Harvard Dialogues on Global Education

The Evolution of NAIS's concept of Global Education

2011-05-16T01:41:47Z

by Paul Miller
Director of Global Initiatives
National Association of Independent Schools

NAIS began encouraging global education programs as a way for schools to become more engaged with the world. We now think of global education as an approach to effective teaching and learning but we also challenge our schools to use it in a comprehensive manner and to creatively assess students, teachers and programs to be sure the approach is working

While some of our member schools have a long history of engagement internationally --- through students from other countries, language study trips, programs such as School Year Abroad and membership in organizations such as Round Square or Global Connections --- many schools gave little thought to becoming more global until around six years ago.

The work of Tom Friedman and others made the practical case for a more global approach, but for us the call to action was the book High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty years to Solve Them by J.F. Rischard (our Challenge 20/20 internet partnership program is based on the book). The sense of urgency, the relevance of the issues, the opportunity for problem-based learning and for collaboration with people of other cultures struck a chord with many member schools.

NAIS took a lead role in encouraging the growth of programs in our schools, conducting a series of Global Education Summits at our annual conferences, providing resources and information, and creating a Principles of Best Practice document to urge schools to model the behaviors and attitudes they were teaching.

Today, more than 90 percent of our schools offer some sort of global education program. While global is part of the fabric of those schools, the challenge is to ensure that it is properly woven in and not tacked on as an "extra." We encourage schools to go beyond just putting phrases such as 'global citizens' into their mission statements, and determine what skills, knowledge, and values those global citizens will need, and design courses and experiences to meet those outcomes. As consensus has grown around the core abilities students should develop --- critical thinking, creativity, character, communication, and collaboration --- many schools increasingly find a global approach to be useful as well.

There is no formula for what, precisely, that entails. In fact, as part of our effort to get all our schools to be more strategic, we pose three basic questions: what do we teach, how do we teach, and how do we assess? For those schools that include global in answering the first question, we propose not only cross- and inter-disciplinary approaches to the second, but also full integration. For example, international service learning or study trips should be part of a longer course of study. In addition to full preparation for the trip, it should be followed up by both academic work and reflection.

It should also be followed up by assessment of the learning, teaching, and methodology. Global education is never static in terms of the subject matter or effective approaches. We must keep asking how we can do things better. The days of just organizing a trip to an exotic location or bringing in a few foreign students are far behind us.

An entrepreneurial response to the need for global education

2011-05-09T14:53:43Z

by Tyler C. Tingley

Co-Head of School

Avenues: The World School

Other posters in this blog space have documented the marginal progress educators in the United States have made since Professor Kandel's 1928 address challenged the nation to become more effective in preparing students to understand global affairs. Gerhard Fischer, in his May 5 post, details the reasons that make it easy for a Midwestern parent to support efforts to raise math test scores while ignoring the teaching of foreign languages and other components of global studies.

One of the reasons these short-sighted decisions are replicated year after year in communities across the United States is that to the tax-paying citizen, such curricular decisions are generally cast as part of a zero-sum game. Education budgets are limited; to add language instruction means that something must be taken away. It is hard to make an imaginative, long-range decision in this kind of environment of abrasive fiscal discipline.

A number of us who have been involved in non-profit private education have been searching for models that will permit more flexible funding of initiatives to increase access to global studies. Increasing numbers of independent schools are making global studies a key part of their mission. The National Association of Independent Schools has recently developed a separate department to support and encourage independent schools who are developing courseware and experiences in global studies.

Avenues: The World School represents a new direction in the development of global studies programming. The school is founded on the concept that to be well educated today means fluency in more than one language, understanding of the major cultures and histories of the world, and personal experience outside the home country. All Avenues families will choose whether their children will study Mandarin or Spanish. The school will begin these languages in the Nursery years, in a 50 percent immersion program and continue them through high school.

The first campus of Avenues will open in September 2012 in New York City. Beginning in 2014 Avenues will open two more campuses a year in major cities around the world, until the target of 20 campuses is reached. At that point, Avenues will be a school of some 30,000 students and 2700 faculty.

The core curriculum of the school will be the same for each campus, facilitating movement of both students and faculty among the campuses. A unique aspect of the curriculum is the World Course, a coherent global studies curriculum that begins in kindergarten and extends through the 12th grade. The World Course is being designed by Professor Fernando Reimers and his associates at HGSE.

The founders of Avenues have designed the school to function as one school with 20 campuses--one faculty and one student body. When the math department meets, for example, they will Skype to their electronic meeting from five continents. Such a school would be inconceivable without the power of modern communications media, but in the era of the internet, the potential for students and faculty in such a school to access each other and learn from each other is unparalleled.

Avenues: The World School has been funded by private investors and will be operated on a for-profit model. While this method of financing is uncommon for independent schools in the US, it is very common internationally. And given the difficulty of bringing global studies to American classrooms, this access of the entrepreneurial spirit may provide new opportunities and insights into how to bring global studies into the US educational landscape.

Re-framing the debate about global education - Why we need a game changer

2011-05-05T16:32:31Z

by Gerhard Fischer
International and World Languages Education Consultant
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

It appears to be difficult to bring the many good K-12 international education programs[1] to scale. We are stuck for several reasons. If you had asked me ten years ago what the most important contribution to international education would be, I would have suggested changes in the school curriculum. That's what educators do, after all. I still think that we need to change the curriculum, probably best through infusing global perspectives across disciplines. Today, however, I will argue that we simply need to expose as many teachers, administrators, school board members, and community members to other cultures, other languages, and different views of the world. Whenever I ask educators in the Midwest how many of their fellow teachers and administrators have ever had a significant personal international experience, their educated guesses range from 30 to 40 percent. I believe it will be awfully hard for those other 60 or 70 percent of teachers to prepare their students for a world they have themselves never experienced or that they may not even be curious about. In other words, we are stuck in an education environment in which we constantly have to promote, advocate, and prove the value of international education. I don't think we are in a position yet where we can change curriculum effectively without providing international experiences for teachers and administrators first. We need to win their hearts before we can win their minds. Designing new curricula, though, is primarily a rational exercise.

The current frame of our debate about the importance of international education is grounded in long outdated but still dominant paradigms of schooling. The dominant argument for the value of international education in our schools rests on the assumption that it gives students an advantage in the job market of the global economy. This kind of argument goes back to questions such as what knowledge is worth most and to scientifically based curriculum writing and activities analysis. It is, in other words, an approach that essentially asks businesses what skills they need right now and dictates backward planning of curricula.

This approach is problematic. When Wisconsin debated a new state statute in the mid-1990s that would require the opportunity for every student in the state to learn a world language, beginning in 7^th grade, there was enormous pushback. The main counter arguments included the assumption that not every child needs another language, because not every student would ever travel outside the country. I don't think those attitudes have changed greatly[2]. And I don't think that most parents in the American Midwest believe that their kids will compete for the kinds of jobs we keep talking about. Reducing our advocacy to the "jobs argument" will keep us at the current level of global education with very little room for growth. As with so many areas in our curriculum, some tend to be reserved for our highest achieving students.

As long as we design a global education curriculum within this framework, we will not make significant advances:

Higher test scores in reading, writing and arithmetic (newer terms are en vogue these days) are still considered the key for improving the education of our students. They are absolutely important, but our national discussion seems to assume that anything beyond that is a frill that we can focus on in good times, but not in bad times. As most world language teachers will tell us, though, their programs have never seen increased support in good times, yet they have seen plenty of cuts in bad times. As long as we design curricula with very narrow and specific goals, we will find it hard to build a solid foundation for international education for all students.
Beliefs in scientific curriculum making are strong and alive in the U.S. They rest on the core assumption that reason alone will create the necessary educational success. Necessary for what? The making of a democratic society? Or necessary for the accumulation of personal and national wealth? So, how do we argue for global education?

These are the kinds of conversations among policy makers, businesspeople, and education leaders. The interesting thing is that once we look at good international education programs in the schools, the conversation immediately shifts from the economic need to something much broader and valuable: Students meet friends in other countries, and they explore topics of great importance mostly through the lens of empathy and friendship. Take the fourth graders from Golda Meir Elementary School in Milwaukee: their teacher is traveling to Denmark with them for the 17^th year in a row. All year long the students prepare for that, and much of their curriculum uses examples from Denmark or other European countries. The student population reflects the overall demographics of the Milwaukee Public Schools, and most students or parents cannot pay for this trip by themselves. But the entire school community has bought into providing their students with a solid international education. They fundraise and make things happen. Denmark, I hear you asking? But who wants to learn Danish? And indeed, in a purely back-mapped curriculum, those kids would study Mandarin Chinese right now. Where, after all, are the economic opportunities? Do we think that these kids come back changed from their trip? Do we have evidence that the entire school community is impacted by this wonderful opportunity? Absolutely.

This is what I am getting at: If we keep framing the debate about global education purely in terms of the job market, and if we keep buying into the old frame of the purpose of schooling in terms of a direct path into good employment, we will keep missing the mark, and we will remain stuck. If, on the other hand, we acknowledge that this country is still predominantly very inward-looking, if we acknowledge that ingrained assumptions about American exceptionalism may not encourage curiosity about other people and cultures, we need a different approach. I believe that we will make significant progress by simply allowing our citizens (school board members, administrators, teachers, and eventually students) to interact with other cultures. I am deeply moved by the emotional impact of such programs, and I have decided to put my emphasis on creating such opportunities. I argue that we will not make headway with any curriculum changes unless we engage our fellow citizens emotionally in global education. We will not succeed with reason alone.

[1] I am using the terms "global" and "international" interchangeably for the purposes of this blog entry.

[2] Enrollment in world language programs in Wisconsin still hovers slightly above the 50% mark, remarkably unchanged from the numbers about 15 or twenty years ago. Also, most of these students take only the minimum of two years of another language.

Inequality and global competency

2011-04-27T17:39:08Z

by Natasha Kumar Warikoo

Assistant Professor

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Author of Balancing Acts:Youth Culture in the Global City

Much has been made of the importance of global competency for American youth to participate in an increasingly globalized economy, and to understand politics, the environment, and technology from a global perspective. These agendas are important and necessary. However, I would argue that they are not sufficient. Professor Reimers, in his posting, warned against 'global education light' that focuses on an annual 'world cultures day'. I want to express a different kind of warning, which is that global education without a discussion of the important moral and political issues related to inequality, both domestic and international, will blind youth to the inequalities, past and present, that plague our world.

Let's start with inequality in the United States. I won't reiterate the significant and stubborn trends of inequality based on income, neighborhood, race, and ethnicity that affect youth's life chances. Schools have been quick to address new immigrant communities with 'global education light', enjoying potluck dinners and dance festivals. But, how can we critically engage students in discussions of justice, fairness, and moral responsibility in an increasingly connected and globalized world? Global education needs to be intertwined with global responsibility. This can be from a young age. Recently, my daughter's class collected "pennies for peace" to raise money for schools in Pakistan. Projects like these must develop age-appropriate activities designed not only to develop students' understandings of life in other parts of the world, but also to begin to address questions like the one my four-year-old raised: "Why do we have money to buy pencils but they don't?" in honest, authentic ways. And, the more that socially responsible students are empowered to see themselves as agents for change in a globalized, unequal world, the better off we will all be. So, one day my daughter might set her sights on social change such that a "pennies for peace" program will no longer be necessary.

Finally, the more that students can connect personally and locally to global issues in authentic ways, the more real and impactful it will be. One means for this is through their and their friends' family histories of migration. 24% of children in the United States have an immigrant parent--that's 14.5 million children. The study of migration has multiple important and fascinating dimensions--inequality, cultural change, human rights, and much more. Educators should seize on this opportunity for real, global education heavy, with the goal of developing students into global agents for change and social justice.

Defining and assessing global competence in teaching and learning

2011-04-25T14:22:38Z

by Dana Mortenson
Executive Director
World Savvy

In the last decade, global education has received renewed focus, study and support as the world around us changes rapidly and we usher in a new era of global cooperation, collaboration and interdependence. We've achieved much broader consensus around the need for a more globally competent society, to confront the challenges of the 21st century more effectively - although how this should be done is still a subject of heated debate. A variety of frameworks in education have been offered as the solution, and in the field of global education, as Fernando pointed out in his blog, the efficacy of integration versus specialized instruction is a point of contention among practitioners in the field. However, before debating the merits of approach, more attention must be paid to defining and assessing global competence in teaching and learning. This remains an underdeveloped area of this growing field, and is crucial if we are to truly understand the implications of reforming our education system and 'globalizing' teaching and learning.

There has been notable progress on this front, including Oxfam's Global Citizenship curriculum framework, CCSSO and the Asia Society's matrix for global competence and though framed differently, National Geographic's definition and case for geo-literacy strikes similar chords with the rest of the field in identifying what students need to be prepared for success in the 21st century. When I step back to consider what these frameworks specifically and global education generally seeks to accomplish, it is simple: to prepare students for a changing world. Most in the field do agree that our 20th century framework for teaching and learning do not accomplish this need to teach students in this century how to think, rather than what to think, and that a reliance on rote memorization works against these aims.

At World Savvy, we've helped to develop more globally competent teachers and learners through integrated, interdisciplinary programs--youth engagement in arts, media and project based learning, and professional development which builds educators' capacity to embed global competency into teaching. This approach is focused on creating a global lens for all teaching and learning which illuminates the connections between issues, events and people, locally and globally, and promotes informed, positive action. We've experimented with many approaches to gauge impact, and to more fully understand the complexities of assessing global competence (see evaluation consultant Tom Shaw's blog on World Savvy's website)To this end in 2010, we adopted a Developmental Evaluation model, which allows us to operate in this complex space and navigate, sort out and adapt effective principles in this realm, allowing us to understand the range of contexts within which teaching and learning for global competence takes place. When our organization took on the task of defining global competence and developing an instrument to assess it among our students, we turned to our teachers, students and staff to understand the components of this dynamic concept, and settled on the following framework:

Knowledge:
- Complexities and interdependency of world events and issues
- Geography, conditions, issues and events
- Historical forces that have shaped the current world system
- One's own culture and history in relationship to others

Skills:
- Research
- Communication and collaboration
- Coping and resiliency
- Critical and comparative thinking
- Creative thinking and problem solving

Values and Attitudes:
- Openness to new opportunities, ideas and ways of thinking
- Self awareness about identity and culture, and sensitivity and respect for differences
- Empathy and valuing multiple perspectives
- Comfort with ambiguity and unfamiliar situations

Behaviors:
- Seek out multiple opinions and perspectives
- Form opinions based on exploration and evidence
- Taking informed action on issues that matter to you
- Sharing knowledge and encouraging discourse

To assess students' development of global competency as defined above, we created an instrument that evaluates, in a variety of ways, an individual's willingness to explore how the world works, rather than their specific knowledge of how it functions; interest in other cultures, rather than their specific knowledge of those cultures; desire to take a stand on global issues, rather than specific knowledge of the issues, and so on. We are interested in evaluating our students' "readiness" to participate in a complex, interconnected world. This is not intended to diminish the value and importance of specific knowledge about global issues, which is critical; but what we've found in programs is that what is done with the knowledge acquired is even more critical--how it impacts dispositions and ways of seeing and thinking about the world and interacting with it. The instrument is meant to assess that dynamic space, to understand what takes a student from being 'globally aware' or knowledgeable to 'globally competent'.

Exactly what constitutes global education?

2011-04-22T16:27:10Z

by Robert Harrison
Curriculum Manager
International Baccalaureate Organization

Exactly what constitutes global education? At a recent similar discussion ("What Kind of Education Enables Us to Cope With an Interconnected World") sponsored by Cambridge Assessment (UK), a panel of industry and education sector experts tried to forge some consensus about what 'knowledge and skills are attractive to higher education institutions and employers around the world and whether there is a common set of skills, body of knowledge, level of understanding or a mindset that enables students and countries to flourish.'

The panel--with some notable dissent from the august and very traditional perspective of a Senior Tutor from the University of Cambridge--identified five common threads. In an era of intense globalization, they agreed, students need:

1. an understanding of pressing global issues

2. multilingualism, both in terms of multiple language proficiencies as well as fluency in global English

3. information technology (information literacy) skills

4. collaborative skills and experience

5. capacities for innovation and creativity.

Interestingly, educational thinkers from India and China (Hong Kong) added:

6. an appreciation for diversity/ understanding of language and cultures

7. the capacity for independent thinking.

This portrait of global education stands in contrast to the way many universities continue to think about what's essential in students' preparation for academic and economic success. At the Cambridge event, the weightiest player in the room calmly insisted that in the 21^st century, universities continue to seek students who were just about the same as they'd always sought: young people with intellectual acumen possessing command of a reasonably-fixed body of specialist subject-area knowledge.

I was struck by the disconnect. It isn't as if the 'Oxbridge' system isn't aware of and responding to changes in the way the world works. A good look around the James Martin 21^st Century School at Oxford University shows a fascinating and high-powered model.

But it's a lively question to consider how best to balance traditional disciplinary subject-matter content mastery with the pursuit of 21^st century global knowledge, skills, and attitudes. I wonder if the ways nations, states, local educational authorities, and classroom teachers move between and combine these two demands may be the most important big-scale decision facing primary and secondary educators today.

It's time to get serious about global education

2011-04-19T12:00:00Z

by Fernando Reimers
Ford Foundation Professor of International Education
Director, International Education Policy Program
Harvard Graduate School of Education

In 1928 Professor Isaac Kandel of Columbia University addressed the annual meeting of the Association of Secondary School Principals. In his talk he made an eloquent case for why teachers should prepare students to understand global affairs. Judging from a number of recent expert reports (examples here and here) evaluating the state of international education in our K-12 schools, it is apparent that we have as a nation made little progress in achieving that aspiration. As shown by the level of foreign language proficiency of high school graduates, by their knowledge of world history and geography, and by their understanding of global affairs, our schools are not helping our students to understand, much less to lead in, the world in which they live.

The limited reach of the programs which exist to engage the minds of our children and youth with the global affairs that will shape their lives is all too aparent. The Peace Corps has for many years, through its Coverdell World Wise Schools Program, been offering at no cost to schools lesson plans and instructional materials about global affairs. Their mailing list includes 17,000 teachers--an impressive number for sure, but a very small fraction of the 7.2 million teachers and school staff in the nation. Similarly, of the more than 132,000 elementary and secondary schools in the country, just over 1,000 offer the International Baccalaureate program.

In a recent article examining the challenges to US global leadership, Capt Wayne Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby make the case for a new national strategic narrative that moves from containment to sustainability, based on understanding and responding to a 'strategic ecosystem' that is complex, uncertain and presents challenges, risks and threats. They advocate that way 'to achieve sustainable prosperity and security, is through the application of credible influence and strength, the pursuit of fair competition, acknowledgement of interdependencies and converging interests, and adaptation to complex, dynamic systems'. Given that their hope is that this strategy can serve as a national narrative that guides collective efforts to promote development, understanding of the ecosystem and complex interdependencies that are the foundation of their analysis is a prerequisite to broad-based adoption of their strategy. Given the paucity of our efforts in global education, it is reasonable to ask: how many of our college graduates, let alone high school graduates, are prepared to understand the ecosystem that Porter and Mykleby have in mind?

Over the last few years the World Economic Forum has produced reports of the major global risks in the areas of economics, geopolitics, the environment, society and technology. An examination of the K-12 curriculum standards of the states with the most rigorous curriculum in the US shows that they constitute inadequate preparation to understand those global risks, much less manage them or turn them into opportunities.

Given the realities of global interdependency it is unsurprising that a growing number of groups (examples here and here) have recently advocated for global education at the K-12 level in the United States. But two misconceptions stand in the way of adequately equipping high school graduates with the expert level of skills they will need. The first is the conflation of global competency with teaching core subjects at global levels. The popularization of international assessments of student knowledge and skills in the subjects of language, mathematics and science, have generated an interest in emulating the educational practices of the nations where students achieve at the highest levels in those tests. Such comparative study is indeed valuable, but the global competency necessary to understand and act on global challenges will not emerge simply from teaching math and science at the highest levels. Explicit instruction in those global topics and challenges is necessary to equip students to understand and act upon them. The second misconception that stands in the way of providing such instruction is the widespread belief that we can produce deep global competency with 'global education light'. At the extreme these 'light' approaches include the popular 'world cultures day' which many schools celebrate, with food festivals from around the world, and small stands with cultural artifacts from around the world displayed in the school cafeteria. Less extreme, but equally insufficient, are the various modalities of 'infusion' through which we believe we can produce high quality global education. Infusion starts with the premise that it is not possible to gain important spaces in the curriculum for global education, so we must look for small windows of opportunity into the existing curriculum to make connections with global topics. While these approaches may be useful to promote the appreciation and interest for global topics, they are insufficient to promote the kind of expertise students gain in a focused course, with a clear scope and sequence, which are the approaches we use to teach most subjects we value, whether these are math, chemistry or history.

The adoption of infusion as an approach to global education, while practical in responding to the many constraints facing our schools, particularly in an era where the heavy emphasis on assessment is biased towards a few core subjects, accepts defeat before even trying to prepare our students adequately to lead in a rapidly changing and growingly interdependent world. It is a step back relative to the aspirations articulated by Isaac Kandel eighty years ago, on which we have made so little progress. If successful they will produce students who understand global affairs as much as our graduates of most of our foreign language programs can communicate in those languages, perhaps with interest and self-confidence but not with great skill. We might call these effective approaches for 'global appreciation' but not for 'global education'.

We need to begin to develop explicit curriculum that leads to deep understanding of global affairs, this requires articulating a clear progression, defining the components of competency, defining standards of performance, and identifying what is appropriate and effective teaching at various points in the progression. It means, in addition to developing such curriculum, also identifying effective instructional materials, standards of teacher competency, and making the time to teach and learn this subject. Defined in this way global education presents a five-fold challenge: developing the instructional sequence, developing powerful pedagogies, developing assessment tools, building capacity, and holding school leaders and teachers accountable for creating these opportunities.

Because the gap between this conception of Global Education and the current state of affairs is clearly much greater than the gap using 'lighter' versions of 'global appreciation,' the risks is that recognizing the gap will lead us to paralysis, to concluding that this is not a domain we can do much about in the near term, even as we recognize its important.

It is my intent in these lines to be provocative because I do not believe that burying our head in the sand will be particularly helpful to preparing our students to respond to the monumental global challenges we have passed on to them. I recognize that articulating a clear vision is aspirational, that it will take time and work to make the necessary progress in translating that vision into changed conditions in schools for a significant number of our students. This blog, and this blog series, as well as the Think Tank on Global Education which they are leading to, are an opportunity to flesh out this vision and a strategy to achieve it.