West-East Reciprocal Learning through collaborative inquiries around water education

• In Event: Intercultural and International Reciprocal Learning for the Improvement of School Education: Stories from a Toronto-Shanghai Sister School Network

Proposal

In this paper, an elementary teacher in Toronto and an elementary teacher in Shanghai share their 5-year experiences of working together on joint projects using water as an entry point for their collaboration. Each teacher is given an opportunity to reflect upon their water collaboration from their personal-professional-cultural standpoint. They are also invited to examine how their inter-cultural collaboration affects themselves, their students, and their curriculum. Overall, the paper highlights teachers’ lived experiences of “what works” in a Toronto-Shanghai Sister School network informed by the idea of “reciprocal learning as collaborative partnership” (Xu & Connelly, 2015, 2017). It foregrounds teachers’ personal practical knowledge of West-East reciprocal learning while demonstrating how this knowledge challenges the West-East competition narrative so often embedded in international, comparative educational settings.

Authors

• Michael Connelly, OISE/University of Toronto

• Yishin Khoo, University of Windsor