Four Wilbraham & Monson Academy faculty members have been invited to speak at three national conferences before the end of the 2015-16 academic year.
Dean of Faculty Walter Swanson will present twice, while Ms. Melody Rivera, Mr. Michael Dziura and Mr. Paul Bloomfield will also serve as expert panelists.
"It speaks well to the level of expertise they have as individuals and also that Wilbraham & Monson Academy is regarded as a leader for global information and global endeavors," Mr. Swanson said.
Mr. Swanson will present at the Global Forum on Girls' Education in New York City in February, and then will travel to the Global Educators Benchmark Group in New Orleans in April.
At the forum for girls' education, Mr. Swanson's will address independent girls' schools from throughout the country with a speech titled "Building Programs for Global Citizenship," where he will cover such school topics as curriculum, global travel and marketing.
"The Academy has a robust program," he said. "They want to see what they can learn from us and adapt it to the girls' schools model."
Mr. Swanson will team with Mr. Bloomfield when they speak at the annual conference for the Global Educators Benchmark Group. Mr. Bloomfield became seriously ill while on a school trip to Cambodia in March of 2015 and needed immediate medical attention. Their presentation, "Tragedy Averted: International SOS and School Case Study," will focus on the importance of International SOS, which was the company hired by WMA to handle such an emergency.
"We wanted to show a real case study of what happens when something minor happens and what happens when something major happens all in the same trip, with the same people in a place you really don't know, and in a health system you're unfamiliar with," Mr. Bloomfield said.
Ms. Rivera will also give a presentation at the GEBG, with her discussion on
"Graffiti, Argentina and the Brain: Changing Pedagogies in the World Language Classroom."
After studying in Argentina, through WMA's Global Educators Grant, Ms. Rivera restructured the curriculum for Spanish III to include a six-month learning project, capped with a visual graffiti activity complete with a gallery walk open to parents, students and faculty members.
"Throughout the six months the students learn everything: literature, grammar, vocabulary, the Argentinian economy ... it's learning with brain-based teaching strategies. It's more experience than explicit teacher instruction. The students are put in situations where they have to experience the content and information rather than the teacher sitting in the middle of the classroom spewing information.
"It puts everything I wanted in the curriculum together and to make sense for the student, with the end goal of the language composition. They're learning all of this – global economies and immigration issues in Argentina – but they're doing so by acquiring the language."
Mr. Dziura has been invited to be a speaker in Los Angeles in April at the TABS Conference, which is the largest conference for prep schools in the country. Mr. Dziura will deliver "Putin Is So Cool: Critical Tools For Cultural Understanding" to the TABS Conference, which was searching for international topics.
The subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin came up in a one of Mr. Dzuira's classes a few years ago. The students were mainly domestic, and mainly anti-Putin. One Russian student, however, after listening to the discussion, said, "Putin is so cool."
"It caused a big stir in the classroom," Mr. Dziura said. "Over the last few years I've been developing these talks about media literacy and using the traditional tools of rhetorical criticism to find common values and common ground."
"What tools do we, as global educators, provide our students to help them work past biases and bridge the communication gap in order to arrive at a place where they can better understand themselves, their peers, and the world?"