christine wilson

OLGC Teacher Brings Peace Corps to Classroom

By Mary Frances McCarthy
HERALD Staff Writer
(From the Issue of 10/19/06)

After watching “Out of Africa” in the mid-1980s, Christine Cipriani Wilson knew that she wanted to go to Kenya and live with the Masaii tribe. She applied to work as a Peace Corps volunteer and as luck would have it, Wilson was assigned to teach children of that tribe from 1987-89.
In Kenya, she helped the students start a newspaper and build a library. The idea of borrowing books was new to them.
“This country that we live in here is incredibly fortunate,” Wilson said. “With very few resources in Kenya you can see that kids can do a lot.”
Wilson moved to Northern Virginia with her husband and two young children two years ago. After having worked in public schools in New York City, she decided that she might enjoy working in Catholic schools and began her first year at Our Lady of Good Counsel this year.
“The biggest thing missing (in public schools) is the idea of spirituality,” she said. “It’s an important part of a student’s make up.”
Comparing her current teaching job to her job in the Peace Corps, she said, “I feel like this is the harder job. Children in a developing country are so eager to learn. Here (an education) is a given.”
Wilson brings her experiences in Africa to teaching in her Vienna classroom. An English classroom is an easy place to introduce a wide range of themes, so Wilson the eighth-graders studying developing countries and e-mailing a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia to learn more. Each student chose a country and will complete a research paper.
Wilson hopes that not only will her children learn more about the basics of English — grammar, style and structure — but that they will also move away from the idea that they are writing their assignments only for a grade.
“The purpose of learning how to write is not being graded by a teacher, but to communicate,” she said. “We write to real audiences.”
Their e-mails to Elvira, the volunteer in Armenia, are an example of how Wilson is trying to communicate this message. Students read their e-mails to Elvira aloud in class and share her responses.
“I see (e-mail) as a very exciting type of writing,” Wilson said. “It’s kind of cool, you can use slang and it’s more personal, more like them.”
E-mail shouldn’t be the final form of communication the students use in their research writing, but Wilson hopes this relaxed style of dialogue will encourage them to ask more insightful questions. She wants the knowledge that they learn through these exchanges to be used as primary resources and become a part of their finished projects.