Valley Streamer studies abroad Down Under

Shanice Green, 22, was behind in her credit hours at SUNY Cortland last year after transferring there as a junior from Adelphi University. She had always imagined that studying abroad would be part of her college experience, but advisers told her she wouldn’t have time during the academic year.

The childhood education major wanted to finish her student teaching requirement in a summer and fall program in Australia, but she knew that her parents, who emigrated from Jamaica when they were adolescents, couldn’t afford the $20,000 cost.

Green’s mother had participated in an educational opportunity program at Skidmore College, and she encouraged Green to pursue her goal despite the financial constraints. Green applied to a shorter program that her school offered, and was accepted. She was also awarded a prestigious Gilman Scholarship, which Congress funds to provide assistance to students whose lack of finances might prevent them from studying abroad. It covered $2,500 of the trip’s projected $7,400 price tag.

The trip lasted for four weeks, from mid-June to mid-July. Green and 21 other SUNY students spent two weeks visiting 11 schools in Queensland, Australia, and learning their approaches to and philosophies about education. The group spent two more weeks on a bus tour of the tropical Sunshine Coast.

Seeing Australia’s education system up close caused Green to reflect on the one she came from, she said.

“Education is more open there,” she said. “There’s more opportunity for choice. Here, things are more restricted.”

Other differences caught her attention: there were pathways provided for specific vocations, including hairdressing and engineering. Subjects were housed in different buildings. Tea was a feature throughout each day. The approach to professionalism struck Green as more friendly, with colleagues addressing each other by their first names.

She noticed larger societal differences, too. There were no school shootings, and security measures at schools were less strict. The media seemed less biased, she said, as there was more objective reporting and less opinion voiced than what she was used to from American news outlets.

Green’s group visited the Outback, Australia’s vast desert interior region, where they saw kangaroos, wallabies, koalas and dingoes. They also learned about the country’s troubled history with its indigenous Aboriginal people, and the “Stolen Generation” of children who were systematically taken from their families by the government and church missions between 1900 and the 1960’s, to be raised in institutions or by white foster families. They learned about the poverty, malnutrition and high rates of school dropouts that continue to plague that community, much as those issues plague indigenous communities in the United States.

The experience was, Green said, a mind-expanding one. She will volunteer at two Lindenhurst elementary schools this fall as her required service project. She plans to work with economically disadvantaged students between 10 and 13 years old, who she wants to teach the value of seeing other parts of the world.

Green said her trip changed the way she relates to the rest of the world.

“Being in another land, it helps me be a global citizen,” she said.