By Jamal Elabiad
Connecting Classrooms is a global British Council project aiming at developing understanding and trust between young people in different societies, creating a safer and more connected world for the future. The project also works towards building lasting partnerships between groups of schools in the UK and in over 60 countries around the world, including Morocco. There are several criteria for selecting teachers to join the project. Teachers, for example, need to be competent in English language teaching (ELT) and competent users of the computer and Internet to manage communication.
But, as far as I know, there are many schools around Morocco where the criteria for selecting teachers to take part in Connecting Classrooms project (CCP) were not respected. In other words, only a small number of the Moroccan English teachers who were selected to participate in the project meet the project requirements, but the majority, albeit ineligible, were invited to join. The question is how were they selected despite the fact that they are unqualified according the project criteria?
The conclusion I came to was that those teachers were selected either because they were recommended for the project or because they are close friends of the project coordinators. And to know whether my conclusion was true or not, I contacted a middle school teacher of English who took part in Access program four years ago.
The middle school teacher confirmed my conclusion adding that he was invited last year to participate in the CCP, but he rejected the offer, for the teacher discovered that he was selected, not because he met the project requirements, but because one of his English high school teachers recommended him to the project coordinator. When I asked him if he got any evidence to support his allegation, he replied saying it was his high school teacher who one day told him it was he who said to the project coordinator that “I am the right middle school teacher for the project.” By the way, both the high school teacher and the project coordinator are active members of a Moroccan ELT association.
The fact that the middle school teacher was a previous student of the high school teacher is not the only reason behind suggesting him for the project. Another reason is that both the middle school teacher and the high school one are originally from the same town, and are among the teachers who were appointed to work in their home towns. I did not know of this reason until I was, to my surprise, told that the teacher who was selected for the project soon after the middle school teacher turned it down is not only an ex-student of the high school teacher, but he is also from the town where the high school was born, and he is currently working in a village close to his birthplace. In brief, the other teachers of English would have been invited to join the project if they had been students of the high school teacher, or if they had been originally from his place of birth.
The middle school teacher said no to his high school teacher’s offer for the reason that there were, for him, other middle school teachers that possibly deserved to be selected for the project more than him. And I am pretty sure that the teacher would not have joined Access program had he known of the fact that it was his high school teacher who recommended him to the Access coordinator. Doubtless, the likes of such a teacher are extremely rare in Morocco.