TFS - Canada's International School

Despite Canada being so far north, few Canadians have experienced life far from the 49 th parallel. For Shannan MacKenzie, Junior School English teacher, home was a small town on the outskirts of North Bay. She attended Nipissing University for her bachelors degrees and her master's in education, but it was the opportunity to undertake an international teaching practicum that changed her life's direction. "I had experienced a lack of diversity growing up, and I wanted to find it," she says. After three weeks of teaching English to children in Ecuador, she returned home a changed person. Working with ME to WE, as well as various international schools, she spent the next few years in Ecuador and Mexico, learning Spanish along the way. Now in her classrooms at TFS, she sees the world reflected back at her: "My students acknowledge and celebrate each other's cultures. They are curious, but it is authentic, not superficial, and they work organically together." The first unit of inquiry she taught to her Grade 4 students this year revolved around the impact of our Indigenous peoples on Canada. They heard from a First Nations speaker and had a drumming session, read parts of The Secret Path, by Gord Downie, and watched segments of the video. Students learned about the importance of Indigenous peoples and how Canada has been shaped through immigration. "I asked them to raise their hands if both of their parents were born in Canada. Only two students did so," she shares. This discovery made a significant impact on their awareness of their peers, as well as intercultural understanding. At the West Campus, Jean-Pierre Gastambide is in his first year at TFS, teaching Grade 7. Originally from Bordeaux, France, where he received a degree in math and physics, and a licence to teach, he spent four years teaching math in Tahiti, followed by three years teaching the French Baccalaureate curriculum in Gabon. When asked why the lure of TFS, he states, "It is another experience; how do you teach in Canada? I had heard a lot of good things about the education here and I want to grow my skills, my ways of teaching from the point of view of many different countries, so I can bring them all into the classroom. The fundamentals may be the same, but being able to offer them from many different perspectives gives me a valuable tool in teaching the students." Zeina E. is a Grade 5 student at the West Campus. Both of her parents are from Egypt, and all of her extended family members live there. Travelling back to Egypt on a regular basis has given Zeina a deeper way to see both her family's country of origin and Canada, the country of her birth. Attending TFS has also provided her with opportunities to learn about intercultural understanding and dialogue. In collaborative groups, she and her classmates have taught each other about their cultural backgrounds, and they've presented interesting aspects of their cultures to the whole class. Developing an international perspective is also part of their units of study. "We have been studying different conflicts in the world. For one exercise, we sat at tables where we represented different types of governments, and we had to talk about how we could solve these conflicts," she says. Tamara Bolotenko, Dean of Student Affairs at the Senior School, had a unique language experience while growing up. Born in Toronto and raised in Ottawa, her first language was Ukrainian. She didn't start learning English until Junior Kindergarten, and showed such an aptitude for language learning that she was placed in French immersion in Senior Kindergarten. "Learning different languages made me think differently, and allowed me to understand the values inherent in the cultures that speak them," she says. After obtaining a degree in languages and international relations from Z ei n a E . — by L es l e y La u r ai n "You need to be adaptable, to be able to relate to others and share experiences. It's about communicating." This year, Sarah is part of a pilot project with York University's Glendon College, whereby she and 10 other TFS classmates work with university-level business students to jointly develop a module on international relations, as part of the business program's curriculum. Glendon recognized that TFS' community encapsulates myriad languages, cultures and places of origin, and wanted to incorporate our students' points of view into the new module (as the business students' potential future clients and customers). "They want to understand why an international perspective is so important to us and why it matters in the business world," she says. —ADAM B. 12 TFS ENTRE NOUS 2019

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