Charter school builds cultural bridges

By Bill Fonda/ bfonda@cnc.com
Friday, October 8, 2004

ORLEANS - Karim Ajania first had the vision in 1987, as a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

During his time in the banking industry on Wall Street, the Kenyan-born Ajania said he learned the value of global education and saw how important it is for peoples to understand each other at an early age.

The vision, which was part of his doctoral thesis, was a way for youths from around the world to build the "bricks" of relationships. It is now known as The Brick Project, and Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School is part of that first brick along with schools from Lithuania, India and Zimbabwe.

"It's been a long gestation," said Ajania, now a Truro resident.

Students in Joanne Amaru's seminar class got their first taste of the project Tuesday, setting up accounts to post messages under the instruction of South Africa native and Truro resident Verity Sell, the project's global coordinator.

Sixth-grader Rachel Lake wrote about her love of reading and biology, animals and writing stories, as well as a recent trip.

"I just got back from a little island off the coast of Maine," she wrote. "It was awesome!"

During the school year, Brick Project students will not only communicate with each other, they will study curriculum items from each other's countries - a story written by an author from Zimbabwe, for example.

The students will also develop a sustainability project and post a scrapbook about it online. In Zimbabwe, Ajania said students delivering corn meal to a squatter colony discovered a paper factory and arranged for Zizini Arts & Crafts in Hyannis to sell the paper.

"It's actually doing quite well," Ajania said. "The money is going back to the place where the kids are hungry. These girls, on their own, are finding a sustainable solution for hunger."

Of the American schools considered for the project, Ajania said Lighthouse had the best mix of students and high levels of creativity and concern.

"Both those criteria are very important to us," he said.

Amaru, a sixth-grade social studies and reading teacher, is working with fellow teachers Josh Stewart and Joan Barnett on the project. She said many teachers wanted the project when it was first presented at a faculty meeting last spring, but it had natural connections for her curriculum.

"It seemed like a good match," she said.

Other schools will be added to the project once the school year ends, but Amaru said Lighthouse will continue to be involved.

"We're in for the long haul," she said. "This will take us in the other direction (from the school's exchanges with a Japanese school) and open some new doors for us."