Stepping into an International, Cross-Cultural Water Community: Canadian and Chinese Students’ Water Inquiries in a Sister School Reciprocal Learning Partnership
摘要
In a partnership between two sister schools in Shanghai and Toronto, Canadian and Chinese students developed a unique connection through their teachers’ collaboration in water education. Using narrative inquiry methods and based on a series of field notes from this teacher collaboration, the stories recounted in this chapter of student participation in the water collaboration shed light on the theory and practice of international reciprocal learning in the form of collaborative partnerships. We first introduce the sister school context and the teachers who participated within it. Next, we provide an overview of the collaborative water activities conducted from 2015 to 2019, and highlight the impact of these activities on students from the perspectives of two researchers and a teacher in Toronto. The Toronto students were seen to develop an increased interest in interacting and collaborating with their sister school friends in Shanghai, in addition to students becoming water educators to other students in their school through water inquiries. While the teachers led this water collaboration, the Canadian students participated in building a water community to include their sister school friends in Shanghai and their peers in their own school community. While this paper provides a unique account of student engagement in a sister school network as part of Xu and Connelly’s Canada–China Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education Partnership project, it may inspire other educators to consider cross-cultural reciprocal learning partnerships as unique and powerful opportunities for engaging student learning.