Effective Teaching in a Cross-Cultural Setting:
Comparing the Values of
Community Members and Teachers
in the Marshall Islands
Natalie E. Nimmer
Plan B Project
Submitted to the Department of Educational Foundations,
College of Education, University of Hawai‘i Manoa
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Masters of Education
June 2010
Approved by
Dr. Tim Donahue
Rachel Miller
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………...4
Chapter I: Introduction……………………………………………………………..7
Chapter II: Literature Review……………………………………………………..15
Chapter III: Methodology…………………………………………………………21
Chapter IV: Findings and Data Analysis………………………………………….31
Chapter V: Conclusions, Implications, Recommendations, Next Steps…………..47
Reference List……………………………………………………………………..55
Appendices………………………………………………………………………..57
Acknowledgements
This research would not have been possible without the collaboration of the stakeholders of the Marshallese educational system. First, I would like to thank Secretary of Education Biram Stege, without whom the WorldTeach and Dartmouth Volunteer Teaching Programs would not exist in the Marshall Islands. Her steadfast support of the programs, and the individual teachers within them, has been paramount to the longevity of the programs as well as the continued involvement and connection to the Marshall Islands of many former volunteers, including me.
Second, I would like to thank Helen Claire Sievers and Dr. Andrew Garrod, the Executive Directors of the volunteer teaching programs for their vision, passion, and support over the years. Likewise, without the long-ago vision and continued support of Jerry Kramer and his family, the Majuro Cooperative School simply would not exist. Thank you for creating this gem for Marshallese children. Vision and support can only go so far without in-the-trenches leadership, so I would like to thank Kathy Stratte for her commitment and dedication to the Majuro Cooperative School over the decades. In the midst of endless competing demands, thank you for prioritizing professional development and school improvement, of which this research is merely a tiny part.
Third, I would like to thank the many people who helped in the process of instrument development and data collection. Nancy Snyder, Jai Lewis, Jill Pagels, Kristin Olson and Jessica Risley provided insight into the development of the survey. Of course, the survey could not administer itself, so I would like to thank Annie Himmelsteib, Angela Saunders, and Anna Zelinsky for allowing me to impose on your WorldTeach and Dartmouth Mid-Service Conferences; Liz Rodick for dedicating valuable staff time at EZ Price in order to gather information about Majuro’s public school parents from across the atoll; and Deanna Gilmar for allowing me to add to the crowded PTA agenda. A mere thank you seems insufficient to address the assistance of Melinda Tomeing-Johnny in translating the survey instrument and advising me on how to best gather a group of outer island parents to take it. Komol tata kon am jiban kon survey eo im aolep kain ilo Wotje. Kwolukuun jouj im ij yokwe yuk.
At the University of Hawaii, I would like to thank Nathan Patla for being a constant source of friendly reminders, technical assistance, and humor. In addition, I thank Hunter McEwan and Eileen Tamura for their competent leadership and magnificent skill at finding the perfect advisor for this research. Which leads to Dr. Tim Donahue, who served as the guiding force for the conception of this project, on a jet-laggged July afternoon at the Marshall Islands Resort. Your creativity, dedication to education in the Micronesian region, and knack for showing up in the Marshall Islands during just the right weeks to prod along this research has made me a better student, a better researcher, and a more sane individual. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Finally, thank you Rachel Miller, my final reader and, most importantly, dear friend. Kommol tata.
Last, I would like to thank my vast support network of friends and family, who have shaken their heads in disbelief at my continued choices to return to the Pacific, and yet have supported me through email, snail mail and even the occasional care package. Thank you for firmly encouraging me to pursue graduate school even when I would rather have ignored it for “just one more year,” and even more of a komol for encouraging me to choose the University of Hawaii: Louis Blair, Bob Hogan, Rob Perrons, Wine and Lincoln Lakjohn, Lyn O’Hare, Aaron Malenke, Bates Canon, Katie Green, Isaiah Mosteller, Kari Wiss, and the whole Nimmer clan.
Effective Teaching in a Cross-Cultural Setting:
Comparing the Values of
Community Members and Teachers
in the Marshall Islands
Chapter I: Introduction
Background: Republic of the Marshall Islands
Situated about 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii and 3,000 miles northeast of New Zealand, the Republic of the Marshall Islands consists of 1,231 islands and 29 coral atolls spread across the Equatorial Pacific. The capital, Majuro, has an approximate population of 26,000; and Ebeye, the other urban center, is home to 13,000 people. The remaining 16,000 Marshallese live scattered among outer islands.
It was missionaries who brought the first schools to the Marshall Islands in the second half of the 19th century. Today, all but one of the private schools—Majuro Cooperative School—continues to be operated by Christian organizations. During the Japanese occupation prior to and during World War II, the occupying government made schooling mandatory for most children. Their legacy survives today as many older adults can understand the Japanese language and even use it regularly for basic counting tasks (Hogan, Nimmer, 2009).
The modern era of public education was established after World War II under the United States’ Trust Territory of the Pacific. Since the nuclear tests in the 1940s, the United States has been a major supporter of education in the Marshall Islands. Elementary schools have been built on nearly every inhabited outer island. The first public high school, Marshall Islands High School, was established in Majuro in1963, followed in the 1970s by Jaluit High School. Both schools began as boarding schools with a purpose to educate the brightest students throughout the island region. The third public high school, Northern Islands High School, was established on Wotje in 1997, followed in 2003 by Laura High School, which is located on the rural end of Majuro Atoll. A fifth public high school opened in Kwajalein Atoll in 2004. Today, both Wotje, with approximately 275 students, and Jaluit with nearly 350 students, are boarding schools that serve Outer Islanders from a dozen widely dispersed atolls. The others are day schools and students live with their families.
Nevertheless, the mobile nature of Marshallese and their loosely defined family units continue to make it difficult to maintain school attendance requirements (WASC Self-Study, 2009). Another difficulty is language. Although English is the required language of instruction beyond the 3rd grade, according to Low, Penland, & Heine, H. (2005), the directive is ignored in nearly all public schools because students and even teachers lack sufficient English skills.
Today, the great educational need is for qualified teachers. The problem is greatest on rural islands where the majority of the elementary school teachers hold only a high school diploma (Heine, 2007). The shortage of qualified teachers is so great that only 2 percent of the primary teachers and 36 percent of the secondary teachers hold a bachelors or graduate degree. In fact, 32 percent of the teachers have high school degrees with only some post-secondary courses (Education Overview, 2009). Even teachers who wish to further their education are limited due to their isolation and finances. Moreover, many schools in the Marshall Islands lack adequate textbooks, teaching aids, computers, and Internet access. The educational dilemma is further exacerbated by the emigration of skilled workers (Iding & Skouge, 2005, Heine, 2002).
The United States has provided volunteer teachers to boost student achievement and to give local teachers time off for professional development training. The Peace Corps began the first volunteer teacher program in the Marshall Islands in the 1960s. More recently, the Dartmouth Volunteer Teaching Program and Harvard University’s WorldTeach have joined in sending volunteer teachers.
WorldTeach, a non-profit, non-governmental organization, was founded by a group of Harvard students in 1986, with the first cohort of volunteers assigned to the Marshall Islands in 2002. The goal of the WorldTeach Program is to develop a sustainable program of teacher development by providing one-year substitutes for local teachers so they can attend college-level education courses. Volunteer teachers receive training, language preparation, and field support designed to empower teachers to make an impact that will last long after they leave. The volunteers work as full-time teachers in their host schools. Most volunteers live with a host family or on the school campus, and participate fully in the life of their host community.
In the Marshall Islands, the majority of WorldTeach volunteers are placed in schools on outer islands where the need is greatest. The volunteer teachers substitute to enable local teachers to go on sabbatical for further education.
Dartmouth Volunteer Teachers work in teams of two to four teachers in schools that have great need for qualified teachers. They do not necessarily serve as substitute teachers, but rather, the Dartmouth program maintains a cohort of teachers in the same high-need schools, year after year.
Introduction
Two-hundred years ago, Christian missionaries brought the first models of mass education to the communities they served. They focused on building literacy in order to teach Biblical lessons to their newly-converted followers. Christian missionaries were perhaps the first group of educators to enter cross-cultural classrooms on a broad scale. These classrooms were open to Australian Aborigines, Hawaiians, Native Americans, and other indigenous groups. In addition, Christian missionaries opened classrooms to Whites in Appalachia and the Ozarks in the early 20th Century. In all of these contexts, the missionaries were entering teacher-student relationships in which they did not share a common culture or even language, in many cases. The status quo was to teach the language and culture of the educator, rather than incorporate the background of the students.
Beginning in the 1960s, the United States Federal Government sent thousands of young, idealistic Peace Corps Volunteer teachers to remote villages across South America, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. While these teachers received some cross-cultural training and enrolled in language lessons, they did not learn a lot about what the local communities valued in educators. Thirty years later programs like Teach for America and the various Teaching Fellows programs in the United States’ largest cities heavily recruit Ivy League graduates to take up positions as teachers in failing urban and rural schools. These programs lead the new teachers through an intense orientation including educational philosophy, teaching pedagogy, and the basic statistics about the schools in which they will serve. Never, though, do these teachers—like the missionaries and Peace Corps Volunteers before them who taught in cross-cultural situations—learn about what the local stakeholders actually value in effective educators.
Since 2002, more than 360 mostly-new, mostly-American teachers have come to the Republic of the Marshall Islands to serve in the WorldTeach and Dartmouth Volunteer Teaching programs, as well as Majuro Cooperative School, the only secular U.S.-accredited school in the country. The volunteer programs work in collaboration with the Marshall Islands Ministry of Education to provide staff for the public elementary and high schools, whereas Majuro Cooperative School is a non-profit, private school, serving students in preschool through high school. While the Dartmouth Volunteer Teaching Program recruits only from their own Ivy League campus, the Harvard-based WorldTeach program has employed teachers from across the United States, Canada, Barbados, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Like WorldTeach, Majuro Cooperative School recruits from around the globe and has employed teachers from the United States, St. Croix, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Fiji, and Japan. Most of these expatriate teachers in all three programs have never traveled or lived in the Pacific, much less the Marshall Islands. The majority engage in one-year contracts as first-year teachers.
In general, these teachers report having positive experiences and believe their work has made a difference in the lives of their students (Hogan, Nimmer, 2009). In many schools, these volunteers are considered to be “favorite teachers” by their students. The other side of these positive personal relationships is that some high-level officials question the effectiveness of the volunteer programs (Stege, 2010).
There are few assessment measures used by the programs, or by the Ministry of Education, to determine the expatriate teachers’ effectiveness in the public schools or to measure student achievement. In fact, until last year the Ministry of Education used only the Marshall Islands Standard Achievement Test (MISAT) in 3rd, 6th, and 8th grades and the Pacific Islands Literacy Test (PIL) in 4th grade. In 2009, they instituted a high school assessment, the MISAT-IV and V for 10th and 12th grades. While these tests can offer insight into the effectiveness of curriculum, teaching, and school performance, they cannot necessarily be used to assess the effectiveness of individual teachers or of the U.S.-based teaching programs because the expatriate teachers do not necessarily work with students in the tested grades. Also, the MISAT tests English, math and Marshallese while the PIL assesses only English and math. Most of the Dartmouth and WorldTeach volunteers teach English in addition to science, health and other classes that are not covered by the standardized tests.
Majuro Cooperative School is able to cite the MISAT data to assert their teachers are effective because their school has ranked at the top of all public and private schools in the country for the last several years. However, some attribute this to other factors such as parental involvement, opportunities available to the students due to their socio-economic status, superior textbook and material resources, and the much-smaller class sizes in comparison to the urban public schools.
The WorldTeach program administers a Principal Survey each year which assesses the program and teachers on topics such as volunteer support (eg. site visits, host family arrangements), teacher work ethic and qualifications, and whether the principal would like a volunteer the next year. While this survey provides useful information for program improvement, it does not actually assess the effectiveness of the teacher nor does it ask the principals what they consider to be important qualifications or characteristics for the next teacher who will come to their school.