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Exchange program sends teacher to Japan
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Elaine Kennedy, founder and executive director of New Morning School in Plymouth, will be one of 200 educators traveling to Japan on a Fulbright Scholarship.In a few short weeks, Elaine Kennedy will embark on the trip of a lifetime.
Kennedy, the founder and executive director of New Morning School in Plymouth, will be among the 200 educators to travel to Tokyo as part of the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund (JFMF).
The program, sponsored by the Japanese government, is designed to foster a mutual understanding of Japanese and American culture through a teacher exchange program.
“I’m very excited about it,” she said. “I get to go and learn great things about Japan and then I bring it back to share with the students.”
The Fulbright program is a three-week visit that relies heavily on interaction between teachers during the trip and ways educators will use their experience to spread cultural diversity when they return.
Kennedy was selected from a pool of almost 2,300 applicants for the program. She is the first from the school to go on the trip and that has sparked plenty of interest throughout the students and staff at New Morning, which is off Haggerty Road in Plymouth Township.
“The teachers here are building on this,” she said. “They’re thinking up a lot of exciting programs.”
Kennedy has already started to prepare for her trip, working her way through a dictionary of Japanese phrases. With a tour book of Soka, one of the cities she’ll visit, a near constant by her side, she said she’s ready for a first-person immersion in Japanese culture.
She’ll get one, too.
The three-week stay in Japan will begin in Tokyo with an orientation on Japanese life and culture and meetings with Japanese officials and educators. The group breaks up into smaller teams of 20 and travels to several host cities, where they will visit elementary middle and high schools and stay overnight with a Japanese family.
She said one of the things she’s looking most forward to the stay with the family.
“It’s really the best way to get a feel for the country,” she said.
She’s also very interested, of course, in the educational system.
“We hear so much about how well Japanese students perform on tests,” she said. “I’m really curious at how the educational system works.”
Interaction back home is a big part of the program, she said. And, although Kennedy will be half a world away from her students, technology will allow them to keep in near constant contact. She said she’s working on a blog site to talk with students and staff at New Morning while she’s away. The time difference will help—the end of her day overseas corresponds with the beginning of the school day, here.
Kennedy said the school has other activities planned when she returns, too. She learned about her acceptance in the program last spring, which was enough time for her to incorporate the trip into the theme of the current school year: Hands Across the World.
She said she hopes to share her experience with students, staff, extended families and alumni as well as local community leaders when she returns.
“We have lots of ideas on how to spread the information,” she said.
New Morning School is the only pre-kindergarten through eighth grade parent cooperative school in the state. Kennedy, who has 35 years experience as an educator, founded it in 1973.
