Last year, Monique Darrisaw-Akil traveled to an international education conference in Accra, Ghana, and saw an opportunity for a literacy lesson for young students in the Long Island school district she leads.
At the International Educators Summit, she met school leaders from a small Ghanaian village, and they began discussing a project that would engage students from both their communities, despite being an ocean apart, allowing them to learn from each other and improve their reading and writing at the same time.
The result was a partnership through which students from two elementary schools in New York’s Uniondale school district and the Achinakrom school in Ghana read the same children’s book—Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold, which highlights a young girl’s family traditions while growing up in New York City—and used it as the foundation for an international writing exercise and cultural exchange.
Darrisaw-Akil returned to Ghana this past summer for the same education conference, adding a visit to the Achinakrom school, further cementing the international partnership built around joint learning.
Through the experience, the Long Island superintendent has also gained insights into what makes an international sister school partnership successful.
A project that created a ‘sense of purpose’
When Darrisaw-Akil, who has led the 6,000-student Uniondale district since 2021, returned from the 2024 International Educators Summit, she continued the conversation with her Achinakrom school counterparts and leaders in her own district.
What they settled on was the project based on Tar Beach.
After reading the book, the students in all three participating schools wrote stories about their own cultures and families, and they uploaded them to a shared online platform. Then, the students in each school read the stories and analyzed the similarities and differences in their cultures.
The project exposed students to different cultures and challenged them to write compelling and thoughtful narratives about their own lives, Darrisaw-Akil said.
For the Uniondale students, it helped create a “sense of purpose” to know that children on a different continent would read and engage with their writing, she said.
“Knowing that there’s going to be young people just like them across the world who are going to read their stories added a level of meaning, connection, and purpose that we don’t always get with all of our assignments,” she said.
The project also served as an exercise in gratitude for the adults, she said.
“We’re not a rich district, but we realize that we have so much more than some other places, and we’ve been really grateful for the things that we do have, like working technology and access to books and other resources,” Darrisaw-Akil said. “We’ve been so impressed with the work that the teachers from our partner school are doing without all the bells and the whistles and the things that we take for granted.”
In July of this year, when Darrisaw-Akil returned to Accra for the International Educators Summit, she delivered a presentation about the collaboration with the Achinakrom school’s head teacher, Linda Sefa, and other Uniondale leaders.
Darrisaw-Akil brought her students’ writing as well as a quilt they had made for their partner school. After the conference, she traveled to the school and delivered the gifts.
“It was just a tremendous, tremendous eye-opening experience—a transformative experience,” Darrisaw-Akil said.
A relationship based on learning, not charity
When she visited the school in Ghana, Darrisaw-Akil brought basic supplies like pencils and crayons to donate, as well as a couple of laptops.
That was the first time the American school district had donated supplies to its counterpart, despite knowing there was a need.
It was an intentional decision Darrisaw-Akil made to ensure the Uniondale schools understood their relationship “wasn’t built on giving to them” because it “establishes a power imbalance we didn’t want.”
“I wanted it to be clear that our relationship was built on learning,” Darrisaw-Akil said.
Now, as the Uniondale district’s new school year gets underway, the second year of the international partnership is also shifting into gear.
Darrisaw-Akil hopes that—despite the four- to five-hour time difference and uneven access to technology—the schools will find ways to allow the students to meet and talk over a video call, something that wasn’t possible in the first year of the partnership.
Successful partnerships are built on shared goals, mutual respect
Districts interested in establishing partnerships with schools outside of the United States don’t have to “travel across the world like I did in order to make things happen,” Darrisaw-Akil said.
There are some global networks, like the Global School Alliance, that can help introduce districts to international schools with similar educational objectives and partnership goals, she said.
That’s why it’s important for any district considering such a partnership to clearly establish a specific “learning goal” for students, Darrisaw-Akil said, whether it’s a exploring cultural topic, developing literacy skills, or focusing on a shared academic project.
Schools should also consider how the partnership might work practically and the challenges they might run into throughout the process, and how to address them.
Is there a drastic time difference? Does one school have much more limited access to technology than the other? Would staff members benefit from a quick training to establish “a mutual, equitable starting point?” Darrisaw-Akil said.
“We have to ensure that our educators understand it’s not that we’re teaching them everything because we’re ‘the great Americans,’ and make sure there’s a very mutual respect,” she said. “So that might require some training, some kind of debriefing, some rethinking. But just because some ways of doing things are different in different cultures, it doesn’t mean that one is superior to the other.”
Finally, once a partnership is established, leaders from both schools should work together to create lesson plans, establish parameters for how long a joint unit might last, agree on the goals it should accomplish, and determine how to measure success, she said.
“Our children are going to be working with young people, with peers all over the globe, because technology makes it possible,” Darrisaw-Akil said. “So our schools prepare children for the world of work and the world of the future by fostering global understanding, global awareness, and respect for differences.”
