Two Andover High School teachers have swapped roles with teachers from France and India, giving themselves a culture lesson while exposing local students to the perspectives of foreign-born educators.
Through the Fulbright Classroom Teacher Exchange program, teacher Kim Caverly is returning to Andover High after teaching English to students for a year in a town just outside Paris. Steve Sanborn is heading to India with his family this week, to teach biology. This will be his second Fulbright exchange; he lived and taught in Hungary close to 20 years ago.
The two longtime teachers agree the overseas experience taught them just as much as they taught students in the classroom.
"I feel for professional growth, you need to push yourself outside of your comfort zone — meet new friends, experience a new culture," said Caverly.
"It's invaluable to step out of what you do and see people doing it in another environment," agreed Sanborn. "I'm eager to look at how another (school) system works, and what they have in common (with Andover)."
As part of the Fulbright exchange, Paris resident Marie Barrillon taught Caverly's French classes at AHS while Caverly taught at Barrillon's school through last year. Indian teacher Sreeja Rajan arrived in Andover this week and will teach Sanborn's biology classes at AHS while he teaches biology at Rajan's school in Trivandrum, India.
With roughly 50 U.S. teachers on Fulbright exchange each year, it is unusual for the same school to have two teachers accepted into the competitive program in back-to-back years, said Rajan.
The Trivandrum International School, where Sanborn will spend his fall semester, is a boarding school for native and international students. He will bring his wife and two children, ages 9 and 11, and they will live in dorms on the school's campus.
His children are excited about living in India, he said, and even hosted Indian-themed birthday parties earlier this month, complete with Bollywood movies and henna tattoos.
"It's the ultimate family adventure," he said.
While the Sanborn family lives in India, Rajan will live in the Sanborns' home in Amesbury.
"I have some apprehensions, of course. I love the subject I'm going to teach, I really do. I feel that will seep into students, no matter what," said Rajan.
Housing exchange is possible, but not required of teachers in the Fulbright program, said Sanborn. Although Caverly lived in Barrillon's hometown of Paris, the duo did not exchange housing.
One of Caverly's first homework assignments to her students in France was to ask for suggestions, written in English, of what to do and see. She spent the year using their suggestions, stopping at favorite ice cream spots and spectacular views. At the end of the year, she showed her students photos of all the places she'd been under their advice.
"Students are pretty much the same everywhere. That's what's wonderful, and what makes you want to keep being a teacher," said Caverly. "If students don't think they're learning, they're still learning. That's the best learning — where you don't realize you're working."
Going forward, Andover students will speak and correspond with Barrillon's students in France using computers in the new Andover High language lab. There also are tentative plans for a group of French students to visit Andover in spring 2011.
The brainchild of Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, government-funded Fulbright grants have been sending students and teachers overseas since the 1940s.
After an extensive application process, involving much paperwork and reference-checking, teachers in Fulbright's classroom exchange program are matched with a foreign teacher in a school with a similar teaching philosophy.
American teachers that don't speak a second language are sent to countries where students and many people speak English, such as India, the United Kingdom or European countries, said Sanborn. Teachers request three countries they'd prefer to be sent, but the Fulbright program has the ultimate say in where they're sent, he said. Teachers accepted into the program are given a week orientation in Washington, D.C. before they arrive at their new location.
Before leaving their home country, the two matched teachers are encouraged to correspond. Once they are teaching in each other's classrooms, correspondence dies down as teachers focus more on their new students, said Sanborn.
"The last thing you worry about is your home classroom," said Sanborn.
Chuckling, Caverly noted the majority of her pre-exchange correspondence with Barrillon was not about teaching but on day-to-day basics like finding housing, opening a bank account and commuting from Paris to school in Rueil-Mal-Maison, 15 miles outside the city.
"I knew (Barrillon's) support needed to come from the (AHS) building and not from me in France," said Caverly.
Teachers in the program are set up with a mentor in their new school, and the Andover quartet agreed exchange teachers at AHS get support from an entire department.
"The whole (foreign language) department was extremely helpful. Everyone went out of their way to help," said Barrillon, who first knew she wanted to be a teacher after coming to the U.S. as an exchange student.
In the two decades since he first went on a Fulbright exchange to Hungary, Sanborn noted how things have changed in the world and for him personally.
He arrived in Hungary single with not much more than a backpack. He corresponded with family and friends at home through mailed letters.
Now, e-mail correspondence is at light speed. He'll travel to India with his family, laden with baggage, and post photos and updates on an online blog for family and friends to keep in touch.
