partnerships that occur predominantly or entirely online. Teachers or students from two or more countries might travel physically to meet during a partnership, creating a more personal, face-to-face opportunity as a component of a long-term online experience. But meeting in the middle doesn’t rely on physical travel; it’s about students and the educators who guide them seeing others as the people they are, without judging or trying to change them. It’s about meeting others where they are, figuratively speaking, and of crafting rich experiences that benefit all involved. It’s about seeing other humans in all their wholeness, for their strengths, weaknesses, and goals, not just their circumstances. It’s about seeing the essential humanity in others by acknowledging that every person has his or her own complex set of gifts, needs, and hopes. It’s about celebrating all we have in common and learning from what we see differently. It’s about learning from and with one another as real partners, not being observers who simply learn about each other. It’s about trust, building relationships over time, and helping students see the world and their lives through someone else’s eyes. And it’s about equipping students to become the kinds of “patiently impatient” change makers Freire (1998) describes (p. 38).
Global education has experienced a boom since the mid-1990s, when it quickly became popular in schools worldwide. Connected educators around the globe are using new technologies to engage with communities and individuals, but many of those connections are not as equitable as they could be, by which I mean that they are founded on a deeply ingrained deficit mindset most teachers don’t realize they have, which usually includes inaccurate assumptions about intelligence and capacity. Those inaccuracies don’t do justice to what every child in every context has to offer the conversation. In fact, many connections are based on exploitative foundations by well-intentioned teachers who use global education simply to observe or solve for, rather than immersing students in what they can learn from others. In my experience, this approach can unintentionally dehumanize partners. For example, I’ve seen many young people come away from global learning experiences with the impression that they’ve “saved” a community, instead of seeing that community as perfectly capable of saving itself. Giving students the opportunity to engage directly with the world can be life changing, often providing a sense of purpose that motivates and grounds young people well into adulthood. But if that sense of purpose is based on the belief that one country or cultural group can save or fix others, these experiences may be causing more harm than good. We need a global educational revolution that puts equity at its core—one in which partners on all sides know they have something to learn and to teach, and one in which all partners have a voice and collaborate on equal footing.
Giving students the opportunity to engage directly with the world can be life changing, often providing a sense of purpose that motivates and grounds young people well into adulthood.
Why I’m Here
As an elementary student at the School in Rose Valley in Pennsylvania (an early progressive model developed by Grace Rotzel) and a graduate of the Jefferson County Open School in Colorado (the United States’ second public alternative school focusing on experiential education, founded by thought leader Arnie Langberg), I was lucky to be in globally connected, student-driven educational systems that fostered my passion and purpose. At these schools, thinking differently was a merit, and being willing to oppose authority for the sake of what Vladimir Nabokov (1980) calls “a too early moonbeam of some too early truth” was practically a graduation requirement (p. 372).
My educational experiences in the 1970s and 1980s included a great deal of outdoor and expeditionary learning, meaning that I learned by doing beyond the classroom walls. I experienced global learning and partnerships long before there were technologies to simplify those connections. My first global learning expeditions were two work trips with Open School to Sonora, Mexico, in ninth and tenth grades, during which my peers and I helped rebuild rural schools in small mountain communities through a partnership between the United States and Mexico. We provided the labor force, and the Sonoran government identified the school most in need of repair and provided paid foremen and materials.
I was on desk duty both years, which meant stripping, repairing, and then repainting all the students’ wooden desks. I remember working in the shade in a beautiful courtyard and seeing my first scorpion. I remember sitting in the local church during breaks, feeling a connection between Catholicism and Judaism that I’d never recognized before, a sort of universal spirituality I still connect with today. I remember that the local women cooked a huge traditional meal midweek for our celebration, and we played in the river with children and adults from the community. I remember my friend Shankaron, a refugee from Ethiopia, riding a horse for the first time—and her bellowing laugh as the horse forded the river with Shankaron up high. I remember tastes and smells, trying my very poor Spanish, and laughing with the children when I failed to communicate well. I remember a lot of laughter and feeling oddly connected to that place, which I can’t even name or find on a map, and to the people who lived there. And I remember that I had a deep urge for more—more learning, more travel, more connecting across the differences that usually separate us.
I was able to get more; at the end of my junior year, in May of 1985, I left Colorado to spend six months living and working in Israel/Palestine and two months traveling through Europe to complete three of my passages for high school graduation. While the experience created a great deal of political and spiritual discord I still struggle with today, it was a real, raw, and hugely formative experience that still motivates everything I do. It took me many years to figure out how to turn a difficult experience into constructive action, but in the fall of 1995 I started teaching tenth-grade English in Costa Rica to the children of presidents, ministry officials, and the most powerful business leaders in the country. From that moment forward, my classroom became my platform and my platform was, in a nutshell, global citizenship—not just an understanding of the world but an urge to respond constructively and collaboratively to our shared challenges.
Early in my teaching career, in the late 1990s, the global education landscape changed significantly. In 1997, the Lincoln School where I taught in San José, Costa Rica, established one of the very first videoconferencing suites in a Central American school, marking the beginning of a new era in technology-enabled global education. Suddenly, students didn’t need to go anywhere to make connections and have authentic conversations with people around the world. They could engage with the world from inside the classroom, and even though physical travel remained a priority, teachers could create transformative experiences without spending money, fuel, or time in transit. Technology meant we didn’t have to wait until students were old enough to travel, either; even our youngest students could make connections with real people anywhere on the planet, as long as their teachers had access. It has taken several decades for mobile technology to narrow the digital divide more significantly, but online connections are increasingly accessible to students from more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
Since the late 1990s, technology-enabled global education has blossomed into a powerful movement, particularly as technology access has become increasingly equitable—though we still have improvements to make. Nearly every teacher I know is anxious to find a global partner—a classroom his or her students can work with to foster intercultural skills and see the world through a different lens. The tragedies of September 11, 2001, created new urgency around building better relationships between the United States and key regions of the world, and several public policy groups issued reports in the following years that “called for increased language study not only for its educational value but because having more citizens able to speak other languages is in the national interest” (Jenkins & Meyers, 2010, p. 8). Further, a series of reports from the Government Accountability Office documents how the lack of expertise in critical languages such as Arabic was affecting the United States’ diplomatic relations, capacity to gather intelligence, and ability to further its policy objectives (Jenkins & Meyers, 2010). The ground was starting to shift, and the word global, which had seemed threatening to so many during the Cold War, was suddenly at the heart of educational dialogue.
