The TA/FLAP Programs at EIL

In my previous blog, I said that "I could go on for pages about these programs." I realized that I already had on my computer a fairly detailed description of these programs - all I needed to do was paste it in here. So that's what I'm going to do. "Sometime, in the spring of 1975, I became the head of the Department of Curriculum Services at the Experiment of International Living (EIL), which was based in Brattleboro. The department had previously been staffed by two people, plus a secretary: Carol Jaensen and Gay Northrup. I no longer remember why they had both quit. I also had a colleague, Helen Seidler. Our secretary, Jane Roach, was a holdover, as I recall, from the previous staff, so she knew something of the ropes, but Helen and I were starting from scratch, and it was a daunting job. After a few months Jane quit and we hired a new secretary, Ann Hastings (?). This department ran four programs: The Teacher Ambassador program, (participants were called TA’s), the Foreign Language Assistant Program (participants were called FLAPs), the Schools Educational Exchange program (called SEE), and the US-France Teacher Exchange Program (no popular acronym, as I recall). The Teacher Ambassador program had an interesting history. The Experiment had been involved in training Peace Corps volunteers through its connection with Sergeant Shriver. It was Shriver, I think, who conceived of a new program which was dubbed "the reverse Peace Corps." Aware that the Peace Corps, while very rewarding to participants, had an inherently paternalistic element in it (and perhaps even racist), Shriver sought to bring black teachers from Africa to teach in U.S. schools. Somehow, he convinced Congress to fund such a program and one glorious year, 50 African teachers came to Baltimore to work in the public schools there! The Experiment took on the work of orienting these African teachers to the U.S. educational system in which they would be working. Not surprisingly, the Congress cancelled the funding after one year. Jack Wallace, Director of the School For International Training, had the brilliant idea of taking over the program, and he sat down at his typewriter and created the Teacher Ambassador program which kept the original idea - bringing teachers from other cultures to teach in U.S. schools - but broadened it to involve countries throughout the world, and schools all over the U.S. - essentially making use of EIL's 50-country membership and a network of EIL host families in the U.S. Thus, the TA program brought experienced teachers from all parts of the world (Europe, Africa, Asia and South America) to the U.S. to teach for one year in a local school, at any level from elementary through high school and occasionally post-secondary. There were about 25 teachers each year, and they were placed all over the country. We had the job of (1) finding schools in the U.S. that would hire a “foreign” teacher for a year, (2) recruit teachers from abroad who could function successfully in a US school, (3) bring the teachers to the EIL campus for a 6-week orientation session which Helen and I led, (4) arrange for the transportation of the teachers from their home country to the US, and then after orientation, to their assignment, (5) arrange for housing for them during their year (usually with Experiment host families), (6) provide moral support during the year of their placement. This program was funded by a fee paid by the local school. The fee was ridiculously low -- $8000. Out of this fee we paid for the cost of the teacher’s round-trip transportation from their home country to their assignment, a monthly living allowance, and all the administrative costs of the program – publicity, recruitment, orientation (room and board), plus all staff salaries, etc., and in addition were expected to contribute something like 20% of our income to general EIL overhead costs! The previous staff had been going into the red badly, and I was hired with the mandate to make this program cost-effective. The main thing I did to cut costs was to eliminate overseas travel for the staff. Previous staff had gone overseas to interview potential teachers, but that had been costly. The Experiment had offices in 50 countries, and to save money, we decided to have the applicant interviewed by his or her local Experiment staff person. It was not a foolproof screening process, but we could reduce the chances of an unsuitable person coming to the U.S. by providing clear guidelines for the interview, and for the most part, the teachers who came turned out to be remarkable people. Out of fifty or so teachers we recruited in this way, only one had to go home during the year because he could not make the adjustment. The most challenging aspect of this work was finding schools in the U.S. who would hire a teacher. There were a number of obstacles. First of all, there had to be an openness to and awareness of the amazing potential for learning by bringing a teacher from another culture into the classroom – learning not only for the students, but for other teachers and for the community as well. Then, even if that was present, it was often politically or socially difficult for a superintendent to hire a teacher from another country when there were unemployed teachers in the local community. Sometimes we ran into problems with the teachers union. And if the teacher being hired was an additional item in the budget, it might seem like an unnecessary frill to some. Despite these and other difficulties, we were able to find two dozen or more schools to sign on each year. Sometimes the teacher simply assumed full responsibility for a class – e.g., they taught sixth grade that year, perhaps taking the place of a teacher on sabbatical. Sometimes they were hired to teach their native language – French, German, Spanish – to high school students. A private school in Buffalo, NY, the Calasanctius School, hired a teacher from Japan to teach Japanese. Sometimes a school district hired a teacher to be a cultural resource for the whole district; e.g., a Nigerian teacher worked in that way for the city of Cleveland, going every day to a different school and giving a program about Nigerian/African life and culture. (The question he got most often from students: “Do your people live in trees?”). The Foreign Language Assistant Program brought college-graduate young people to the U.S. from French, German or Spanish-speaking countries (usually, but not exclusively. France, Germany and Spain), to work as assistant native-speakers in language classrooms in the U.S. This was an easier program to recruit for because it did not “replace” a local teacher, and you had a language teacher in the local school going to bat for the program. FLAPs were always housed with a family in the community, and home stays for them were also easier to secure because they were young and fun to have around. Families with teen-age children were especially eager to host a FLAP. We had an orientation program in Vermont for FLAPs also, but not as long as the TA orientation. There were typically 30-35 FLAPs in a given year. SEE was a program in which a local language teacher took her entire class for an language immersion experience to France or Germany or Spain, or perhaps Guadeloupe, over the spring vacation period, always with a home-stay for everyone for most of the period. These programs were arranged by the Experiment Director in the host country. We had to recruit the teachers, who usually loved the idea, but might balk at the cost of the program (which actually was really inexpensive for what you got), or at the idea of having to organize the group. As I recall, the teacher got to go free if she or he recruited a certain number of participants, so that was an incentive. The U.S-France Teacher Exchange Program was very small, probably no more that two or three persons were involved at a time. It involved a US teacher going to France to teach for a year, and a French teacher coming to the US to teach for a year. It was not a direct exchange – I wish it could have been, but that would have been even harder to work out than it was. It was a frustrating program because you thought you had someone, and then they would back out, and that would disappoint the people at the other end who had made plans to receive a teacher. So then you scrambled to find a replacement. Or it could work the other way too – the school would back out at the last minute and then you had a disappointed teacher. I think we wondered sometimes if it was worth all the effort. Organizing, planning, publicizing, recruiting, twisting arms, writing scores of letters, making hundreds of phone calls—it was a lot of work. It turned out to be a 7-day a week job much of the year, and often went well into the evening. This was particularly true during orientation sessions – which filled a couple of months in the summer. We had to arrange housing and food for all the participants, of course, as well as the program of orientation. But I’ll have to say that this was the most wonderful part of the job. It was like having a microcosm of the United Nations in your backyard. We had gotten to know each of the TAs or FLAPS through their applications, (which included essays and photos) but did not actually met them in person until they arrived in Brattleboro, and it was immensely fascinating to see what they were actually like. In almost all cases, they were exceptionally fine people, especially the TA’s, and during our weeks with them we would really bond and become like a family. This was the part of the work that I could share with my family, and we would usually host the entire group of TAs or FLAPs at our house for a picnic, so that Shirley and the children could get to meet them. But it was also the case that this job kept me away from home probably more than any job I had ever had, especially during the “high season.” Another aspect of this job involved travel to visit TAs or FLAPs in their placements. It was impossible to visit everyone, of course – there was neither time nor money for that. But I did get to make one trip to visit several – in Ashtabula and Cleveland, OH, Anoka, MN, and, the saddest part, Cedar Rapids, IA, where I had the very painful task of sending a teacher back home, unwillingly. “Sharma” as we called him, was from New Delhi, and was an artist and dancer. He was a lovely and charming person in many ways, but we also knew from the orientation period that there could be problems, because he was also impractical, stubborn and insensitive to others. He was fixated on an idea that he hoped would happen in Cedar Rapids, but it was not what he had been hired to do, and no amount of discussion by us or by the administrators in Cedar Rapids could dissuade him from this idea. We sent him there hoping it would work out, and it did for a few weeks, but by about late October, the folks in Cedar Rapids had had it. We tried to suggest alternatives, and spent a lot of time on the phone with Sharma and with his supervisors. But their patience had run out. They flatly refused to keep him on any longer, and there was nowhere else for him to go but back to New Delhi. He became depressed and simply refused to budge from his quarters. So it was necessary for me to go there, actually help him pack up his things, take him to the airport, and put him on a plane to New Delhi. This was a painful duty for me to say the least. I tried to do it in as loving and gentle way as I knew how. In addition to the work that was directly related to the running of these programs, Helen Seidler and I also went to several conferences together where we would make a presentation on cross-cultural education, or “global education,” to teachers and administrators. As I recall one of those conferences was in Washington, D.C. Another was a gathering of private, independent schools. We also hosted at least one such conference ourselves on the EIL campus. These meetings were in part a way of getting our programs “out there” but also a way of getting the larger programs of the Experiment “out there,” and of course we always had brochures describing the various programs of the Experiment. These were interesting, you met a lot of people who had fascinating backgrounds, but they were also a lot of work and could be exhausting. The Experiment also went through a few “spasms” of organizational re-shuffling during my time there. A fair amount of time was spent just dealing with the Business Manager and other administrators at EIL – that was part of the job. But there were larger organizational issues that came up. E.g., one fall the entire EIL staff was taken to a retreat center on Cape Cod for a three-day brain-storming session to clarify our mission statement, re-formulate our objectives, plan strategies – whatever the current management jargon happened to be. A great deal got written down on newsprint pads, but nothing ever came of it. I only held this job for about 18 months, enough to go through two cycles of orientation. I would have stayed with longer, even though it was sort of a burn-out prone job. But a new president was hired at the Experiment, Alfredo Perez, who decided virtually unilaterally that the entire Curriculum Services Department and all our programs, were not making enough money for the Experiment. In a year and a half I had turned the department around to the point where it was no longer in the red – it was breaking even. Given another year, I might have been able to make that 20% contribution to EIL overhead (though we would have had to raise our fees – there was no way we could cut costs any lower, and raised fees would have made recruitment of schools harder). But we never had a chance to find out. With the stroke of a pen, our department was wiped out and Helen and I, and our secretary, Annie, were out of jobs. Despite the long hours, hard work and the many frustrations, I still regard the work I did at the Experiment as one of the most enjoyable and meaningful jobs I have ever held. I think that is due both to the people I was working with, and to the larger goal of international understanding which I felt I was helping to realize. Richard Bolles, in the workshop which I attended in 1975, taught an exercise which I think has a profound truth at the bottom of it: the exercise was called “What has to happen in order for that to happen?” He asked us to think of ultimate goals we would like to see realized in the world at large. We were encouraged to “think big,” not to limit our vision at all. One of my goals was world peace, the peoples of the world living in peace and harmony together, the end of war. Having articulated a goal like that, we then asked, “what has to happen for that to happen?” So we had to think of some penultimate goal that would lead to the peoples of the world living in peace and harmony. That might be, “people all over the world becoming aware that peoples of other cultures or nations are human beings like themselves with similar hopes and dreams.” Again we would ask, “what has to happen in order for that to happen?” And so on. The idea was to bring this causal sequence down to a level where you could actually see yourself being directly involved through your work. If you could feel that what you were doing in your work -- no matter how seemingly “minor” or “unimportant” -- was in some way part of such a causal chain, you would feel differently about your work. You would find more meaning and satisfaction in it. Contrariwise, if your work seemed to have no connection to any larger purpose that you could see, you would not be likely to be happy in it, no matter how good your were at it, or how much it paid. Perhaps that is an idealistic notion. However, I think it is true. In any case, I could see how my work with the TA’s and FLAPs etc., could lead to a larger goal of world understanding, peace and harmony. Not inevitably, of course, but it could be an important contributing factor. With the Department of Curriculum Services wiped out by a profit-oriented President of EIL, what was I to do? (By the way, Alfredo Perez did not stop with my department. He began to argue that the only thing that the Experiment should be doing is teaching English as a Second Language, because that’s where the money was. When the Board realized that given a free hand, he would destroy the Experiment, they got rid of him. That happened about a year later; too late for me). In retrospect, Perez’s action was a blessing in disguise. First of all because it probably rescued me from what was an impossible workload and schedule that could ultimately have killed me, or, failing that, led to a physical or mental breakdown. As wonderful as it was, it was just too much, and as long as I was under the gun to produce a “profit,” – that 20% contribution to overhead – I would never have been able to hire any help. But it also led to another truly remarkable job. My “savior” was again Jack Wallace. It was he who had originally hired me to be a part-time career counselor at SIT; it was he who had steered me to the role of Director of Curriculum Services; now he came up with another idea: Executive Director of the Vermont Higher Education Council, of which he was a member."

The 1975-76 group of Teacher Ambassadors