated by the coordinators. Some participants who struggle with technology have been making an effort to keep up using other ways to share their students’ work-sharing google folders for instance via email and much of this work has been embedded and curated through the website.
ASEF ClassNet Team: Could you elaborate a bit more on how the COVID-19 Pandemic affected the project? How did you overcome the challenge/challenges?
Juliette: Covid-19, as previously mentioned, has meant that we have had to pivot the project a little. With the uncertainty of school attendance, the management of providing online lessons that met the needs of our own student’s curricular challenges, and our own responses to the personal contexts we are working in, we have had to be flexible. We have needed to be self-directed and remove the expectations that students and teachers adhere to specific timelines and provide uniform responses. The project needed to recognize the needs of participants and it was this understanding that prompted the production of mindfulness activities for participants and the page of student responses to A Day in the Life of Covid-19. As participants become more accustomed to our new reality, participation may become more regular. School shutdowns and asynchronous school term times did cause difficulty but maintaining the momentum, connection, and communication as a coping mechanism for the pandemic was important. The project had to be as flexible as we as teachers and students needed to be and participants needed to feel included at whatever stage they felt most comfortable.
Maria: As I already mentioned, it led to the interruption of the project in some countries where the lockdown had a really negative impact, namely where students lack access to computers and the internet. Teachers had to find solutions to ensuring learning during these challenging times. It took time to adapt to the new remote learning system. The biggest challenge to continuing the project remotely was at each school level where the teacher would have to guide their students’ work at a distance while ensuring they all had access to learning and looking after their well-being. As coordinators, Juliette and I encouraged the other teachers to continue to involve their students in the project activities by keeping in touch through different online media like the project’s Facebook group, the Twinspace, website, and email. We created tutorials and shared resources to guide our partners through different activities. We also felt that we needed to help students to cope with the schools’ closure, the loss of schedule, the social confinement during the pandemic by inviting them to create and share their own blog where they would express their thoughts and insights on the pandemic.
ASEF ClassNet Team: Despite many challenges this year, you have managed to run a brilliant project. Very well done, congratulations! Now, tell us how would you describe your students’ overall learning outcome from the collaboration? Will it benefit them in the long-run?
Juliette: The current project has had to be flexible both in form and outcomes since the world we are exploring, is currently adjusting to new norms. The students participating in the project have responded to the prompts and stimulus materials in a variety of ways that have been both academic outcomes as well as personal ones. The important learning outcomes that students demonstrate are those of comprehension; the application of their knowledge and research in different forms such as FlipGrid videos, Voice Thread, Adobe Spark Posts Pages and Videos, Padlets, and cartoon strips, where analysis, evaluation, and synthesizing in both written and visual forms takes place. students have also engaged in a cross-cultural shared meeting and this also prompted further reflection on both the similarities and differences in their learning at this time.
There is even art gallery information for students to share their work. Art has historically been used as a teaching tool and place of social commentary and critique. The project draws upon all intelligence to give students an authorial voice. One final product will be a video of some participants exploring AI and SDGs and sharing their interest, engagement, and passion.
Maria: This project equips students with key competencies and skills for the 21st century (creativity, communication, collaboration, decision making digital literacy, critical thinking, problem-solving as well as global citizenship), which will foster lifelong learning. Through an engaging learning process, I observed that my students are building a deeper understanding of world events and developing awareness and knowledge on important issues that I believe will foster both personal and academic achievements.
ASEF ClassNet Team: Finally, what has been the most rewarding experience of coordinating the school collaboration?
Maria: I am particularly proud of the fact that together we succeeded to create a learning scenario that promotes students’ engagement and livens their self-esteem by giving them a voice to express themselves, being flexible, and promoting risk-taking and change. I had the chance to see my students becoming more independent and confident in communicating their own perspectives on matters they were concerned about despite many uncertainties this year.
Juliette: In many ways, reading the work of the participants and seeing how their blogs on living through Covid-19, have been the most meaningful experiences for me. They were a window into a shared experience where students could recognize their concerns and frustrations and see themselves as a community supporting one another. Now that we are becoming more familiar with working under different duresses it will be lovely to see how students begin to look at the SDGs and AI and Gender Equity through a post-Covid-19 lens. The implications of the pandemic for issues like relieving poverty, good health, and well-being, providing quality education, or dealing with gender equity, will provide participants with a rich source of concepts to grapple with.
Also, for me, one of the most exciting parts of leading last year’s project and co-leading this year’s is the opportunity to meet passionate educators and to give students a meaningful and authentic purpose and audience. Knowing that we have a global reach and the capacity to build intercultural exchanges for students, particularly in terms of exploring world issues, is empowering!
ASEF ClassNet Team: Thank you both very much for your time and for sharing such inspiring insights!
About the Interviewees:
Mrs Juliette BENTLEY, Teacher and Technology Implementation Mentor Mt St Michael’s College, Ashgrove, Australia
Juliette is an Adobe Education Leader who conducts practical professional development workshops both nationally and internationally. She presented at the 2017 & 2018 Adobe AEL Summits in Sydney and attended the 2019 conference. She led an introductory workshop at the ALEA 2016 Conference in Adelaide, introducing English teachers to the Write the World (WTW) global platform for student writers. Her students contributed to the WTW Young Voices Across the Globe 2016 and 2017 journals. She has given workshops at several local and state conferences by the English Teachers Association of Queensland (ETAQ), at the Creating Future Libraries Conference 2016, and was interviewed about her student writers group on 612 ABC Radio in Australia. The Educational Reporter and The Australian Teacher publications have run stories on the impact of the group. Juliette is an alumna of the ASEF ClassNet.
Mrs Maria Piedade DA SILVA, Teacher and Teacher Trainer, Agrupamento de Escolas de Sátão, Portugal
Maria has been teaching English as a Foreign Language since 1996 to pupils aged 12 to 18 and has been involved in international projects (Lingua e, Comenius, eTwinning, Erasmus+ and ASEF ClassNet) for about 18 years. She is also a Teacher Trainer at Edu for Training Centre, a Certified Microsoft Innovative Educator, and an MIE Expert. She has coordinated several Comenius and Erasmus+ projects, as well as eTwinning projects which were awarded with National and European eTwinning Quality Labels. She was awarded two European eTwinning Prizes for the projects: “Photography as a Pedagogical Tool” (2014) and “Grandma’ stories in 2080”(2018) and two European Language Labels in 2009 and 2013. She is a PhD researcher, affiliated to the CECC — Research Centre for Communication and Culture, Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She has published articles and communications at national and international conferences. Maria is an alumna of the ASEF ClassNet.
