When faced with the opportunity to do a local, rural or international community field experience, Greg Zimmerman, a 2016/17 BEd secondary teacher candidate, opted for an adventure to teach in Colombia. In April 2017, Greg embarked on a three-week international community field experience (CFE) to Bogota’s Colegio Anglo Colombiano, an IB World School. Three weeks later, he is back at UBC’s Vancouver campus with a job offer to teach Grades 9-11 in their English department starting mid-August. The Faculty of Education extends a hearty congratulations to Greg on his new teaching position.
During the CFE, Greg taught IB-Middle Years Programme and IB-Diploma Programme English, the Canadian equivalents of Grades 7, 9 and 11. Some of the classroom projects he was involved with included incorporating TED talks on adversity with the Grade 7s to highlight the themes of the novel Wonder which they were reading, studying poetry and the structure of writing a literary commentary with the Grade 9s, and looking at social media in relation to language structure and storytelling with the Grade 11s.
This wasn’t Greg’s first time teaching overseas. Prior to enrolling in the UBC BEd program, Greg taught in South Korea and as a seasoned international teacher, he knows the importance of a solid expat community, and Bogota had that in spades. “The school itself was a highlight. The Anglo Colombiano is an enormous and beautiful campus that they are always working on improving, be it with new facilities or trying to restore green spaces to areas that are not being used. The staff was incredibly welcoming and made me feel like I had been there since the beginning of the school year almost immediately (quite a comfortable feeling for someone who [was] student teaching).”
We wish Greg a brilliant future and best of luck in his new role as an IB teacher.
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