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.
Why Foster Global Citizenship and Equity
Many scholars identify global citizenship and education as moral imperatives. While the term citizenship is a largely Western concept, related concepts of community engagement and responsibility are not. Harvard University’s Fernando M. Reimers (in his work with Vidur Chopra, Connie K. Chung, Julia Higdon, and E. B. O’Donnell, 2016), describes a global citizenship curricula as providing the following:
All students with effective opportunities to develop the dispositions, knowledge, and capabilities necessary to understand the world in which they live, to make sense of the way in which globalization shapes their lives, and to be good stewards of and contributors to the Sustainable Development Goals. (p. xx)
In an earlier work, Reimers (2009) emphasizes that schools must embrace the need to prepare students for the future, but he also points out candidly, that most schools don’t prepare students for the future. There is no question that schools need to provide early opportunities for practice and participation, especially since “globalization impacts job prospects, health, physical security, public policy, communications, investment opportunities, immigration, and community relations” (Reimers, 2009, p. 4).
While developing a classroom partnership can be very labor intensive, it is one of the best ways to develop these understandings, knowledge, and skills. Global partnerships can take years of effort and false starts before reaching significant success, but they are among the most rewarding experiences you can create for students when you take the time to make them equitable and relevant. A powerful global partnership experience can change lives, career paths, and even our shared world in the long run. Whether you are talking about five-year-olds in San Francisco understanding and upholding children’s rights through a partnership with students in Sierra Leone, a middle school class in Toronto sharing local mythology with students in rural Costa Rica, or high school students in Denver trying to understand the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through photography and poetry exchanges, directly connecting with real people in the world can help humanize your curriculum in powerful ways.
Direct connections with people are essential if you want to get students to a place of authentic citizenship, which is when students can realistically understand or empathize with others’ needs because they have met and collaborated with them personally. Ian Davies’s work (as cited in Evans, Hawes, Levere, Monette, & Mouftah, 2004) suggests that traditional attempts to transfer citizenship concepts such as tolerance, justice, and civic participation to students are nearly impossible using conventional teaching methods. Davies (as cited in Evans et al., 2004) finds that when students participate in inquiry with people worldwide, they are much more likely to become authentically engaged in practicing citizenship, both during and after the classroom experience. Julie Lindsay and Vicki A. Davis (2013) take this idea a step further, indicating that making personal connections with people around the world fosters open-mindedness and builds bridges. Pointing out that these connections are no longer optional for a better future, Lindsay and Davis (2013) write, “Students are the greatest textbook ever written for one another and will be travelers on this bridge” (p. 2).
Direct connections with people are essential if you want to get students to a place of authentic citizenship, which is when students can realistically understand or empathize with others’ needs because they have met and collaborated with them personally.
Unfortunately, much of what global education has produced fosters inequitable thinking, particularly when the partnership projects originate in more developed countries (Kubik, 2012, 2016). Global citizenship is often translated in simplistic terms, becoming an endless fund-raising campaign in which students in the West do what’s referred to as saving the rest. This is not meeting in the middle. This kind of global education does not foster true citizenship; instead, such experiences can dehumanize the people students seek to understand, turning them into empty vessels who can only survive with the outsiders’ solutions, not whole people with multifaceted lives and their own ideas about how to improve their communities. At their worst, these kinds of global connections can exacerbate power imbalances and even cripple local industry.
Consider the example of a classroom in Canada partnered with a rural classroom in a coffee-producing region of Colombia. Students in Canada discover the deficits in their partner classroom, including a lack of school supplies, technologies, and flexible school furniture. Students in Canada run a fund-raiser for which they buy the cheapest Colombian coffee they can find, mark it up, and sell it locally to donate profits to their partners. It sounds reasonable enough, but the students’ action actually exacerbates both the Colombian community’s reliance on foreign aid and the root economic problems that are causing that reliance. If the students instead work toward fair market prices for Colombian coffee, or help their partner community connect with free trade networks to eliminate the middlemen who lower their profits, the impact would be more about empowering their partner’s economic independence, thus improving their ability to solve their own problems. Making this shift means recognizing that their Colombian partners don’t need handouts, but are complete, competent people who live in a complex system that doesn’t consistently reward their hard work, and who can benefit from a collaboration built on mutual respect and recognition.
During one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had since leaving the classroom, I got to see five-year-olds at the Town School for Boys (www.townschool.com) in San Francisco, California, explore photos of children sent by their partner community in Sierra Leone through a see, think, wonder activity. Amid the usual wonderings (for example, I wonder what their houses look like; I wonder what their favorite animals are; I wonder what sports they like to play at recess) were a few difficult questions about how children in rural Sierra Leone live. When one little boy said, “I wonder if they’re poor,” the class erupted; the other boys insisted loudly that this was a rude question to ask. The teacher artfully unpacked the problem, asking the students why it felt rude. “What are we really trying to find out? How might we ask this question differently?” To my surprise, one five-year-old raised his hand tentatively and said, “I wonder if they have everything they need,” and then another followed with, “And if not, I wonder what they need.” This was a demonstration of deep empathy, a central tenet of global citizenship because of how deeply it motivates students to work toward a more fair and equitable world.
If that level of empathy—and the urge to respond—is present in five-year-olds who have personally connected with children in another part of the world, maybe all educators have to do is avoid crushing that hope and connectedness by developing humanizing global experiences. Maybe empathy and global citizenship aren’t things to be taught, but to be fostered.
Maybe empathy and global citizenship aren’t things to be taught, but to be fostered.
What Students Want From Global Education
Understanding what young people want from global education can help you engage them in more meaningful, relevant learning. Each year, the University of Wisconsin–Madison hosts a Global Youth Summit that brings together middle and high school students from across the state for activities and dialogue around global education. In 2013, student attendees identified four areas they would like to see addressed more consistently and authentically in their schools (Hill, 2013).
1. Offer a diversity of world languages, with opportunities for authentic use: Students recognize wide disparities among schools, many of which offer only French and Spanish, and most of which begin serious language study at ninth grade. As students point out, “If we start training for sports at a young age, why not languages? Can you imagine if a high school quarterback had to start freshman
