A world of learning Brewer teacher returns from education program in Japan

BREWER – Teacher Kristen VanDusen brought home souvenirs and plenty of memories from her recent trip to the Land of the Rising Sun.

She also brought back something that should benefit her cooperative education students at Brewer High School.

While in Japan, she witnessed a community-based teaching program that provides students with vital firsthand experience.

“The best way to learn something is to go and do it,” VanDusen said during an interview Tuesday at an area coffee shop.

The Japanese expression for the program style is Genchi Genbutsu, which translates literally into “go and see.” When students experience job-related situations, such as handling customers or watching a manager run a meeting, they often learn more, she said.

VanDusen and 39 other teachers were selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants nationwide for the 2007 Toyota International Teacher Program. The group flew to Japan from California on June 22 and returned to the United States on July 7.

“It was like a fairy tale,” VanDusen said. “Every evening we’d say, ‘There is no way this can get better tomorrow’ but then we’d get up and they’d say ‘We’re going to meet the U.S. ambassador to Japan.’

“It was one amazing thing after another,” she said.

VanDusen has taught at Brewer High for five years and is teaching cooperative education and a creative writing class this fall.

While in the Asian country, she made soba noodles, participated in a Japanese tea party, learned calligraphy, watched a martial arts display and took a Samurai pleasure boat into Tokyo Bay. T

he group traveled from Kyoto, which has more than 1,600 temples, to Nagoya, which is home to the Toyota skills academy, a technical school similar to the United Technologies Center in Bangor. Then they went to Takayama, where they stayed in grass huts, then traveled back to Tokyo for the trip home.

VanDusen’s teaching position is just about the perfect job to translate and implement the cultural model for teaching she learned in Japan. Cooperative education is a work-study program at Brewer High School that provides students with skills for finding and keeping a job and transitioning into life after school.

Under the Genchi Genbutsu educational model, each of her cooperative education students would select someone who interested them from the community, preferably from a career path they are interested in, and would interview the person, job shadow them and then make a presentation to the class about the selected person and their job.

Through this process, some students may find that they have selected a job that matches their skills and others may find jobs they thought they wanted aren’t suited for them, she said.

The program becomes co-curricular by adding writing, math and problem solving components.

VanDusen also is working to complete plans with Andy Geaghan, Brewer advanced placement environmental science teacher, on revamping the school’s recycling program based on Japan’s ambitious system.

“They recycle everything,” she said.

Nearly 500 teachers nationwide have participated in the Toyota International Teacher Program since it began in 1999. The goal of the program is to educate teachers about Japan’s history, education, environment and technology and how they affect industry and society in the global economy.

“The things that I learned weren’t necessarily the things I went there looking for,” VanDusen said.

“You see things a lot differently” when you’re in a foreign country and don’t speak the language, she said. “I saw things through a lot different lens.”

The trip left a lasting impression on VanDusen, who said that with technology today students need to understand more about different cultures and globalization.

“You can’t just live in a cocoon here,” she said. “There is really a need to be a global citizen.”