JEDDAH, 23 December 2005 — Coincidence or destiny? On Dec. 15, the same day that the National Dialogue Forum entitled “Us and Others” ended, a group of Scottish student teachers arrived in Jeddah to meet their Saudi counterparts.
While the forum only discussed the theoretical Saudi relationship with the outside world, and did not come up with instant solutions, the British Council in Saudi Arabia took the initiative of connecting and bridging gaps between the two cultures.
According to Anthony Calderbank, assistant director at the British Council in Alkhobar, the weeklong visit was part of a program entitled “Connecting Futures”, initiated after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that aims at bringing together youths from different cultures to discuss life issues.
The delegation comes from the Teacher’s College in Edinburgh and is the first group of Scottish teachers to visit the Kingdom after the program sent four Saudi teacher groups — three from Jeddah and one from Al-Hasa in the Eastern Province — to Edinburgh and Belfast.
The future teachers expressed to Arab News their great appreciation for everyone as everyone has warmly welcomed them.
“We did not come with preconceived notions before visiting the Kingdom,” said Luke Woolley, one of the eight students.
The group visited women and men colleges of education, as well as a school for the disabled and an orphanage. They all agreed that there were similarities in teaching methods as well as in the youths’ behavior.
They did, however, point out some of the differences between the Saudi and the Scottish method of training teachers.
In Scotland, training for teachers begins in the first year of studies while in Saudi Arabia it begins in the fourth year.
“It’s a bit too late,” said Mike Quickfall, the director of professional development at the University of Edinburgh.
He explained the need for early training, because students should be exposed as early as possible to hands-on teaching to determine if they indeed want to pursue this career.
Matthew Maclennes, who is studying to be a physical education teacher, noticed that Saudis do not pay much attention to P.E. as a major subject. “In Scotland they take P.E more seriously. It’s just like any other subject, like math or physics,” said Maclennes.
When visiting a girls’ school, Karen Clements, another student teacher, noted lots of similarities between the girls’ schools in the Kingdom and in Scotland.
“Girls schools there lack the same distractions as the schools here,” she said, referring to the segregation between boys and girls.
She noted that just like the girls’ schools in her country, Saudi girl students seemed “very keen to learn.”
The student teachers agreed that being in the Kingdom — even if it was for a short period of time — was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “Values and virtues are different. (Saudi culture) is not negative, but rather it’s a different lifestyle,” said Luke Wooley, a student teacher of religious and philosophical studies.
