Going Global

This week (October 22–28) marks the first ever Worldwide Week at Harvard, which highlights the tremendous work being done globally by the greater Harvard community. Throughout the week, events, talks, symposia, and activities are being held — including Friday’s Askwith Forum, “Learning to Change the World” — that demonstrate a commitment to global issues and offer the chance to engage with the work of a variety of disciplines across the university.

Here, four master’s candidates in the International Education Policy Program, focus on global education and reflect on why the field is so important — to them and the countries in which they work.

As a Nigerian-American I have always straddled the ideological border between cultures. This dual national background enriched my global perspective immensely, but it also made me aware of the stark inequalities that exist both between societies and within them. This perspective inspired me to act and since adolescence I have worked as a social justice educator and community organizer with multicultural youth in Boston and across the globe.

While working in Andorra as a Fulbright Fellow, I realized the ways in which intercultural collaboration can promote sustainable peace. Andorra is a small European nation nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains where cross-national collaboration is at the root of the education system. While engaging my students from all over Europe on issues of social justice and civic engagement, an idea occurred to me: What if students from the Global South could convene in a similar manner and work together to come up with innovative solutions to the seemingly intractable problems that plague their nations?

I developed the idea of a comprehensive scholarship program that would promote this valuable South-South discourse without the dependence on a Western institution as a medium. I am currently partnering with the United Nations Association of Greater Boston to develop a Model United Nations curriculum focused on migration, an important phenomenon that is currently relevant in both the Global North and South.

After graduation, I hope to move to Latin America and find meaningful work in the field of international development that will help me foster South-South discourse, learning from the successes of countries like Mexico and Brazil, and steadily work toward my goal.

Prior to coming to HGSE, I was working for an education start-up in India, in teacher professional development for government school teachers in Kashmir. This experience exposed me to various challenges of sustaining education in armed conflict and I am using this year at Harvard to try and innovate on a solution for the same. My team and I are currently designing a leadership development prototype for young individuals from states experiencing conflict, crisis, and fragility that would enable them to leverage their experiences and create sustainable solutions in education in armed conflict.

For me, education is what empowers me, and I believe that no one should have to live in fear. To this end, global education lies at the heart of empowering all citizens, no matter where they are from.

Why do we commit to driving globalization forward but continue to draw new borders every day? Why do we advocate for social justice but see an ever-increasing sentiment of xenophobia? Why do we claim to have developed “schooling of the future” yet see students remain apathetic to global issues in the present? 

It is essential that the realm of education focuses on global education and global citizenship in these unsettling and complex times. The youth of tomorrow must be nourished with mindset that is truly committed to making the world a better place. To me, global citizenship is a birthright and education must provide students with a means to embrace this identity.

Where I come from, I was deprived of such holistic learning. So far, “global education” and “global citizenship” have remained a concept of the West. Some attribute this exclusivity to a sense of “intellectual colonialism.” I aim to take global education and contextualize it to the emerging world, where communities need to be empowered and antediluvian attitudes need to change. Under the guidance of Professor Fernando Reimers, I aspire to implement the Global Citizenship Curriculum through the “The World Course” in public and low-cost private schools in India, a setting I’m most familiar with. The growing middle class in developing economies invest a fortune in creating a better future for their children, yet the system remains obsolete. I hope to change that and, although I am only 22, one day, I know I will.

I have been developing a curriculum for the United World College in Singapore in improving their existing approach to teaching finance. Finance goes beyond big capitalist banks, and through a new curriculum, I aim to focus on aspects such as microfinance and budgeting for nonprofits and charities in the global space. I have also been working with Envoys to expand experiential learning to schools in India. Although these projects are in their nascent stages, they are the stepping stones to my ultimate goal in pushing the frontier of global education.

The power of global education is nested in its ability to empower individuals by expanding their perception of what is possible as well as their ability to achieve, and its ability to empower communities by creating a safe culture conducive to community development.

I spent the past six years seeking to co-create a just society in the Middle East by working toward empowering individuals with the tools they need to create and achieve their own dreams. I first witnessed the power of education when I taught and later led the Hoya Empowerment and Learning Program (HELP) to teach English, and computer and financial literacy to low-income migrant workers on campus. Through HELP, I witnessed education empower the migrant workers with self-confidence, pride, and positive relationship-building skills.

I know from my experience as a teacher that students’ capacity to dream is shaped by their experiences. In launching the “My Dreams” campaign at the school I worked in, I sought to expand the limited perception my students had of their potential. I did that by inviting inspirational women to share their dreams and accomplishments, and having the students present and talk about their dreams in an end-of-year event. In both my work in HELP and the My Dreams campaign, my aim was to provide the tools, as well as increase cross-cultural and cross-socioeconomic group interactions, to expand learners’ perception of what is possible; both of these elements need to be present in global education.

When referencing global education, we are prone to limit our thinking to cross-border understanding of others, but global education today is also relevant to understanding and valuing diversity within a country’s borders. With the increasing heterogeneity within countries, communities are growing apart by “othering” those who are not from the same social class, ethnic background, nationality, and/or religion. This inhibits our ability to see those unlike us as human beings, and as such numbs the human heart to the suffering of others, increasing the likelihood of oppressing and inflicting pain on others. I witnessed this process in the public school in Qatar. Policies that limit events such that only local students can attend, though well-intentioned, propagated racial discrimination among students and a work culture that does not value merit. For this reason, among many other examples of the influence of policy on school culture, I have switched my focus to the power of education in shaping communities’ cultures and values.

Global education, as I perceive it, ensures we keep our humanity by recognizing the humanity in others. In my quest to improve education policies in the Middle East, I have chosen to dedicate the next couple of years to understanding how policies influence school cultures, and how we can use this understanding to better inform education policies to create a positive culture that values diversity and encourages learning. 

Learn more about Worldwide Week at Harvard.