Back in January, Dawn Oler, a Family & Consumer Science teacher at Hinsdale Central High School, and Laura Stamp, a science teacher at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School in Oak Park, crossed continents to begin research as part of the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program.
The Fulbright Program, established in 1946, provides grants and scholarships to students, academics and educators for the exchange of culture and knowledge among the international community.
Annually, Fulbright sends around 400 teachers from 90 countries and territories to a different part of the globe for four months, holding seminars and working on personal research projects.
For her research, Oler flew to Finland studying why the nation has one of the most successful public school systems in the world.
In the U.S., students pursuing a degree in education declined by a third, according to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, a problem not shared by one of Europe’s northernmost nations.
“I wanted to find out what they were doing to recruit teachers here and how they train them,” Oler said in an interview with the Pioneer Press.
Oler gave several reasons for why teaching as a profession has plummeted in the U.S. compared to Finland, first among them was negative media attention.
“Negative news gets clicks, and media right now is driven by the more clicks they get … and so we bring forward the negative more, and then parents talk about that at home, and the community talks about that, and students hear that,” she said.
The second major difference is environmental, according to Oler the role of an American educator has expanded to a 24-hour job in which the demands of the community are in constant fluctuation. “We’re sending mixed messages as a society as to what is actually the role of education in America.”
Low wages are the last major hurdle for garnering new teachers; while wages have increased over time, they haven’t managed to keep up with other higher education professions, Oler said.
“It was considered a woman’s profession for a long time, and so it was underpaid as just a supplemental wage to running a household, and we know that that is clearly an outdated model,” she said.
Not all of what Oler found was doom and gloom for the American education system, teachers in the U.S. have wider access to professional development for teacher and school spirit weeks, and school spirit in general, is a unique fascination catching on.
“The biggest thing that I have seen here that I think we can do at home is to change our conversation when we talk about education … we need to have positive conversations about what we do,” Oler said.
More than 5,000 miles away on the opposite side of the Eurasian continent, Stamp is conducting her own research in Vietnam, studying the impact of climate change and how it’s taught to children living in a region significantly impacted by rising global temperatures.
“I’ve been speaking about climate change for several years, and in our district it is not taught thoroughly. We teach the standard and that’s it, and it was very frustrating to me,” Stamp said in an interview, Friday.
Part of what Stamp wants to bring back to Oak Park is an expansion of how climate change is taught, bringing lessons out of the lab and into real-world applications and incorporating communication and problem-solving skills.
“There are schools in Vietnam right now that actually have disaster plans, because of the impacts of climate change, and so pretty soon in the United States, we’re going to also have to have more specific disaster plans for schools as wildfires and floods and things like that increase,” Stamp said.
Education in Vietnam is very traditional, Stamp said. “The teacher stands up there, says things, the kids write it down, they do their homework, they take a test. In the United States, we have a lot more flexibility in our curriculum and in our methods.
Oler and Stamp’s time abroad ends in April, giving them a chance to use their experiences in the suburban Chicago classroom.
“To be around other teachers who are not only interested but have the time to explore how to be a better teacher is just so inspiring,” Stamp said. “I just wish that all these people who think that teaching is just standing up in front of a classroom and reading something from a textbook would just have access to all the amazing things that all the different Fulbright teachers are doing and the passion and creativity that they’re bringing to their projects.”
