Students also call for using technologies to connect them with native speakers and teachers, enabling them to explore a broader array of cultural perspectives and to actually use world languages in authentic ways.
2. Increase direct engagement through travel and exchange: Students recognize that their most powerful global experiences take place because of exchange programs that bring international students into their schools and homes. They also emphasize the importance of developing scholarship opportunities for physical travel, noting that international immersion experiences are inaccessible for the majority of public school students.
3. Connect with the world through technology: Students emphasize the value of more and better technology use to integrate opportunities for nontravel international experiences. They would like their schools to develop long-term sister school relationships with other communities in the world—deep global partnerships between two school communities that include more than just a couple of classes connecting occasionally. Students point out that this is easily achievable through existing and emerging technologies, citing the use of technology as a far less expensive and more convenient way to bring the world into the classroom.
4. Foster open-mindedness; promote awareness and acceptance: Students emphasize the importance not just of learning about the world but also of doing so in ways that develop a less nationalistic lens for engagement. For example, recognizing that most of their schools focus on national themes far more than international themes, one group notes, “Intolerance and ignorance of other cultures must be minimized. Get rid of patriotic egotism” (Hill, 2013). Students also recognize their own roles in spreading enthusiasm and open-mindedness within their communities, noting that young people need to get involved in global causes and be part of creating change in their schools and the world.
Hooking into students’ existing urges and interests does not mean ignoring significant core content; it means creating a space for students to think and create for themselves within the context of our academic disciplines. It means recognizing that education is less about covering a breadth of knowledge and more about uncovering students’ sense of passion and purpose; facilitating their voice and empowerment; and helping them see how disciplines matter across the patchwork of human experience.
Hooking into students’ existing urges and interests does not mean ignoring significant core content.
Why You’re Here
This book is for educators who want to find that middle ground—who want to develop equitable global partnerships based on trust, mutual respect, and a shared vision of global collaboration and development. Accessible for beginners, this book will help lead you through the process of developing project ideas, finding existing programs or partners on your own, designing and maintaining the collaboration, and evaluating your success. Also, to challenge more advanced global educators, this book invites conversations about how to handle more controversial topics in partnerships, build partnerships more equitably for all involved, and spread global thinking and engagement across the broader curriculum and school community.
This book will be helpful for teachers, instructional leaders, and administrators who strive to build direct global connections into the educational experiences they create for students in all disciplines and grade levels across the preK–12 spectrum (though many of these strategies would also work for higher education settings). It is also for specialists, after-school program leaders, camp counselors, and anyone helping foster global citizenship and the urge for collaborative action in young people.
In chapter 1, you will explore the concept and importance of global competency as a central facet of global citizenship, and you will consider how partnerships might foster that competency. In chapter 2, you will begin defining the kind of partnership you hope to build, exploring key elements to determine student learning priorities. Chapter 3 reveals several global partnership examples by age group, to help deepen your vision of what’s possible when you connect your classroom to the world. In chapters 4 and 5, you will explore ways to find a partner, first through existing global partnership programs (chapter 4), and then through building a partnership on your own via online networking or travel (chapter 5). Chapter 6 lays out key strategies for communicating well with your global partner, as well as an overview of several useful technologies for live and off-line communication. Chapter 7 sets you up for an equitable experience by exploring some of the pitfalls to avoid in global partnerships, and chapter 8 helps you navigate challenges in partnerships that include controversial topics, offering strategies for building successful partnerships around social justice and human rights. Chapter 9 explains how you can assess students’ growth and partnership success, and its last section on evaluating broader global programming leads into chapter 10, which explores how to build more buy-in and professional capacity around global learning across your community. Each chapter includes anecdotes from global education participants, practitioners, and leaders, as well as suggestions and a tool to help you build collaborative learning experiences. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/21stcenturyskills to access live links to the websites mentioned in this book.)
I believe that tolerance is a low bar to set. I believe in the “shared world” evoked by poet Naomi Shihab Nye (2008) and in our potential to live a responsible, constructive, and engaged life as a global community (p. 163). I wrote this book with that shared world in mind. We are capable of building what poet Adrienne Rich (2013) calls “the dream of a common language,” but we have to work at it collectively (p. 8). Every classroom and every student can make contributions to that better future, to “bending the arc of history” as Anthony Jackson (2015) puts it, so that we can meet in the middle and really understand each other. We aren’t preparing students to be global leaders after they finish their education; we are creating the space for them to lead change now, from inside the classroom.
Whether you are a beginner or more experienced, I hope that this book provides the guidance and frameworks you need to build meaningful and equitable learning partnerships that help your students develop a more humanized sense of the world and their place in it.
CHAPTER 1
BUILDING GLOBAL COMPETENCIES VIA GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
—Alvin Toffler
Before even trying to envision your global partnership ideas in action, it’s important to ground your work in the goal of developing students’ global competencies—communication, collaboration, humility, and empathy, to name a few. To do that, you need a starting place for trying to envision the world your students will graduate into, as well as the skills and knowledge they might need for that world. This chapter will explore the urgent rationale behind global competency development, some of the leading definitions of global competency, and the pedagogical
