After two weeks of visiting schools in DeKalb, Rochelle and the Chicago suburbs, 20 teachers from Uruguay made their way to Rockford.
Their destination – Lincoln Middle School, opened in 1927 and located adjacent to the city’s historic Midtown District – provided their first glimpse of something that looked familiar.
“We have seen schools in more wealthy neighborhoods,” said visitor Natalia Ferraro, who teaches elementary school English in Uruguay. “This one is more similar to what we have back home, so that is important.”
Ferraro and her colleagues spent the morning attending Transitional Program of Instruction-Newcomers classes, offered to recent school-age immigrants to Rockford who are learning English and need cultural acclimation and academic support.
Some came from Spanish-speaking countries, but others were from Africa, Afghanistan and other nations.
“You had so many different languages in the same classroom, and the teacher manages to understand the students – to explain to all of them – and that is very important for us, how the cultures and the languages mix and mingle and work together,” said Andrea Joyce, who teaches middle school English.
“I loved the way that the curriculum is organized, especially that students in some high schools can choose whether to do a dual program, having both English and Spanish lessons, or just focusing on English,” she added. “Our country is receiving a lot of immigrants, too, so we have to learn more about that.”
NIU’S GUESTS ARRIVED Sept. 11 as part of the third Uruguay Teacher Exchange Program.
Chosen from 130 applicants to the Fulbright Commission, and representing all regions of Uruguay, the visitors are proven teachers dedicated to becoming better teachers.
Here, they received a comprehensive introduction to American culture, history and educational systems from Spanish-speaking teachers in bilingual and dual-language classrooms.
Most mornings were spent in K-12 classrooms: Cortland and Littlejohn elementary schools, Clinton Rosette Middle School, DeKalb High School in DeKalb and Central and Lincoln elementary schools in Rochelle.
Professional development during the afternoon was provided by College of Education faculty James Cohen, David Nieto, Jim Ressler, Mariana Ricklefs, John Evar Strid and Stephen Tonks.
Ricela Feliciano, assistant professor of mathematics at NIU, and Amy (AJ) Crook, coordinator of Multilingual Programs for the DeKalb School District, also delivered workshops.
Cohen and Tonks, who organized the event with help from Terry Borg, former director of the college’s Office of External and Global Programs, are pleased with the outcome.
Both also connected the participants via Zoom before their departure, led workshops, welcomed the visitors in the classes they teach to NIU students and attended presentations the Uruguayan teachers conducted as required.
“Each year, it seems like we can focus less on the logistics and more on the interpersonal, relational things,” said Cohen, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
“It’s a cultural exchange, it’s a teacher exchange and it’s an exchange of ideas,” he added. “They get introduced to a different school system, and they get to meet American teachers who, because we’re in dual-language programs, the majority of whom are not actually from the United States but are from all over the world. They’re meeting international teachers.”
Tonks, professor in the Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations, said that the visitors come not for themselves but for their students back home.
“A big reason that the teachers participate is that they want to improve their own teaching,” Tonks said. “They want to see things that they’re not doing; that they haven’t done before; things that are innovative. They envision the U.S. being advanced in education and teaching practices, so they expect to be really wowed.”
Lincoln Middle School clearly exceeded that expectation.
“That was special for everybody,” Tonks said. “These are 11- and 12-year-olds, in the lowest classes, and some of them speak very little English.”
“The Uruguayans said it was the most impactful experience,” Cohen said, “because 100% of the kids in the Newcomers program are refugees, literally from all over the world. One hundred percent. And to see the teacher interacting with them, the kids communicating with each other and the teacher communicating with the students is really magical. The Uruguayan teachers acknowledged this and saw this magic happening.”
ANA DEMARIA, WHO TEACHES English at the high school level, would confirm that – even if it’s not an issue yet for Uruguay.
“We saw today the multiculturalism in a class,” Demaria said. “We have immigrants coming, but most of them come from South America, so we share the same L1 – the mother tongue, which is Spanish for us – which is very useful for us as English teachers.”
Demaria, like the others, was awed by the instructional technology in U.S. schools.
“The beautiful digital boards!” she said. “The resources are very difficult to have. A lot of resources we are not able to get from the government, so we have to think beyond that. We saw a lot of techniques and resources that we can apply without having all that is not readily available to us now.”
One strategy is differentiated learning, she said.
“We work with that in elementary schools but it’s something that is not worked with in high school or middle schools. It’s like that is lost along the way. I don’t know why,” she said. “Maybe we should work with that in the same way elementary teachers do.”
Ferraro gathered classroom management ideas in Rockford that were more applicable for her than those she observed in the other host districts, which also included School District U46 and Berwyn North School District 98.
“The students were behaving more similar to how my students behave. They were louder and they moved around a lot,” Ferarro said. “It helps me to see the techniques the teacher used.”
Stephanie Perez, who teaches English in middle schools and high schools, was intrigued to watch U.S. students traveling the hallways between classes.
Passing periods could prove valuable in Uruguay, Perez said.
“Here, the teacher creates his or her own classroom environment,” she said. “In Uruguay, we teachers are the ones who are switching from classroom to classroom. We do not have the resources that you have, but we do what we can. We do our best.”
Perez applied to Fulbright because “it is said that the U.S. gets very high grades – a good level of education – and I wanted to see how you get those results. I’m pretty happy to be here. I learned a lot.”
Among the ideas she took home is one she called “maybe kind of silly.”
Oh? Silly?
“For example, the hallway pass,” Perez said. “Kids are organized here. At home, they are louder, and they are not organized at all. Maybe sometimes you’re teaching and a kid” – snapping her fingers here for dramatic effect – “ ‘I’m going to the bathroom!’ ”
Yet she also returned to Uruguay with instructional ideas “about how to foster oral skills” for students learning English.
“I see that sometimes my students are quite shy, so I think I’m going to do my best with the things I’ve seen here,” she said.
“They are teenagers, so they like to socialize. Maybe if I said, ‘OK, we’re going to send videos to the U.S. to different students,’ then maybe they are going to do their best and, step by step, they are going to improve their oral skills because they’re motivated, because they are going to meet someone new – someone from another country,” she added. “And if they see that we as teachers are motivated, they are going to be motivated as well.”
CULTURAL ACTIVITIES included walking through Chicago, visiting Millennium Park, viewing the city’s architecture from a riverboat, exploring the Museum of Science and Industry, touring the Starved Rock State Park canyon, sightseeing at the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Area and shopping at an outlet mall.
Day One’s itinerary offered a performance of Off the Vine, a band featuring Tonks and Patrick Roberts, associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations.
Restaurant selections dished up an international smorgasbord of tastes along with Chicago-style deep dish pizza.
On campus, they attended the NIU Latino Resource Center’s El Grito celebration and, of course, cheered on the NIU Huskies football team.
“We brought them to a tailgating party thrown by Donna Werderich and her husband, Bob, before the Vanderbilt-NIU football game,” Cohen said, “and they kept on saying, ‘I feel like I’m in a movie. I feel like I’m in a movie. We don’t experience this. We only see this in the movies.’ ”
Tonks heard the same: “The marching band. The cheerleaders. They don’t really know about tailgate parties, per se, but they know they see American football, bands and cheerleaders in the movies, and they’re like, ‘This is just like a movie.’ ”
Yet it’s the realities of their lives that defines them.
While some came from Montevideo, population 1.4 million, one works in a rural school so small that she teaches all six of the children, each in a different grade from first through sixth.
Coming to the United States opened their eyes – as international travel does for everyone, Tonks said – and taught them as much as it taught their hosts.
“I think they’re very curious about the world, and they’re adventurous as well,” Cohen said.
“There was one teacher; this was her first time ever on an airplane; first time ever out of her country. She’s never even been to Brazil, and it’s just a few hours to go from where she lives to Brazil. It’s super easy. You don’t even need a passport. All you have to do is walk across the street – literally! – and she’s never been there. She’s never been out of her small bubble.”
Her emotion on arrival touched Cohen.
“Even though she was probably 45 years old, it was like watching a child experience sugar for the first time. It was really just a beautiful experience,” he said.
“It’s second nature to Stephen and me now – to travel and to see different places – and we get excited, but it’s not to the level that she got excited, and not to the level that several of them got excited,” he added. “They were so grateful and appreciative of everything.”
Cohen witnessed that again at the Sept. 28 closing ceremony.
“To see the humanity in them come out – to see them interact with Terry, Stephen and me at such a basic human level – was simply reward enough,” he said.
“We don’t get that a lot in the United States. We in the United States focus on, ‘I have to get to my next meeting,’ or, ‘I have to catch this phone call,’ or ‘I have to answer this email.’ But these three weeks allowed all of us to really experience each other at that basic, fundamental human-to-human level,” he added, “and it grounds you. I know it grounds me. It grounded me tremendously.”
Tonks is looking forward to what comes next.
Each of the 20 visitors is required by the Fulbright Commission to, within one year, create and implement a project based on their time in the United States.
He expects that their personal takeaways from NIU will prove more life-changing, however, and provide the rationale to continue the program.
“In the end, if they want to see some ‘perfect’ education world, which to some extent they have built up for themselves in their heads, then they will see some good teaching and a lot of positive things,” Tonks said.
“But they also see the realities and the struggles that are present in the United States – in education, in schools and with the refugees. Just all sorts of things,” he added. “And to me, seeing those realities is just as meaningful than, ‘OK, I saw great teaching. Now I’m going to do that in my classroom.’ It was so much more than that.”
