ideas, and (4) take action—among the most respected frameworks for global learning in North America. (See table 1.3 on page 22.)
Table 1.2: World Savvy’s Global Competence Matrix
Source: Adapted from World Savvy, 2014.
Table 1.3: The Center for Global Education at Asia Society’s Four Domains of Global Competence
Source: Center for Global Education at Asia Society, 2005.
While most schools in the Center for Global Education at Asia Society’s International Studies Schools Network use a variety of project- and inquiry-based instructional models, the four domains of global competency also provide a potential design structure for planning global partnerships and other global learning experiences, both inside and outside the classroom. Whereas the other two frameworks provide learning goals for skills, knowledge, and values, this framework provides potential steps for instructional practice—that we begin by investigating the world, for example, move into recognizing perspectives, come back to investigate more, recognize more perspectives, and begin communicating our ideas as we move toward taking action.
The next step is to apply one or a combination of these frameworks to specific pedagogical or instructional strategies.
Investigating Pedagogical and Instructional Strategies for Global Competency
In my experience, so-called sit-and-get pedagogies, what Cooper (2013) refers to as “DLR: drill, lecture, repeat,” rarely create graduates ready to thrive in the world. Whereas DLR learning focuses on rote memorization and tightly controlled learning management, VUCA-ready graduates need to know how to think for themselves. While global education is not necessarily synonymous with inquiry-based learning (where students learn through investigating an issue), it shares one important feature: the best global education is based in student-centered instructional practices. This means that, with the teacher’s guidance, students lead learning, making choices along the way, and enjoying opportunities to create something meaningful. The goal is to foster students’ abilities to work across cultures, navigate complexity, and think for themselves about how to solve the world’s pressing problems. Global education is about fostering our students’ innovation, creativity, passion, and purpose; and their ability to collaborate globally to develop new solutions to issues such as poverty, disease, climate change, and global conflict (Mansilla & Jackson, 2011). These goals can’t easily be fulfilled by using teacher-driven models in which students take notes on lectures, fill out worksheets, and regurgitate knowledge on tests.
The best global education is based in student-centered instructional practices.
As early as 1897, educational philosopher John Dewey (as cited in Kucey & Parsons, 2012) criticizes traditional modes of education for being too focused on issues of the past rather than on the process skills and thinking that help students thrive in their current and future worlds outside of school. Noting that it is impossible to know what the world will be like by the time students graduate, Dewey (as cited in Roth, 2012) advocates instead for the development of “habits of learning” in schools, including “plasticity … an openness to being shaped by experience,” over the pure acquisition of knowledge. These habits, he insists, will outlive any era-specific content knowledge, providing students with the skills to navigate any reality they might encounter.
Paulo Freire takes these ideas further with his 1970 publication, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he points out that the traditional banking model of education doesn’t lead students to their own sense of personal conscience (Freire, 2000). Calling the problem with education “narration sickness,” Freire (2000) explains the challenges of traditional education this way:
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance, … Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. (pp. 52–53)
Real conscience and an evolving sense of one’s place in the world, Freire insists, require a dialogue between teacher and students. Global education movements are in sync with much of what Dewey (as cited in Kucey & Parsons, 2012) and Freire (2000) emphasize, and student-driven pedagogies are increasingly recognized as the best path to developing students’ global competencies. Brandon L. Wiley (2014), former executive director of the Center for Global Education at Asia Society’s International Studies Schools Network and chief program officer at the Buck Institute for Education, frames instructional tendencies this way:
Schools that focus on developing global competence take into account the diverse learners in every class. Across the school, teachers use project-based learning, higher-order questioning, and inquiry-based instructional strategies and student needs, learning styles, interests and standards to guide them. Classrooms provide opportunities for students to learn and apply discipline-specific methods of inquiry. Woven throughout the curriculum are instructional strategies that enable students to demonstrate productive habits of mind, which include problem solving, creative- and generative-thinking skills, the capacity to analyze issues of international significance from multiple perspectives, and the ability to direct their own learning. (p. 138)
This instructional approach combines the global competencies outlined in the frameworks provided earlier in this chapter with student-centered pedagogies, and includes the disciplines, standards, and curriculum that most schools are required to teach. Wiley’s (2014) image of a globally engaged school includes many layers of student-directed learning, as the student who thrives in a VUCA world knows how to manage his or her own knowledge acquisition, rather than waiting for a teacher for direction. He also emphasizes that these schools give equal time to the visual and performing arts as to core content areas (Wiley, 2014). His point is important. The arts can break down political and religious barriers in ways no other discipline can, as well as create an avenue for reflection and self-expression that students need—especially if they’re studying controversial global challenges like conflict or human rights, as explored in chapter 8 (page 143).
Similarly, students need to develop their world language skills for global engagement in any career field—and increasingly, those language skills are important locally as well. Global partnerships provide an ideal forum for practicing a language through authentic, not contrived, communication. In my experience in the Spanish classroom, global partnerships that motivate students to learn about each other will naturally motivate language learning as well, since the ability to communicate is the whole point of language study. This is often a missing link for world language classrooms, and no number of videos or in-class exercises can parallel the experience of talking to a real human being in the target language, especially if that person lives in another country. In my own classroom, I saw huge leaps in student progress when I embedded opportunities to use Spanish authentically, particularly with other teenagers in Latin America. In this regard, global partnerships can allow world language teachers to develop not just their students’ language competencies but also students’ urge to use them, which takes language learning out of the textbook and into the world.
