NTEASEE harmony

NTEASEE is the Akan word for harmony and understanding one another.

It was chosen as a name for our link project by a group of Ghanaian and British teachers who worked together last year to put together our successful bid for British Council funding to strengthen the curriculum links between our schools.

Groups of students and teachers from UCTC have been visiting Ghana since the original visit by a group of 11 back in 2001. Links with Buoyem Village were established the following year as a result of the Iroko Arts KS4 project which was part of the Uckfield Festival.

British Council support and funding has enabled us to arrange the first return visit of Ghanaian students and teachers who will be arriving in Uckfield in June 2007.

The principle aim of this project is to build on the highly successful cultural exchange which we have established over the last 4 years between AFSTS and UCTC.

Growing out of this, our aim now is to develop over the next three years an open channel of communication using the Internet as an interactive and dynamic resource to support teaching and learning across the curriculum in both schools. It is our intention that this link will be sustainable beyond the three year initiation period, and that interactive learning between the two schools will become a regular feature of curriculum planning and development.

Through this development we are aiming to support teachers and students in both schools to understand the complexity of development issues in the South and the North.

We aim to address our mutual tendency to simplify issues to the point of inaccuracy due to our lack of awareness of social, economic and political factors which determine the status quo in our respective countries.

We believe that this is the kind of understanding which can only come from the immediacy of personal contact and the development of trust that enables us to ask difficult questions of each other to support critical thinking and deep understanding.