college of education | fall 1999

LATTICE Linking Teachers and International Students

The idea was simple enough: Get Lansing area teachers and international graduate students together to discuss issues of interest to both.

To Sally McClintock, a retired teacher and principal, it would be a win-win proposition. The teachers would come away with an international perspective that could inform their teaching, and the foreign students would gain a better sense of the American educational system.

"I just saw a need," McClintock said. "It was a need to make international experiences and the world beyond our borders more real and interesting for teachers so that they would take that into their classrooms. There was lots of talk about having a global perspective in the 21st Century, but not many teachers were very excited about the issue or had many ideas how to do that."

So she took her idea to Jack Schwille, the College of Education's assistant dean for international studies in education. He loved the idea from the start.

With some fine tuning and funding from the provost's office, lattice was born in 1995, and has since seen its support grow to include the College of Education, various MSU programs, and three area school districts--East Lansing, Haslett and Lansing.

lattice--which stands for Linking All Types of Teachers to International Cross-cultural Education--is an international educational partnership between the teachers from the three school districts and the international students from the College of Education and other programs at MSU.

From the beginning, Schwille said that lattice has sought to be different. Over the years, MSU has provided many opportunities for international students to do "one-shot" classroom presentations in kÐ12 schools.

lattice seeks to develop much more personal relationships between the teachers and international students. The group of 20 to 25 teachers who meet every month are joined by an equivalent number of international students.

That way, Schwille said, the teachers and international students can get to know each other as individuals.

"This has created an entirely different relationship," he said. "It is a relationship in which teachers and international students are willing to listen to each other and look at issues from very different cultural perspectives."
There is also another difference.

lattice has not been about providing the teachers with a ready-made curriculum or units.

"Right from the start the idea was that we wouldn't show them how to do it, so to speak," Schwille said. " The changes had to follow naturally from the experience, from the personal relationships they developed from the program.

"And we've seen quite of bit of that over the years."

A number of the teachers have invited international students into their classrooms and developed units around international themes that were the focus of their monthly sessions.

"lattice has had a more significant effect on my teaching than probably anything else, and I've been in the field for 21 years," said Margaret Holtschlag, a teacher at Murphy Elementary School in Haslett and Michigan Teacher of the Year. "It has changed the way I perceive the craft of teaching, it has gotten me to think beyond those four walls of the classroom to the whole world out there."

The program has begun to have far-reaching influence. McClintock met a principal from South Africa at a conference, and the principal was so impressed with lattice that she started a similar program for teachers in her hometown of Richards Bay in rural South Africa.

And earlier this year, 15 of the teachers, including Holtschlag, traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright-Hays Group Study Abroad Grant. While there, they studied issues of diversity and multiculturalism, lived with South African families, and traveled to Cape Town, Durban, and Richards Bay.

In addition, the teachers had the opportunity meet and work with South African teachers, artisans and many others. A group of South African students visited MSU in the fall.

For Anne Schneller, a specialist in the International Studies in Education program and who has been part of lattice from its inception, the South African trip is the kind of personal experience that lattice has come to represent.

"Internationalizing the curriculum is important, especially for us who live in a middle class suburban environment," Schneller said. "It's very easy for us not to see that there is a greater world out there with people who are very different than ourselves and lead different lives than our own. By letting our school children start learning about that we hope it will make them more aware of the outside world."

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