Galapagos Journals: English, Ecology and Educational Exchange in Ecuador
A ride on a tourist boat changed Karen Hamlin’s life. Now she’s changing the lives of hundreds of children and helping to save one of the most unique places on earth.
In summer 2003 Willamette’s Office of International Education offered extra seats on their annual study abroad boat tour of the Galapagos Islands. Hamlin, director of Willamette’s School of Education, jumped at the chance. She’s always wanted to see the Ecuadorian islands, well known for their unique wildlife. During the boat ride, she struck up a casual conversation with the National Park guide on the tour boat, Miguel Mosquera, who lives on San Cristobal, the largest island in the Galapagos archipelago. He also happens to be president of the Albatross Foundation, a local community foundation focused on improving education in the islands.
“Miguel told me the schools on the islands were struggling and needed a lot of help,” explains Hamlin. “The main economies are farming and fishing, but countries like the U.S. want islanders to dramatically limit those activities. In order for the Galapagos children to have an effective voice in the future of the islands, they need to be able to speak English and understand why their island home is unique and needs to be protected.”
The challenge stirred Hamlin’s imagination. A middle school teacher for 16 years before coming to Willamette, she’s an expert in developing curriculum for children. Her solution was to create a curriculum on the ecology of the Galapagos, taught in English by Oregon teachers. The teachers, in turn, would be taught Spanish language by Galapagos teachers. “Instead of ‘Let us show you how to do it,’ it’s an exchange,” she says. “We have some things to share, they have some things to teach us.”
For the past three summers, Hamlin has taken a team of five teachers to the Galapagos to teach six grades of 20 students each at the Escuela Naval (Naval School). To qualify, each teacher must be a graduate of Willamette’s Oregon Writing Project, a three-week summer institute in writing and its use as a learning tool. The teachers pay their own airfare and volunteer their time, spending three months preparing and working together before the trip.
Once on San Cristobal, the teachers spend three hours a day for two weeks teaching an intensive science/writing curriculum. The classes involve plenty of field trips to explore island flora and fauna, with the children recording what they learn in artwork-filled journals they write in English. Hamlin estimates they’ve taught more than 150 island children.
The teachers also spend two hours a day learning Spanish. It’s a role reversal for them, one that teaches them important lessons about how students learn. “The experience puts you at the edge of learning.” says Jenele Denton, a retired middle school teacher who has traveled with Hamlin’s group the past two years and hopes to return. “Every day I’m there, I learn something about how to teach and how to be present with children.”
Melody Munger, a middle school teacher who taught on Galapagos, wrote this about her experience: “His head bent in frustration over his writing journal said it all. Oscar, a second language learner, wasn’t going to write the essay I’d assigned. During study hall, Oscar and I sat down together to take a look at that empty page. When we began to chat about the writing, images of me learning Spanish this summer in the Galapagos flashed through my mind. I asked my teacher, ‘Does it really sound like Spanish when I speak?’ She reassured me that it did, so I was willing to continue trying.
After encouraging Oscar to tell me what he was thinking and then write it down, he was able to. With some encouragement, I was able to help him past his crisis of confidence, and it helped us both take one more step down the road of language acquisition.”
One of the unexpected consequences for many of the teachers involved in the Galapagos project, including Hamlin, has been a change in their philosophy about bilingual education. “There’s a push across the U.S. to have English-only instruction,” she says. “But our experience in Galapagos has convinced us that initial learning of a second language, particularly when that learning includes additional content such as science, is more productive if explanations are available in the students’ first language. We’ve personally experienced what it feels like to try to learn a foreign language in a total immersion environment, and we understand the stress that causes. It’s been far more useful for us to both learn and teach a second language in bilingual settings. All of us who have taught in the Galapagos have come to believe that English language learners benefit from having some initial instruction — especially in areas like concepts of grammar — in their first language.”
Hamlin, who continues to study Spanish in the evenings at Chemeketa Community College, says it’s our responsibility to prepare more effective English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers. “Part of that preparation includes providing teachers with Spanish language skills. If teachers look out at their Spanish-speaking students and see fear and anxiety, they need to know enough Spanish to be able to alleviate their concerns and build connections with those students.”
To broaden the learning experience, Hamlin also established an online curriculum and email exchange between Galapagos and Salem students. Teachers in the islands and bilingual Willamette MAT student teachers who have studied in Ecuador have collaborated on a curriculum that enables students in both Salem and Galapagos schools to study and talk together via the Internet about their areas’ unique ecology and preservation efforts. “Salem students, for example, learn about spotted owls and the lack of water in the Klamath Basin,” explains Hamlin. “They have to be able to explain Oregon ecology to their co-learners in Ecuador.”
The model of distance co-learning offers a way for students around the world to connect and learn about each other’s unique culture and ecology. “The idea is to use technology in innovative ways that are bilingual and localized,” Hamlin says. “It’s a model that can be replicated and disseminated all over the world.”