Teaching lessons at Universidade de São Paulo
By Amber Lewis
For the first educational day of our study abroad program, we were tasked with giving a lesson to students that were from the high school connected to the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil’s largest public educational institution. Faculty working with USP gave us the opportunity to teach a mock lesson to some students who went to the university’s partnering high school, where we would ‘teach’ them some vital information about the City of Chicago, as well as some cultural customs that the city held. We were split up into groups of 1-2 UIC students for about twenty high school students, and we instructed them for about an hour. Following this teaching period, we received a short break, and then we were given the role of student as the high schoolers brought us on a tour of the high school campus. After a long day of teaching and learning within the Universidade de São Paulo, we were then dismissed for a brief lunch break before returning to talk about the possibilities within the education field if you were interested in continuing your education or career experience in Brazil.
I was very surprised at USP’s education system! While I understood that it was an example of a more traditional public school system, I thought that it was interesting to see how big their campus was. The high school and middle school are separated into two separate buildings, and students talked about how they enjoyed walking outside and enjoying the natural settings during passing periods. When asked about the subjects they learn, they have a much wider variety of subjects than a traditional U.S. public school likely would, mentioning subjects like philosophy, geography, and other languages outside of English and Portuguese grammar. They discussed enjoying fun subjects within their arts department, where they can learn different instruments or performance types; however, they also loved to describe how they enjoy watching marmosets hopping in between some of the trees that are located near the center of their campus. Overall, I enjoyed hearing them talk about their experiences because of how comfortable they seemed learning about all of these topics, and everyone seemed like they had a great time learning about the information that we brought them about Chicago as well.
The discussion with faculty regarding a continued career in education was also very interesting. I think a lot of people were surprised to hear that in the U.S., it’s common to pay for your education in college, which is in sharp contrast to USP’s free educational programming. The faculty discussed the work that they’ve been doing in the education field to promote the decolonisation of educational spaces, and the work that they presented from other researched faculty seemed very interesting. Although I’m not involved in education in the teaching sense, their work to promote a more inclusive educational environment seems like something that I would be interested in from an educational perspective. Overall, I really enjoyed learning about another public school institution, and I’d love to know how USP continues to develop as the education system changes!
