Members of staff from Ondokuz Mayis University present Vice Chancellor Professor Graham Upton, with an engraved mirror as a memento of their visit, watched by Professor Richard McGregor
Do children from different countries acquire the same family and social values by the end of their primary school years or does their country of origin, allied to their culture, dictate this acquisition? As part of a project being run in collaboration with a university in Turkey, lecturers at the University of Cumbria are endeavouring to find out.
Richard McGregor, Paul Cammack and Richard Palmer, all from the Faculty of Education, initially visited Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey as part of a joint project with the education faculty there.
The project will survey between 400 and 500 pupils in Turkey and a similar number in England and and then compare their acquisition of "universal values". Also, Year 6 teachers are being surveyed to discover if they have received any formal training in the teaching of such values and how they individually, and the school in general, goes about teaching and then measuring the acquisition by the pupils.
It is hoped the project will identify commonalities as well as differences and simultaneously throw up any areas of divergent practice.
Following the earlier visit to Turkey, the Cumbria and North Lancashire project team hosted five colleagues from Ondokuz Mayis University under the leadership of Professor Yakup Keskin. Together they visited ten local schools in Lancaster, Blackburn, Blackpool and Kendal. The schools had all agreed to take part in the exercise and the team hopes to feed back to them with useful advice once the data has been analysed.
The results of the project are still to be finalised and the findings will then be presented at conferences, and although it is too early to say in detail what will be revealed, it has already become clear that there are some significant cultural differences which affect the way children are taught in both countries. For example, in Turkey there is greater emphasis on the family, and teachers will often go into the homes to talk to the parents, as a result of which they become part of the ‘extended family. In Turkey however the teaching tends to be more formal and instruction based compared with the more "learning partnership" approach now generally found in Britain.
While at the University of Cumbria, the Turkish researchers met with the Vice Chancellor, Professor Graham Upton and the Dean of Education, Dr Sam Twiselton. to whom they expressed the wish that further exchange programmes could be planned for the future
Posted on Monday 18 July 2011