Director's Blog

I am always astounded at the varied and rich learning experiences at SOIS that occur on a weekly basis. Last week was especially abundant as we look forward to the winter break. The PYP students on Friday were wonderful in their performance at the winter concert under the guidance of our ES music teacher Sarah Bonner. The standing-room only crowd had their hearts warmed with Christmas cheer that only children can produce. There was singing, dancing, playing of instruments – a true demonstration of learning music.

Above are lights designed by grade 5 students using Japanese washi paper. They were so good I wanted to buy a couple of them for my home! It is interesting to see the different designs from the students. Our school is full of art works from the students.

We had a special night on Wednesday with the annual students versus teachers basketball game. The boys’ varsity team was too much for the “fossils” again this year, defeating us 47-41 in a close game. It is good practice for the team and a good workout for us.

Visiting artist Allison Samuels gave a talk to our diploma program visual arts students on Friday. She described her experience as a working artist in New York City. The students had questions about attending art school, starting her own business, and how to follow one’s passion. As with all young people who enjoy the visual arts, finding a balance between making a living and making art is always difficult. Allison is a fabric artist and next week will be giving some embroidery workshops.

In the photo above, SIS principal, Mayumi Ito putts through an obstacle course in our annual Two Schools Golf Cup. We are always finding ways for our two schools to work together. Each day last week, a different hole was set up in the faculty lounge and an OIS staff member was paired with an SIS staff member. It was funny to hear cheers throughout the day coming from the usually quiet break area. The event was small, but important in encouraging communication between the two schools. I have found in my career that doing fun activities together, allows for more collaboration throughout the year.

And finally, I wanted to share this photo of the faculty at the All School Production auditions. They evaluated the singing and dancing talent of our students. The cast for this year’s musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is set and rehearsals started last week. Students, parents, and teachers from grades 3-12 are involved. Much goes into the production including the designing and building of sets and props, perfecting the songs and dances, making costumes, managing the stage, live music, sound quality, lights, etc. It brings us all together and it should be an entertaining performance in February.

One of the traditions of celebrating Christmas is the act of giving. This can take the form of presents to each other, but also, it can mean giving to the poor. Not only money, but time as well. Serving the community and helping the least fortunate in our society is important to OIS. We have many initiatives from K – 12 led by our students and faculty that lend support to the poor.

• The Grade 1 students are collecting money, rice, soap, underwear, and sleeping bags for the homeless in Osaka. Our students regularly visit the Sannoh Childrens Center in Nishinariku. There is still time for you to donate to the cause, and you can find deposit boxes in the genkan.
• Grade 11 student Sawako Tachibana is promoting the Nozomi Project, a non-profit organization helping women in the Ishinomaki region. Nozomi means “hope” in English and one of the initiatives Nozomi Project does is take broken pottery left in the wake of the tsunami and turn it into beautiful jewelry. Sawako is raising funds to give to the organization.
• The SOIS Eco Club continues to collect paper for Gyokokai, a shelter for formerly homeless, physically disabled people in the Nishinariku part of Osaka. They are also starting to collect aluminum. Gyokkai collects the paper monthly for processing. The Eco Club also purchased 20 planters with the grades 3 and 4 students are adopting. They will take care of the plants and place them in the balcony in front of the elementary classrooms.
• The elementary school through fundraising efforts donated $450 to Bobonaro, a NGO providing potable water in schools in Timor Leste. This was done through Kopernik, whose founder, Toshi Nakamura, an Osakan native, started. He visited our school last year.
• Other donations from OIS went to Canaan Village, a facility near Fukushima that houses adults with disabilities and to the School of Hope in Cambodia.
• The grade 11 service trip this March will be to Cebu, Phillipines. They are raising money and building a playground for the children at a disadvantaged school.
• The grade six students visited ARK (Animal Refuge Kansai) and also raised funds for the refuge.
• The grade 10 students are working with our neighbor, the Senri Rehabilitation Hospital. They volunteer and assist speech pathologists, physical therapists and other specialists with the patients.

I would like to wish everyone in our community a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Let this time of peace and giving inspire you to help others.

 

(This is the second in a series of KG personnel who play a role at our school.)

Atushide Sakakura is our head of campus and visits our school on a monthly basis for one of our main administrative meetings. Administrators from the school also have frequent chances to meet up with him when they visit the main Kwansei Gakuin (KG) Uegahara campus. He is an administrative trustee of the KG Educational Foundation with overseeing responsibility for all the KG K-12 schools and a professor at KG university in the School of Humanities. A native of Kyoto, he has bachelors and masters degrees from KG University in the field of Chinese history. He feels it important that for students to be global or internationally-minded, they must first understand their neighbors.

Professor Sakakura enjoys his time on the SOIS campus. He sees that the students here have more choice in what they learn than in the average Japanese school, something he sees as a positive trait of the education we offer, as he thinks students are happier and learn more when they can decide for themselves what path their learning will take. His time also spent in K-12 schools brings him back to a time earlier in his career when he wanted to be a teacher in a high school instead of a professor and he likes being around younger students.

Besides being an expert in Chinese history and a leader on the KG Board of Trustees, Sakakura sensei enjoys spending time with his grandchildren and is a skilled curer (smoker) of different kinds of meat.

Sakakura sensei’s experience and common sense have helped our school immensely. He is a strong advocate for the Senri and Osaka International Schools. He always has the best interests of our students in his focus. The campus head plays a very important role in representing our campus within the KG foundation.

This is the first in a series of posts introducing the members of Kwansei Gakuin University who play a role at our school. The goal of this series is to improve communication between OIS and KG and strengthen the bonds between the university and OIS.

Reverend Musubi Tabucchi is our SOIS Campus Supervisor on behalf of Kwansei Gakuin University. He has a variety of roles within the KG foundation, but finds time to be at our campus for at least two days per week. Reverend Musubi, besides his role a supervisor of our campus, is also a professor in the school of education and the dean of chaplains, coordinating the entire Christian program for the university. He started at KG in 1981 and has been working with our campus since negotiations started with the Senri International School Foundation and KG.

He is a native of Ashiya City located on the Kobe side of the Osaka Bay. Reverend Tabucchi has bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees in theology from KG. He also has done post graduate work at Kings College in London. He is also an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ in Japan. Reverend Tabuchi is a third-generation Christian minister. His grandmother was part of the first group of women ministers to be ordained in Japan.

Reverend Tabucchi has grown quite fond of OIS in his time here. He feels he is part of both the KG and OIS families. His international perspective has been invaluable for our transition to KG. His daughter is a graduate of international schools and his multicultural insights, wisdom, and commitment to international education have been invaluable for our community.

 

 

I had the privilege of accompanying OIS students on Saturday to their visit to the Sannoh Children’s Center. The mission of the center is to provide after school care for children in one of the poorest wards in the city of Osaka. In the photo above, center president Maeshima Mami leads a reflection discussion with our students and other volunteers. The students had returned from  the yomawari or night patrol. Adult volunteers and children once a month prepare and deliver onigiri, which is Japanese rice wrapped in seaweed, and blankets to the homeless men of the Kamagasaki neighborhood of the Nishinari-ku ward. Kamagasaki is the popular name of the area and its use is discouraged by the government as it is associated with the large homeless population.

The homeless of Nishinari-ku are mostly elderly male blue collar laborers. For the usual reasons, like gambling addiction, alcohol, mental health, etc, they have come upon tough times. Mami-san gave the three groups instructions before leaving the center. I walked with one of the groups led by her, and our students encountered about 10 homeless men, sleeping on the streets of shopping arcades. They were usually against a wall and they spread newspaper on the ground and put up cardboard pieces to shelter them a bit from the elements.  All of them were very gentle and appreciative of the blankets and food. There are also shelters in the area that provide some beds and organize 1-day odd jobs for them with companies or people needing manual labor. There are also low cost hotels if they have some income.

I thought the Sannoh Children’s Center was crazy for having children walking the streets in such a notorious ward at night. It turned out to be quite safe and heartwarming, as the men were so grateful that someone noticed them and wanted to help. Crime rates are extremely low in Japan compared to other industrialized nations and violent crime. I was much safer in Nishinari than in the poor urban areas of my home country of the United States.

When we got back to the center, we all reflected on our experience. We gained an understanding of the plight of the homeless men in Japan. The homeless are not to be feared, but to be cared for. The work of the Sannoh Children’s Center and others in the ward should be supported more by the government and private citizens. I would like to thank our CAS and Community and Service Coordinator, Lyn Melville-Rea, for organizing this program for the school. She has been taking students down there for years and the center and our students have benefited from her efforts.

It is difficult to grow grass in Japan and the courtyard lawn was looking very patchy. A few weeks ago the grade 3 and kindergarten students got together to seed the area. As you can see in the photo below, their efforts paid off. The students not only helped make the school campus look better, but they also learned about plant biology and lawn care.

I would like to thank the teachers and students who made the project a success.

I spent some time in classes this week and wanted to share some of my observations. In the photo above, the grade 9 humanities class is discussing political cartoons from the time of the end of World War I. The students are learning about the Treaty of Versailles and instead of just memorizing dates, names, places, etc., they are applying their knowledge and thinking critically about the issues. Their major assignment for the unit will be to write a letter to the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, taking the perspective of the defeated Germans, protesting the conditions in the agreement. This is very “IB” to have students put themselves in other’s position. I got the opportunity to help the group above, analyze the political cartoons. Our cartoon showed the hypocrisy of the allies, condemning German’s militarism while demonstrating even more militarism.

In other classes, Mr. Elshout was demanding perfection from the trumpet section and a short piece from the musical Chicago.  Next door, the high school choir was practice Carol of the Bells, a popular Christmas carol, based on Ukrainian folk music. The boys were supplying a low vocal harmony to the girls main melodic piece. A group of MYP students in physical education was practicing a choreographed dance routine. For the dance unit, the students have to demonstrate certain individual elements in artistic unity with their group members. The teenagers love it and dance is a lifelong skill that makes people feel good while they are doing it. Mr. Routh recorded the performance on his iPad and the students critically watched it, adjusting their routine in anticipation of the final performance next class. Another physical education class was doing the 12-minute run test. Two of the grade 10 students I asked, completed over 14 laps of the soccer field, which comes to about 2,700 meters.

I ended my tour in the kindergarten A classroom. Mrs. Dawn Inada, does a spin on the traditional “show and tell” activity and asks the students to bring in an object in a bag and then she gives clues to the students for them to guess what is in the bag. The student with the bag gets to pick students and it is much more interactive than show and tell. The object inside the bag was a pine cone and we were all wondering how you say it in Japanese.

It is always inspiring to spend time with the students and makes all the hard work we do in the offices worth it.

Students use the recording studios often. Last year they were upgraded to handle digital recording. Throughout the years, the elementary students have done broadcasts, administration occasionally does announcements, and much editing for our musicals and films is completed there.

Below is a broadcast from last month. In recent years, the videos are uploaded to Youtube and you can see more of them at this link on the activities web site.

The banner above was from our hosting of an IB PYP workshop this weekend at the school. Over 100 educators from 26 different countries came to SOIS to attend 5 different workshops in English and Japanese.

Last Thursday I attended the fall meeting of the Heads of School of the IB Association of Japan (IBAJ). IBAJ is one the numerous regional associations that has formed in countries throughout the world. This association is especially important here in Japan, because the IB Asia Pacific Regional Office overseas over 600 IB schools in 26 different countries. The association provides the IB schools in Japan, a forum to collaborate and support each other. The association also is a unified voice towards the Asia Pacific Regional Office in dealing with challenges specific to Japan. There are 27 schools in Japan currently offering at least one of the IB’s three programmes (PYP,MYP,DP). We at the Osaka International School of Kwansai Gakuin offer all three and we are one of only three schools in Japan doing so.

Some of the meeting was spent discussing the structure of IBAJ as it is a relatively new organization. We also had video conferences with members of the IB Asia Pacific Regional Team, including the Heads of School Services and Professional Development. They will also be visiting the Kobe/Osaka area on November 22-23 and I hope to get a chance to meet them in person.

We also received an update on the status of Japanese Ministry of Education’s (MEXT)  initiative of attempting to have 200 Article 1 (Japanese national) schools earn IB authorization by the year 2018. This is a move by the Japanese government to train its future workforce to be more globally competitive in this interconnected world. MEXT is working on a collaborative project with the IB to offer IB courses in Japanese. The idea is for students to earn a Dual Language IB Diploma, with 2 courses in English and 4 courses in Japanese. The IB website has this link in both English and Japanese with more information about the initiative. The list of Diploma Programme courses  now offered in Japanese is growing and includes economics, history. biology, physics, and as we learned at the meeting, mathematics is now in Japanese.  s.

As for the 200 IB schools by 2018, progress is slow because of many factors.  There is a lack of IB expertise and the costs are high for either training staff or getting qualified teachers. There are national curriculum demands that might make it difficult for schools to fit the IB requirements in the students already busy schedule. Finally, there are also language and culture barriers to get through to understand what it takes to start an IB curriculum. We spoke with Ayumi Hoshino, the IB Developer for Japan and she highlighted the numerous workshops taking place throughout Japan. I remember she said there were about 12 schools moving that are applying or going to apply for authorization.

We are SOIS are in an ideal situation. The Senri International School received a grant three years ago to explore the IB curriculum and over 70% of their faculty has received some training in IB pedagogy. They are moving towards offering some classes in IB in the near future. The eventual goal would be to have the full, IB Dual Language Diploma available for all SIS students. OIS faculty would serve as mentors and the two faculties could work together to improve their teaching. It would also benefit OIS to have more students in the Diploma Programme and give us the chance to offer more courses, possibly IB Theatre, different foreign languages, and even going towards the IB Career-related Certificate., and be the first school in Japan to offer the fourth IB programme. The expansion of our IB courses would cause the two faculties to work more closely together, living the vision of the two school concept. This also fits in well with KG University and KG Senior High School winning the Super Global Awards from the government. SOIS is a role model for the globalization of education in Japan.

This February 2014 article from the Japan Times gives some more background of the MEXT-IB collaboration. The article featured former Head of OIS, John Searle (excerpt below)

Osaka International School of Kwansei Gakuin is one of 27 schools in Japan currently offering the IB diploma in English. John Searle, the head of school, says the institution has been following the curriculum for many years and that they have a relatively deep understanding of its value in an international context. He says that offering the dual-language diploma within the national framework will “bring the benefit of significant diversity to Japanese education.”

“Our own experience has shown us that an interesting additional value of offering the IB programs has been the stimulus of discussion, ideas and learning created between all involved,” Searle says. “Such discussion is the bedrock of change and has far wider implications beyond just program implementation. On a larger scale, if students, parents, teachers, schools and universities have the conversations required to understand what the IB programs are about, it really could have a huge impact on how people think about education and learning here in Japan.”