Despite being a teacher for 25 years, it wasn’t academics that led Chris Gellermann to participate in an educational exchange trip to Campeche, Mexico — it was a dance performance.
Gellermann teaches Spanish in Volusia County, where the non-profit Sister Cities of Volusia sends teachers and students to different parts of the world, or “sister cities,” to broaden their cultural horizons.
Gellermann was interested, but it wasn’t until exchange students from the Instituto Campechano came to perform traditional Mexican dances at his school that he decided to go for it.
“I was so impressed,” Gellermann said. “They were just so intense and so professional and just amazing, and I’m like, ‘Man, I gotta look into this more.’”
Three weeks later, Gellermann became one of three teachers to travel to Mexico in an exchange program organized by Mary Risner, associate director of UF’s Center for Latin American Studies and former president of Sister Cities of Volusia.
The Center has taken educators on short trips to Latin American countries like Belize, Ecuador and Costa Rica since 2008, but this 10-day pilot program was the first and longest of its kind, Risner said.
During the trip from June 8 to 18, two of the Florida teachers stayed with local Mexican teachers, and all of them visited three institutions to learn more about education and culture in Mexico.
“[With] this program we wanted to go a little bit deeper … a real exchange, as opposed to just our teachers going to one school for a couple of hours,” Risner said.
But the program isn’t over yet — this October, the former Mexican hosts will become guests at the teachers’ homes in another exchange.
“I think we all need to learn about different parts of the world so we can all respect each other and appreciate our differences and similarities, and I think it’s particularly important in Florida where we have a lot of students from a lot of different countries,” Risner said.
And with the financial upsides of this program, they’re hoping to turn the pilot into something more.
The Center for Latin American Studies used part of their two-year $840,000 funding (2018-2020) from the U.S. Department of Education to fuel this exchange program, but because the teachers were hosted by local Mexican educators, all they had to cover were the flight and other transportation costs.
The three teachers were picked through the recommendation of Alachua County supervisors, but Risner plans for the participants to be picked via an application process next time, and she would like to take more than three.
The next exchange program is currently scheduled for June 2021.
“I just hope we can continue to have funding and support from the school district around Florida to do more of these kind of exchanges and to do them for future teachers in the College of Education, because I just think it’s so important for us to understand other cultures and be accepting and respectful,” she said.
Chris Gellermann on his educational exchange trip to Campeche, Mexico. Gellermann was one of three teachers to travel to Mexico in the program organized by Mary Risner, associate director of UF’s Center for Latin American Studies and former president of Sister Cities of Volusia.
