Steve Howard Japan Trip: June 28, 29 Wrapping up the work

These last two days have been very focused on collaborative planning between the US and Japanese teachers. The goal of this entire program is to increase the awareness and understanding of Japanese teachers and American teachers to each others cultures and educational practices, and to then use that new understanding to develop cross cultural opportunities to engage our students in learning ESD concepts. I joined in with a really great group of 7 teachers for my project, 3 Japanese teachers and 4 American teachers, and we are doing our project on comparing attitudes and practices about waste reduction in our schools focused on the reuse-reduce-recycle-refuse concept. We will also be sharing pictures, videos, and letters in a Google Group between our students on their perspectives and values about their respective cultures. It was challenging at times to develop this project, in that we only had a short period of time to iron out the details and there were considerable barriers due to language issues, but by the end of it I think everyone felt good about what we had achieved. I'm really looking forward to moving forward on this with my students next year, I know they will be very interested in this project.

In spite of all the work with this conference, we have managed to have a good bit of fun as well. We have been out to some nice meals, exploring more of Tokyo in the evenings, and we had a very special final banquet with live music and a very fancy Japanese food buffet.

Tomorrow we have our one "free day", and various small groups are forming around some different destinations. I think I'm going to join a group taking the 1 hour train ride to a smaller coastal city called Kamakura, which is supposed to have some nice temples. Some of us might rent bikes for the day so we can cover more ground. I'll let you know more about what we do and find in my last post.

Much of the last 3 days has been like this...