Director's Blog

Why am I here doing this engaging work? Probably, it turns out, because my parents paid attention to me when I was growing up. Sounds simple but parents, it turns out, are the best partners to great teachers. How do we know?

Read Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column “How About Better Parents.”

And this is an important reminder of just how important parenting is - a humbling thought as the guardian of all these students. I know our very own houseparents are great role models themselves of what great parenting is all about.

Much of the kind of paying attention the research points to relates to instilling a love of reading. My parents took me to the library as often as they took me to the hockey rink. Maybe they knew I would grow too tall and skinny to make the top team in high school. I remember them saying to me over and over again: “readers are leaders” so go read a good book.

So, with that in mind, that is exactly what I am going to do. And if there is anyone reading this blog, go ahead and suggest a book – maybe one you think a college head should read.

We are now well into the new school year at Pearson College and, after all the excitement of welcoming eighty new students, our 38th year, a quiet sunny Sunday has given me time to think about the year so far. My quiet Sunday has also given me time to read through some of the books I meant to finish over the summer.

The two books, “The Empathic Civilization” by Jeremy Rifkin and “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed” by Howard Gardner make me think about a single word, actually not a word at all but maybe it should be: “warmful.”

This word was captured on a day we spent with our returning students when we were planning the year ahead and describing to each other how we want to welcome our new students to the College. When describing the kind of experience we want for everyone this year, a non-mother-tongue speaker of English said it should be “warmful.” Rifkin makes a compelling claim that our entire fate rests on the development of empathy and Gardner argues that the pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness should be the foundation for any education, inside and outside any classroom and at all stages of life.

The pursuit of a “warmful” experience for everyone this year feels like a good foundation on which to build a healthy empathic community and a better world.

If you take a walk through campus before the summer sun fades it away, you will see this message written in chalk along the pathway: “You need big dreams so that when you are chasing them you do not lose sight of them.”

In this spirit, a big dream was fulfilled today when six Pearson College alumni (who graduated in May), along with Pearson faculty member, Garth Irwin, paddled up to the College docks in glorious sunshine and in glorious moods. They had just completed a 1,200 km paddle along the British Columbia coastline from its far northern reach in Prince Rupert to the southernmost tip of the province right here in Pedder Bay. One of the UWC values is personal challenge.  What a great way to personify this and inspire others to do the same.

A wide range of folks greeted them as they paddled up to the dock ranging from parents of the paddlers, faculty, staff and some students to some of the equipment sponsors, local TV film crew and even a few alumni from the first years of the College.

Just to prove that things are never dull here, in the midst of all the celebration we got a distress call from the Coast Guard about a fishing boat without power and sinking outside the bay. Our very own shorefront manager, Erik, responded in our launch boat and towed the vessel to safety and I got to take the film crew along in our little Zodiac for another shot of life at the College.

Read more about the kayakers’ adventure at: http://unitedworldkayaking.com/about/

More big dreams are coming. Next summer, watch for plans to circumnavigate Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), some cross country cycling and maybe even an ocean crossing.

When so much of College life is built on relationships and community, the end of the College Year is always an emotional time. And each year, it is the students who decide how they wish to mark this rite of passage. This year, in addition to the drama and excitement of jumping into the bay, we had a candlelight ceremony on the East House lawn. Creatively facilitated by our nurse Susan, and her partner, Bill, First year students were in one circle and around them second year students. The two circles rotated in opposite directions until all could visually connect with each other under candlelight. Then Pearson Year 36 students stepped away and dispersed from the circle, symbolically and literally making our Pearson Year 37 students the new second years. And so now, for them, it is time for Extended Essays, Home Service Projects and planning for new student orientation as we get ready for the arrival of Pearson College Year 38. And time for some fun too.

This is the time of year when students mark the end of two years of pursuing the International Baccalaureate Diploma by jumping into the bay after they finish their last exam. Plunging into the 9 degree Celsius ocean is a mixture of shock and joy. While these bay jumps are the visual cues of another year at the College, I came across something else recently that captures another essence of this place: a member of our faculty, Christian, with a bag of Oreo cookies.

When I saw him with his bag of Oreos, I asked what he was doing carrying around Oreos on the day of the English IB exams. Christian gave me a few Oreos and said they were reminders for his students about how to write a paragraph. Being a scientist myself, when he saw the puzzled look on my face he said something like: “There are three parts to a paragraph – the topic sentence, the supporting sentences and the concluding sentence. There are three parts to the Oreo, it will remind my students how to write some decent paragraphs today. Get it?”

This is just one example of the love, care and support that our faculty give to our students every day. Acts of kindness and care like this are what launch our students, one by one, confidently into the bay and into lives that have been profoundly touched by the dedicated adults they have lived and learned with for the past two years. We don’t always see these caring Oreo cookie moments like we do the big splashes in the ocean but we know they happen every day. And for all of these moments and to all of our faculty and staff, I say thank you.

Student Vigil in Solidarity with the Protesters in Tahrir Square (Photo, Mark, PCYear 36, Canada)

In the peace of a College nestled on the shore of a quiet bay, I ponder, and I know many students share a similar sense of pondering, about whether we let in enough of the outside world. While it can be luxuriously remote, we know we are in a bit of a bubble out here on Pedder Bay. In the past two weeks, we have had three visitors and a few events that give me a sense that we have been striking a reasonable balance between connecting to the outside world and connecting with each other in our small community.

Who were these visitors and events?

It began with a visit from Tim Ward, author of “What the Buddha Never Taught.” He shared with us what he learned from living in a monastery in Thailand and reflected with us on lessons learned that might be relevant to life in general and life in a UWC. It was fascinating to contrast the 227 rules and the hierarchy of monastic life with the single principle we strive to honour at Pearson College: “consideration for others.”

Our next visitor, Patrice Brodeur, PC Year 6, working with one of our faculty members, Coops, and a collection of students, designed and lead a special topic day on religion and spirituality. Patrice is a professor and Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism, and Globalization at the Faculty of Theology and the Science of Religions at the University of Montreal. Patrice led off the day with a comprehensive presentation on the religious and spiritual landscape on this planet we share with just under 7 billion people. Following Patrice’s plenary session, students led workshops designed to share their own personal experiences with religion and spirituality. Students engaged with the widest imaginable range of topics, from jihad, sex and the Koran to Rastafarianism, Atheism and Buddhism. The most important part of this was the realization of just how diverse a collection of religious and spiritual perspectives and experiences we have on campus. There was also the feeling of a real ache inside all of us to do this kind of sharing more often. Patrice was asked in the final plenary session whether there is anything universal and applicable to all of us from the perspective of his three decades of research since he left Pearson College. His answer was a kind of secular trinity. He challenged all of us to do the hard work, as individuals and as a community, to get three things right: learn how to listen, learn how to respect others and learn how to communicate in a non-violent compassionate way. He suggested that if we can learn to do this at the level of, say, a room one shares with three other students, we are then prepared to do it on a more global level.

Our third visit came from another Montreal person with a global perspective, Jean Béliveau. Jean is on the final leg of a decade long walk around the world. He left Montreal in August 2000 and has walked over 75,000 kilometers so far. All he has left is the stroll from Victoria to Montreal. This is a kind of personal challenge on steroids but one that Jean is undertaking with great humility. He is walking on a journey of self-discovery following what he described as a kind of mid-life crisis. And he is also walking to draw attention to the UN decade of the child and to promote peace and non-violence for the benefit of the children of the world. You can follow Jean at: http://wwwalk.org.

And as we were all watching events unfold in Tahrir Square, our students led a spontaneous candlelit vigil of solidarity for the protesters and people dedicating their lives to bring about the end of repression and the birth of greater freedom.

These visitors and events lift our heads and hearts up to look around at what is happening in the world and give us great excitement about the role we can all play as events unfold.

So, like the tide, the outside world ebbs and flows through our campus. If you have suggestions on who should come in on the next tide to help us carry out our mission to make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future, let me know. A rising tide lifts all.

At the start of many of our faculty meetings, we share a story, a poem, an inspirational quote and sometimes an interesting video to get our thinking going. I thought you might be interested in what we have seen recently.

The first is a fascinating way to look at the past two-hundred years of human development by country plotting life expectancy on one axis and income on another. These data are then animated. Sounds boring right? If you never liked statistics, you might change your mind when you see this.

This is the time of year when students are agonizing over writing their personal essays for their university applications. I advise them to write in a way that shows instead of tells. What Hans Rosling does in this video is a terrific example of showing us two-hundred years of humanity instead of telling us about it. And in the Pearson College context, we want to be part of this story of moving all of the world towards health. As educators, we are in the human development business after all. To see Han's work in more granularity and more developed, I recommend his TED talk.

The second video is another fascinating way to turn a talking head, albeit and interesting one, into another kind of animation. I sure wish the Catholic nuns in my grammar school could have done this. But they did not even have white boards back then. Here we see Sir Ken Robinson having some fun explaining the changing paradigms in education today. At Pearson, we are not passively being entertained by these videos. We are actively looking at what we do everyday to see if we are getting it right. Beyond the depth and breadth of the International Baccalaureate, we are asking ourselves: what are the qualities of character and the competencies the world needs us to be developing in our Pearson Scholars? That is part of what we are doing with our "Vision 2020" as we examine closely the Pearson experience and what we need to do as a faculty to incubate agents of positive change.

Since a summer gathering with alumni, I have been hearing a lot about the importance of failure. When I asked Barbara (Germany) Pearson College Year 3 to share advice to new Pearson College students, PC Year 37, she said: “Fail, fail again and then learn to fail one more time. It is the only way to develop. If you are not failing, you are not learning.”

At Pearson College, we sometimes use the word village to describe this community of about 250 people who have come here to live, learn, play and work together in pursuit of the UWC mission to make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. Indeed, at Pearson College, we meet in what are called village meetings.

But how closely does this village of ours resemble the larger single village called the world? Should we strive to be more reflective of the mixtures and proportions that make up the world we share? Probably this is not practical for a single college to achieve. However, among the 13 UWCs in the world, together we should come closer to reflecting the true diversity of this planet, in all the ways that diversity can be imagined.

When the first UWC was founded nearly fifty years ago, a driving motivation was to address head-on the tensions between and among nations. The goal was to prevent another world war through education. Education as a weapon for peace.

One of Kurt Hahn's insights was that the "will to act" needed education as much as the "power to think" and that this was best developed through shared, skilled, challenging, sometimes even dangerous, service to others in need. Who needs us today? Alec Peterson, in his book, 'Schools Across Frontiers" writes that 'the challenge that the UWCs responded to was the interdependence of human kind, North and South, Rich and Poor, Industrialized and Rural, in the aftermath of the Second World War. The schools were seen as a "new kind" where young people of all nations and backgrounds could live and learn together at the most formative period of their adolescence and so form those ties of friendship and understanding that would last them through their lives'.

There is no formula for this but if the world's tensions are to be addressed by UWCs, those who are party to the tensions in today's world should be in our colleges. Are they? What are these tensions today? That is something we will be talking about in our village meeting this week and I hope this year. As a way to get us thinking about this, a look at what the world would look like if it were reduced to a village of 100 people might get the mind working:

This year we are welcoming eighty new students, our thirty-seventh class of students to attend Pearson College, who we now refer to as PC Year 37. During the days of orientation our faculty and our PC Year 36 students came up with many ways to welcome our new students to Pedder Bay. We talked about living the UWC mission to 'make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future'. More than talking about it we were able witness it in action through the work of our alumni. We all had a chance to see a trailer of a movie by Wilmer, PC Year 33 from Nicaragua who captured on film the lives of two fellow students, Natan, from Israel and Mujahed, from Palestine. Natan and Mujahed met at Pearson College three years ago. The film captures the story of Natan visiting Palestine and Mujahed, in turn, visiting Israel. The video gives us reason to be hopeful about the future. The film trailer can be seen at: www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi981992985/.