Señora Searls in Japan: FaceTime
Last week I had the awesome opportunity to take a quick week-long trip to Japan to meet a dear friend’s new baby and attend the wedding of another close friend. Both of these friends are people my husband has maintained contact with since his days of studying Japanese abroad in the Shiga prefecture of Japan back in 2005, while I was studying Spanish abroad in Central America, in Honduras.
Like me, Justin lived with host families and attended a local university. Unlike me (a huge regret!) he has done a marvelous job of keeping in touch with his host siblings, who have now all grown up, are getting or have gotten married, and are starting families of their own. There is nothing more wonderful than building on these global friendships we’ve had for more than a decade now, and sharing our lives with one another across cultural and linguistic borders to enrich our shared experiences.
Last week was particularly fun because I had the chance to conduct a live FaceTime call with my first period class! Hatsumi, my husband’s former host-sister, has two small children, one named Chisato (6 years old, in first grade, who joined the call!) and one who is just 11 months old and I met for the first time this trip (Chihiya). Chisato was so excited after our call with my 7th graders that, even though he’d already stayed up past his bedtime to participate, he couldn’t wind down to go to sleep.
The benefits of studying abroad are well documented in many places and include everything from enhancing global awareness to leadership skills to wide-ranging benefits related to academic attainment, career advancement, intercultural and personal development and more.
Perhaps even better are the not-so-well-documented anecdotal experiences that we take away from instances of cross-cultural engagement like this. Having a live call with a palce literally on the other side of the world and conceptualizing that your teacher is in a place that is 13 hours ahead, nighttime (while you’re just starting your morning), and engaging in life-long friendships with members of another language group and culture, is a meaningful experience! It’s one I hope that many of my students were interested enough in that they may remember it later when they too have the opportunity to study abroad and learn langauge in meaningful, contextualized settings within the target culture.
Perhaps one of the biggest reasons I loved this experience was that it proved to me that MapMates, the global education classroom to classroom / teacher to teacher program I created during my traveling sabbatical last year, can live on! Now that I’m back in my classroom post-sabbatial, I can continue to serve as a global ambassador for my own students and other kids around the world, facilitating meaningful global connections that make an impact. I can’t wait to see how else I might connect my classroom to the world in an authentic way this year!
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