A few weeks ago, a fellow international teacher wrote an article about the need for international schools to incorporate further teaching of local culture.

I couldn’t agree more.

And amid global calls to decolonise curriculums, the task of incorporating local culture is even more important.

Some international curriculums do offer an increased opportunity to teach students about a world in which they see themselves as globally connected and responsible for the community in which they live. I am fortunate enough to be at one of these schools.

However, with western-based exam boards and European, American and Australian international teachers having the final say on the taught topics, the tendency for the curriculum to also become westernised is inevitable.

Although many schools have a significant journey ahead in integrating further with their local culture and communities, here are a few ways a closer connection to our host country can be achieved both in and out of the classroom.

1. Curriculum topics

As teachers, the area we perhaps have the most control over when it comes to cultural connections is within our curriculum topics.

Within the English department, the obvious change we needed to make was to our text choices in every grade level. Titles like Pride and Prejudice and Othello have now been replaced with translated Vietnamese novels and South-East Asian poetry anthologies.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’ve simply rejected all things written by Shakespeare or white, British authors. But there’s certainly a need to look across the primary and secondary curriculum as a whole and find more of a balance.

Texts with universal and enduring themes like Romeo and Juliet offer an opportunity for comparative studies with cultural myths and fairy tales in the earlier grade levels.

Our humanities department has always been particularly effective in encompassing the teaching of South-East Asian economic and geographic systems.

Meanwhile, in physical education, some students have chosen to improve their skills in the popular Vietnamese game đá cầu (a kind of foot badminton more commonly known as jianzi) in a unit based on skill acquisition.

2. Residential trips

This year, owing to travel and quarantine restrictions, it is very unlikely that we will be unable to take our usual, annual school residential trips abroad.

But this is the ideal opportunity to allow students to explore their own or host country beyond the resort experience that many students may be used to.

Residential trips at our school are an opportunity for students to participate in educational travel.

With a renewed emphasis now upon domestic tourism in many countries in an attempt to rebuild upon the past few months of devastation, perhaps now our schools and students can experience more meaningful and sustainable trips, with the potential for service within communities hit hardest by the pandemic.

Seeking partnerships with authentic local non-profit organisations is key to ensuring the money is being ethically spent.

Some students in previous years visited indigenous communities in the north of the country, and often these formed the foundation of creative initiatives, independent essay titles and investigative research-based projects upon their return back to the city.

3. Community projects

In many international schools, there is a keen focus upon service-learning, whereby students develop and apply their subject skills and knowledge to consider how they can tackle real-life issues in their community.

Service-learning can be problematic and has often been criticised for pushing programs toward the needs of students rather toward the needs of communities.

Many would also argue that project-based learning perhaps functions better as a separate entity to academic assessments and reports, as it is in my current school.

However, when implemented effectively (and if the school system allows for it) students can be encouraged to engage more actively and meaningfully with the local culture around them.

And they can certainly learn a great deal from the experience in doing so.

From developing marketing campaigns to supporting local businesses to documenting stories about the lives of locals in the community, there are many opportunities to begin connecting their classroom learning with the world outside those shiny, international school front doors.

4. Local colleagues

Another unique aspect of working in an international school is the diversity of the staff body.

While your staff ex-pat community may be more transient, your local colleagues are likely to have seen the changes in your school across a much longer time period.

Their depth and breadth of knowledge is invaluable to the students they teach and support, but are there ways in which we as teachers can be more proactive in making these important connections?

If we want to incorporate further teaching of our local culture, these conversations about how we can do this should really start with the members of our community who already have the most expertise in this area.

Rebecca Markham is an English Language and Literature teacher at an international school in Vietnam. She has been teaching internationally for two years