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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 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 approaches that help foster those skills as central facets of global citizenship and participation.
Educators want to see students not just survive the world they encounter but actually thrive within that world as constructive, innovative thinkers. No matter how they accomplish the goal, educators tend to share the common urge for vigor, motivation, and engagement in students as much as—or even more than—academic rigor. However, educators can’t always agree on what students need to learn, what the right standards might be, and how to reach those goals in the classroom—particularly given that much of the world’s population can find answers to knowledge-based questions on a smartphone. Linda Darling-Hammond (2010) notes that information is spreading so rapidly that “education can no longer be productively focused primarily on the transmission of pieces of information that, once memorized, comprise a stable storehouse of knowledge” (p. 4). Instead, she believes that education needs to focus on equipping students to be cognitively nimble (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Similarly, World Savvy co-founder and executive director Dana Mortenson believes that the only effective education in times of change is one that helps students “build skills and dispositions that make navigating change easier and more natural” (personal communication, October 28, 2016). Google chief education evangelist Jaime Casap suggests that instead of asking what students want to be when they grow up, we should ask what problems they want to solve, shifting students’ thinking beyond traditional job fields and toward a problem-solving mindset that will serve them well in any career context (AZEdNews, 2014).
Starting From Why: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity
Since the tragedies of September 11, 2001, the U.S. military had described the world’s state as a VUCA world, one marked by “Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity” (Owens, as cited in Gerras, 2010, p. 11). Politics aside, the acronym is both accurate and useful as we think about what it means to equip students to thrive in the future. For educators, this acronym provides a challenge that may require redesigning many elements of education: How do we prepare students to thrive in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity? Does the traditional view of what a student needs to know and be able to do by graduation provide the skills and knowledge needed to navigate that world? Will traditional instructional strategies get them there? And if not, what do graduates need to be successful in a world we can’t even envision, in jobs that have yet to be created?
There is an urgency for global partnerships and engagement that goes beyond our curriculum and standards—though partnerships can be easily married to content, given that many global competencies are naturally content oriented to geography, history, and anthropology, to name a few; and our shared global challenges easily connect to science, mathematics, and world languages, as well as being reflected in literature, arts, and religion. (See chapter 2 on page 31 for more information about deciding on topics and educational goals.) To help teachers see the urgency of global citizenship and the accompanying competencies, I start workshops by asking teachers to identify the skills, knowledge, values, dispositions, and behaviors students will need to thrive in the VUCA world. Every time, no matter where I am in the world, the lists are incredibly similar. As the following exemplars from workshops in four different countries indicate, we have more goals in common than not.
MOUNT VERNON PRESBYTERIAN SCHOOL
Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America (2015 Workshop)
decodes, empathizes, thinks critically, is self-disciplined, is flexible, is resilient, resists judgment, expresses with or without approval, communicates, filters information, goes deep, is gritty, communicates value, listens, observes, gives and receives feedback, finds positive supports, has basic knowledge of disciplines, adapts, creates opportunities, self-assesses, self-reflects, collaborates, is socially and emotionally intelligent, reinvents, takes risks, is aware of action and inaction, creates
BUMPE HIGH SCHOOL AND VARIOUS NEARBY ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
Bumpe, Sierra Leone, West Africa (2014 Workshop)
questions, dialogues, finds information, knows the difference between good and bad, lifelong learner, is decisive, demonstrates discipline, is accountable, is moral, is ethical, thinks creatively, is lawful, speaks out, is punctual, is time bound, is self-knowledgeable, motivates self, perseveres, is socially conscious, imagines, explores with curiosity, practices tolerance, is loving, solves problems, is honest, is proactive, collaborates, displays concern, teaches others, is result oriented, respects all, is authentic, leads, is responsible, thinks critically, overcomes fear, communicates, understands, empathizes, applies curriculum well
COLEGIO VALLE SAGRADO-URUBAMBA
Urubamba, Peru, South America (2013 Workshop)
integrates knowledge, writes, reads, understands, resolves problems (mathematical and in daily life), investigates, is technologically savvy, knows other world languages, is faithful, analyzes critically, knows and loves culture, loves, reflects, leads, lives in society, respects all (including the environment), resolves conflicts, makes choices, makes decisions, shows entrepreneurship, is proactive, controls emotions, shows solidarity, communicates, is sensitive to the needs of others, is reliable, is responsible, perseveres
COSTA RICAN REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL SPECIALISTS AND U.S. EDUCATORS
Sarapiquí, Costa Rica, Central America (2015 Workshop)
takes risks, resolves problems, makes decisions, discerns, thinks critically, leads, analyzes, engages, is flexible, practices patience, adapts, works in groups, empathizes, persists, loves country, has a sense of belonging, learns from others, informs, communicates, observes, is empowered, asks good questions, asserts self, is responsible, shows righteousness without impacting the rights of others, listens, participates, follows others, creates, is confident, innovates, respects others, shows self-respect, is proactive, appreciates everyone’s talents, respects different perspectives, grows, practices digital citizenship, creates strategies
Source: Adapted from Project-Based Learning for Global Citizenship workshop.
These lists identify many of the same priorities for students and societies, and they hit on many of the goals of the new global competency component of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), being developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to begin in 2018 (OECD, 2016). As the OECD’s work demonstrates, regardless of the field they choose, our students will spend their work lives collaborating across borders, whether geographic, political, racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, religious, or cultural. They will communicate with a wide array of stakeholders, who have complex and often conflicting needs and priorities. OECD (2016) thought leaders put it this way:
The driving ideas are that global trends are complex and require careful investigation, that cross-cultural engagement should balance clear communication with sensitivity to multiple perspectives, and that global competence should equip young people not just to understand but to act. (p. 1)
Students who are successful in the new economy will be those who have global and intercultural competencies, and those are best developed by engaging directly with global issues and perspectives, whether inside or outside the classroom. As their teachers, we need the same global and intercultural competencies if we hope to be part of that journey. As Reimers (2009) cautions, “Those who are educated to understand those transformations and how to turn them into sources of comparative advantage are likely to benefit from globalization; but those who are not will face real and growing challenges” (p. 4).
Regardless of the field they choose, our students will spend their work lives collaborating across borders, whether geographic, political, racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, religious, or cultural.
Research suggests that global competencies are increasingly important alongside core knowledge, as technology and globalization have impacted almost every industry since the late 1960s (Zhao, 2012). Yong Zhao (2012) points out that global trends have changed the job market permanently:
Technology advancement, globalization, and abundance of unemployed youth are all building blocks of a new economy … globalization and digitization together have created a new platform that helps create new jobs. This platform delivers a global customer base, a global capital pool, and a global workforce—all easily accessible. (pp. 59–60)
This new economy and all it entails will require a different set of skills than the more nationally bound economies of the past. To communicate and collaborate with a global customer base, capital pool, and workforce, students will need global competencies on very practical levels. In her article for Harvard Business Review, Erin Meyer (2015) makes the following claim:
In today’s globalized economy you could be negotiating a joint venture in China, an outsourcing agreement in India, or a supplier contract in Sweden. If so, you might find yourself working with very different norms of communication. What gets you to “yes” in one culture gets you to “no” in another.… In my work and research, I find that when managers from different parts of the world negotiate, they frequently misread such signals, reach erroneous conclusions, and act … in ways that thwart their ultimate goals.
From the ability to speak to a client in his or her native language to the ability to leverage the varied talents of key stakeholders with cultural savvy, the survival skills of the globalized business world are exactly the skills global partnerships develop. It is important to balance these skills with deep cultural and historical knowledge about other countries, plus the capacity to make collaborative decisions in intercultural settings. While I tend to approach this work from a social justice and equity orientation, I recognize that economic forces can do more to legitimize this work in many school communities. I encourage teachers to use this more practical argument as they build buy-in for new programs, particularly in school contexts where tying global education to students’ futures in business might motivate change more effectively. Chapter 10 (page 177) provides more guidance about these kinds of efforts.
When we think about global skills in practice, whether in global business and economic entrepreneurship or in global development and social entrepreneurship, many of global education’s supposedly soft skills actually qualify as metacognitive skills. Soft skills are allegedly the opposite of hard skills, which include easily demonstrable abilities such as mathematical calculation or specific technical proficiencies. Soft skills include abilities that are more difficult to prove or measure, such as emotional intelligence, adaptability, and critical thinking. However, thinking critically about how to meet the varied needs of diverse stakeholders, for example, requires extraordinarily complex, high-level reasoning that interweaves knowledge with social-emotional understandings (Critical Thinking Community, 2015). Far from being a soft skill, critical thinking across cultures elevates global competency to the metacognitive level.
Fernando M. Reimers (2009) suggests that the “preparation to develop these understandings, knowledge and skills must begin early in order to develop high levels of competence as well as help youth recognize the relevance of their education to the world in which they live” (p. 4). This means that global competency development is not just the work of high schools and colleges when the world beyond school looms most closely for students, but that global competency programs should begin early and intentionally build that sense of global and local relevance. Try the global graduate for a VUCA world activity in figure 1.1 with your colleagues to help build a sense of the skills a student needs and to determine when you might best foster them, being sure the conversation stays grounded in the age groups you serve and the competencies most important to the student’s developmental needs.
Figure 1.1: Global graduate for a VUCA world activity.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/21stcenturyskills for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Being intentional about identifying the global competencies you want to address will ensure that integrations are meaningful and educational.
As you plan strategies for finding, developing, and maintaining partnerships for your students, being intentional about identifying the global competencies you want to address will ensure that integrations are meaningful and educational. In the case of the kindergarten students in San Francisco, for example, one of the teacher’s explicit learning goals was empathy, so she developed her own rubrics to measure empathy’s presence in students’ discussions and classroom behavior. Given that global educators often feel isolated and need help creating buy-in across their communities, identifying specific, measurable global competencies and knowledge areas to intentionally teach, foster, and assess through those global partnerships can help legitimize efforts to potential naysayers. Some global competencies, such as research or negotiation skills, are easily measured; others, like empathy, humility, or resilience, are not as easily measured. We will explore how you might approach assessing such immeasurables in chapter 9 (page 155), but you may find it useful to review your academic standards alongside a global competency framework, such as those we’ll explore in this chapter, as you begin planning a new partnership.
Defining Global Competency
To teach and assess global competencies as central learning objectives in the classroom, you need to define those competencies, encourage practice and improvement toward mastery, and measure student performance over time. Global competencies tend to focus on several key learning areas, all of which an effective global partnership can address and foster, and most of which likely came up in the global graduate for a VUCA world activity in figure 1.1. Additionally, it is worth noting that global competencies have a great deal in common with the kinds of intercultural competencies emphasized by diversity and inclusivity practitioners such as Steven Jones, Rosetta Lee, and Glen E. Singleton. If your school is working on internal intercultural inclusivity as well as global education, and are trying to have deeper conversations about race and privilege, it is smart to align the two initiatives so they function in concert, rather than in isolation. The following competencies are the building blocks of global literacy and a good starting place for defining goals. The partnership strategies in this book are based on these sorts of competencies, and a successful partnership will nurture them intentionally.
• Intercultural skills, especially communication and collaboration, are needed in all fields. These skills are important for the increased diversity and complexity that human mobility creates within communities.
• Empathy and humanizing the world are necessary for building the kind of global progress that avoids conflict and meets the needs of the most stakeholders possible in an increasingly overpopulated world.
• Inquiry skills allow humans to adapt to and deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in our constantly changing global landscape. These skills are intrinsically connected to critical thinking, which is key to thriving as a lifelong learner.
• Collaborative solution building and humility, which we need because volatile change and equitable development require collaborative skills and the humility to value other people’s priorities, not unilateral decision making.
Remember that this work does not have to happen instead of curricular goals; rather, global connections and partnerships help our students recognize that what they’re learning has broad implications beyond the classroom, and that every discipline offers potential solutions to our most serious challenges. While it may be easier to run a partnership outside of the academic classroom, such as through clubs, after-school activities, or elective courses, a well-developed global experience that’s grounded in significant content provides a rich opportunity to make that content relevant for students, just as the International Baccalaureate program has tried to do since 1968.
Global competency can be defined in various ways, and the criteria tend to depend on the particular educator’s philosophical views. Reimers (2009), for example, believes that global competencies include the “attitudinal and ethical dispositions that make it possible to interact peacefully, respectfully, and productively with fellow human beings from diverse geographies” (p. 3). This definition suggests that a meaningful global partnership might address how our various disciplines can help solve global challenges, singularly and in concert, and that the development of “attitudinal and ethical dispositions” should be at the heart of our global efforts (Reimers, 2009, p. 3). Gabriela Ramos of the OECD believes that the “development of social and emotional skills, as well as values like tolerance, self-confidence, and a sense of belonging, are of the utmost importance to create opportunities for all and advance a shared respect for human dignity” (OECD, 2016, p. i). Finally, educational consultant Tim Kubik notes a distinction between global competency (which he believes implies a singularity, as though there is just one worldview to cultivate) and what he calls being competently global, a more pluralistic way of framing our goals (T. Kubik, personal communication, May 21, 2016).
Global connections and partnerships help our students recognize that what they’re learning has broad implications beyond the classroom.
While this multiplicity of definition can get confusing, many organizations have developed and redeveloped definitions of global competency into frameworks intended to support the work of educators. Three of the most important for this work include those from (1) Oxfam, (2) World Savvy, and (3) the Center for Global Education at Asia Society. Each provides a framework that offers a valuable lens for defining what global competency might look like. As you explore the following frameworks, consider which global competencies resonate for you, particularly in connection to the age groups and disciplines you teach, so that you can use them as learning goals in your global partnership design. As your school gets more involved in global education, you may even want to craft your own global competency matrix, capturing those elements that best mirror your school’s guiding vision.
Oxfam
Organized around knowledge and understanding; skills; and values and attitudes, Oxfam’s (https://oxfam.org) framework for global citizenship exemplifies the values of equity and social justice, the organization’s core goals. See table 1.1 for a list of Oxfam’s global citizenship components.
Table 1.1: Oxfam’s Components of Global Citizenship
| Knowledge and Understanding | Skills | Values and Attitudes |
| • Social justice and equity • Identity and diversity • Globalization and interdependence • Sustainable development • Peace and conflict • Human rights • Power and governance | • Critical and creative thinking • Empathy • Self-awareness and reflection • Communication • Cooperation and conflict resolution • Ability to manage complexity and uncertainty • Informed and reflective action | • Sense of identify and self-esteem • Commitment to social justice and equity • Respect for people and human rights • Appreciation for diversity • Concern for the environment and commitment to sustainable development • Commitment to participation and inclusion • Belief that people can bring about change |
Source: Adapted from Oxfam, 2015.
The Oxfam framework emphasizes responsible global citizenship in particular, and the broader publication it comes from offers many useful classroom strategies for reaching these goals. While many learning objectives in the Oxfam framework, such as empathy or self-awareness, might seem challenging to teach and assess, this framework focuses on the kinds of immeasurables we most need students to develop. One aspect of the Oxfam framework worth spotlighting is the emphasis on conflict resolution, which is absent from the other two frameworks for global competency, as well as concern for the environment and commitment to sustainable development. Conflict resolution is a key element of building a more peaceful world, and many schools that use restorative justice practices find that such skills can be developed intentionally in teachers and students. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/21stcenturyskills for a link to more information on restorative justice in schools.) Further, environmental stewardship and developmental sustainability, which are United Nations’ (n.d.) sustainable development goals, are essential to long-term survival across the planet.
World Savvy
Alongside academic content foundations in core concepts that include history and geography, World Savvy (www.worldsavvy.org) emphasizes several hard skills like doing research and forming opinions based on evidence. This framework, which defines global competence as “the disposition and capacity to understand and act on issues of global significance,” also emphasizes the importance of self-awareness when seeking to understand others (World Savvy, 2014).
World Savvy’s framework is the only one that emphasizes becoming comfortable with “ambiguity and uncomfortable situations,” exactly the sort of ambiguity VUCA identifies as a challenge of our times (World Savvy, 2014). I ask educators in professional development programs and diversity workshops to lean into discomfort so they can discover the power of confronting rather than avoiding the ambiguity and conflict that make us uncomfortable. To become comfortable with the uncomfortable, with the ambiguity that is constant in times of rapid change, we have to address what creates the discomfort. Many global cultures are nonconfrontational (Meyer, 2015), which means that they tend to avoid uncomfortable conversations about race, identity, and divergent perspectives—even though feeling discomfort signals the importance of such conversations. Globally competent young people who know how to lean into discomfort—and communicate effectively with those who lean away—are essential to success in any field impacted by globalization (Meyer, 2015). Also significant is World Savvy’s emphasis on behaviors, which asks students to take global thinking and turn it into publicly demonstrated action. While deeper shifts in student behavior may take years to see and would require longitudinal studies beyond any singular classroom experience to measure, global educators have an important opportunity to help students learn to act on their values. See table 1.2 for a list of the attributes World Savvy considers crucial to being a globally competent student and educator.
To become comfortable with the uncomfortable, with the ambiguity that is constant in times of rapid change, we have to address what creates the discomfort.
Center for Global Education at Asia Society
The Center for Global Education at Asia Society (http://asiasociety.org/education) commits to setting the standard for how to teach and assess global competency. Its framework blurs the lines between soft and hard skills by interweaving the social, emotional, and academic in powerful ways, making the four domains of global competency—(1) investigate the world, (2) recognize perspectives, (3) communicate ideas, and (4) take action—among the most respected frameworks for global learning in North America. (See table 1.3 on page 22.)
Table 1.2: World Savvy’s Global Competence Matrix
Source: Adapted from World Savvy, 2014.
Table 1.3: The Center for Global Education at Asia Society’s Four Domains of Global Competence
Source: Center for Global Education at Asia Society, 2005.
While most schools in the Center for Global Education at Asia Society’s International Studies Schools Network use a variety of project- and inquiry-based instructional models, the four domains of global competency also provide a potential design structure for planning global partnerships and other global learning experiences, both inside and outside the classroom. Whereas the other two frameworks provide learning goals for skills, knowledge, and values, this framework provides potential steps for instructional practice—that we begin by investigating the world, for example, move into recognizing perspectives, come back to investigate more, recognize more perspectives, and begin communicating our ideas as we move toward taking action.
The next step is to apply one or a combination of these frameworks to specific pedagogical or instructional strategies.
Investigating Pedagogical and Instructional Strategies for Global Competency
In my experience, so-called sit-and-get pedagogies, what Cooper (2013) refers to as “DLR: drill, lecture, repeat,” rarely create graduates ready to thrive in the world. Whereas DLR learning focuses on rote memorization and tightly controlled learning management, VUCA-ready graduates need to know how to think for themselves. While global education is not necessarily synonymous with inquiry-based learning (where students learn through investigating an issue), it shares one important feature: the best global education is based in student-centered instructional practices. This means that, with the teacher’s guidance, students lead learning, making choices along the way, and enjoying opportunities to create something meaningful. The goal is to foster students’ abilities to work across cultures, navigate complexity, and think for themselves about how to solve the world’s pressing problems. Global education is about fostering our students’ innovation, creativity, passion, and purpose; and their ability to collaborate globally to develop new solutions to issues such as poverty, disease, climate change, and global conflict (Mansilla & Jackson, 2011). These goals can’t easily be fulfilled by using teacher-driven models in which students take notes on lectures, fill out worksheets, and regurgitate knowledge on tests.
The best global education is based in student-centered instructional practices.
As early as 1897, educational philosopher John Dewey (as cited in Kucey & Parsons, 2012) criticizes traditional modes of education for being too focused on issues of the past rather than on the process skills and thinking that help students thrive in their current and future worlds outside of school. Noting that it is impossible to know what the world will be like by the time students graduate, Dewey (as cited in Roth, 2012) advocates instead for the development of “habits of learning” in schools, including “plasticity … an openness to being shaped by experience,” over the pure acquisition of knowledge. These habits, he insists, will outlive any era-specific content knowledge, providing students with the skills to navigate any reality they might encounter.
Paulo Freire takes these ideas further with his 1970 publication, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he points out that the traditional banking model of education doesn’t lead students to their own sense of personal conscience (Freire, 2000). Calling the problem with education “narration sickness,” Freire (2000) explains the challenges of traditional education this way:
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance, … Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. (pp. 52–53)
Real conscience and an evolving sense of one’s place in the world, Freire insists, require a dialogue between teacher and students. Global education movements are in sync with much of what Dewey (as cited in Kucey & Parsons, 2012) and Freire (2000) emphasize, and student-driven pedagogies are increasingly recognized as the best path to developing students’ global competencies. Brandon L. Wiley (2014), former executive director of the Center for Global Education at Asia Society’s International Studies Schools Network and chief program officer at the Buck Institute for Education, frames instructional tendencies this way:
Schools that focus on developing global competence take into account the diverse learners in every class. Across the school, teachers use project-based learning, higher-order questioning, and inquiry-based instructional strategies and student needs, learning styles, interests and standards to guide them. Classrooms provide opportunities for students to learn and apply discipline-specific methods of inquiry. Woven throughout the curriculum are instructional strategies that enable students to demonstrate productive habits of mind, which include problem solving, creative- and generative-thinking skills, the capacity to analyze issues of international significance from multiple perspectives, and the ability to direct their own learning. (p. 138)
This instructional approach combines the global competencies outlined in the frameworks provided earlier in this chapter with student-centered pedagogies, and includes the disciplines, standards, and curriculum that most schools are required to teach. Wiley’s (2014) image of a globally engaged school includes many layers of student-directed learning, as the student who thrives in a VUCA world knows how to manage his or her own knowledge acquisition, rather than waiting for a teacher for direction. He also emphasizes that these schools give equal time to the visual and performing arts as to core content areas (Wiley, 2014). His point is important. The arts can break down political and religious barriers in ways no other discipline can, as well as create an avenue for reflection and self-expression that students need—especially if they’re studying controversial global challenges like conflict or human rights, as explored in chapter 8 (page 143).
Similarly, students need to develop their world language skills for global engagement in any career field—and increasingly, those language skills are important locally as well. Global partnerships provide an ideal forum for practicing a language through authentic, not contrived, communication. In my experience in the Spanish classroom, global partnerships that motivate students to learn about each other will naturally motivate language learning as well, since the ability to communicate is the whole point of language study. This is often a missing link for world language classrooms, and no number of videos or in-class exercises can parallel the experience of talking to a real human being in the target language, especially if that person lives in another country. In my own classroom, I saw huge leaps in student progress when I embedded opportunities to use Spanish authentically, particularly with other teenagers in Latin America. In this regard, global partnerships can allow world language teachers to develop not just their students’ language competencies but also students’ urge to use them, which takes language learning out of the textbook and into the world.
The arts can break down political and religious barriers in ways no other discipline can.
The following instructional strategies—project-based learning, problem-based learning, design thinking, understanding by design, and place-based education—are all appropriate for global partnerships. They are included here because they start from the premise that student-centered learning matters for student engagement and empowerment, and are a central ingredient for fostering students’ problemsolving skills. Consider your own context and classroom, and identify the strategies you feel might work for your students as you read about the following approaches.
Project-Based Learning
Project-based learning has students choose a real-world challenge or question and investigate an answer, learning significant content through the process of addressing the challenge. Employing many strategies connected to design thinking and understanding by design (defined in later sections), project-based learning emphasizes a challenging problem or question, sustained inquiry, authenticity, student voice and choice, reflection, critique and revision, and public product creation, all with an emphasis on students gaining key knowledge, understanding, and success skills throughout the process (Larmer, Mergendoller, & Boss, 2015). This pedagogical approach is well suited to all forms of partnerships, as it puts students in charge of their own experiences, with a focus on producing something tangible or presenting an idea that is shared during the experience. The Canada and Colombia pairing mentioned in the introduction (page 1) could be run as a project-based learning experience, for example, in which a driving question, like How might we collaborate to improve our communities?, would allow students to work together, learn from each other, and develop actions and products they decide on together. The project might include connecting the Colombian community with free-trade networks, and the product could be a presentation or paper describing the impetus, process, and results.
A driving question, like How might we collaborate to improve our communities?, would allow students to work together, learn from each other, and develop actions and products they decide on together.
Problem-Based Learning
Problem-based learning is incredibly similar to project-based learning in its student-centered design strategies and intentions. However, problem-based learning always includes engagement in solving a complex and authentic problem, whereas project-based learning can be problem focused but can also focus on inquiry explorations, creative productions, or design challenges that do not solve a core problem (Stanford University, Center for Teaching and Learning, 2001). This pedagogical approach is very well suited to engaging students in solving global issues, so it is particularly appropriate for partnerships in which two or more classrooms work together to build solutions—whether it’s a design for a better water filter or an argument about how to address climate change. For example, eighth-grade algebra classes at the Town School for Boys partnered with rural Sierra Leone to explore the prevention of Ebola; in this problem-based approach, students worked on the question, How might we use mathematics to understand and help end the Ebola crisis in West Africa? Students used exponential equations to understand the disease’s spread, explored and analyzed existing solutions through statistical analysis, and designed actions to educate their community about the problem.
Design Thinking
Design thinking focuses on the creation of a more tangible product, designed with the user’s needs in mind. Tim Brown, David Kelley, and the IDEO team (Thomas, 2016) originally developed design thinking as a mirror of the processes used by real engineers and designers to solve complex problems. Blogger Parker Thomas (2016) describes design thinking as “a vocabulary for describing the process of making and improving.” It includes unique facets such as specific empathy-building steps, in which students define users’ needs on an emotional level, which provides the opportunity to incorporate multiple perspectives. Like project-based learning, design thinking encourages multiple phases of ideation, prototyping, and testing to achieve high quality. This approach (described at www.ideo.org/approach) is ideal for any partnership that focuses on building something better—a cook stove, a solar energy system, a bridge, or a better means of transportation for rural communities, for example. Because it incorporates the use of empathy interviews, used to understand the feelings and motives of the person or group being designed for, design thinking also creates opportunities for humanizing and understanding others’ needs (Institute of Design at Stanford, n.d.). One of my favorite global partnerships using design thinking was the cook stove project, an eighth-grade science partnership that ran for several years between Brookwood School in Manchester, Massachusetts, the Forum for African Women Educationalists school in Kigali, Rwanda, and Colegio Bandeirantes in São Paulo, Brazil (Boss, 2013a). Each community worked with the materials most available to them locally, collaborating around their communities’ specific cooking and efficiency needs, as well as their designs’ environmental impacts.
Understanding by Design
Understanding by design, commonly known as UbD, is a planning structure and process intended to guide curriculum, assessment, and instruction with a focus on teaching and assessing deep, transferable knowledge and skills by focusing on long-term learning goals (McTighe & Wiggins, 2012). Understanding by design, a common concept in curricular planning, asks educators to begin with the end in mind and plan backwards (which is why understanding by design is also known as backward design). Understanding by design emphasizes authentic performance outcomes—tasks that require demonstrating learning beyond a multiple-choice test—and teachers serve as coaches in a largely student-centered experience, ensuring that learning occurs but refraining from directing it too overtly. For example, students in multiple locations might work together to co-create something to demonstrate their learning authentically—from a white paper on human trafficking to a Dream Flag Project (http://dreamflags.org) event that brings multiple cultures together. In many ways, the other strategies described here align with understanding by design because they begin with the end in mind, but the emphasis on authentic performance outcomes makes UbD particularly appropriate for global partnerships.
Place-Based Education
Place-based education focuses on deep explorations of heritage, culture, and challenges in students’ own local communities. You can adapt it for partnerships in which two classrooms do deep local explorations and then share their findings with each other. Place-based education provides learners with ways to become active citizens and stewards of their local environment, and it often includes service learning experiences and hands-on, real-world problem solving (Sobel, 2005). Chris Harth (2010) explores similar strategies in his work on glocal learning approaches, in which students explore global issues but apply their learning by exploring and solving those issues in their local context. Place-based education is particularly useful in elementary partnerships because it makes global issues more concrete for young learners when they can see how these issues manifest locally. This approach also has the advantage of allowing students to do something about the injustices or challenges they discover, encouraging deep understandings of and engagement with their local communities. An excellent example of a place-based global collaboration comes from This Is Ours, an initiative of e2 Education & Environment (www.e2education.org). In This Is Ours, students in different parts of the world photograph and write about their local environment, identifying the plant and animal species that make it unique, as well as sharing how their environment impacts their lives. Any classroom can use the books of photography and writing each school produces for a deep understanding of place as an element of culture and identity.
A Few Concluding Thoughts
Arguably the most important element of global competency originates in the sense of purpose that making an authentic connection can develop in students. Yong Zhao (2012) asserts that “the most desirable education, of course, is one that enhances human curiosity and creativity, encourages risk taking, and cultivates the entrepreneurial spirit in the context of globalization” (p. 17). By connecting their learning to the world outside the school building, students can begin to envision themselves as change makers who can participate constructively, regardless of their age or capacity to travel. The more we get students thinking for themselves and pursuing sustained inquiry into topics of passion, the more likely they are to build their lives around such topics. Pedagogical and instructional approaches like project-based or problem-based learning, design thinking, understanding by design, and place-based education help students tap into their interests and make purposeful choices.
In addition to impacting student engagement—and creating the higher achievement that comes from improved engagement—global partnerships have the potential to develop a sense of purpose that researchers find improves emotional resilience, determination, and lifelong well-being (Damon, 2009). Psychologist William Damon’s (2009) work suggests that connecting students with purposeful experiences throughout their education will help build many related strengths, including increased resilience from a “dedication to something larger than ourselves” (p. 25), and the ability to make “a valued contribution to the world beyond the self” (p. 28). In that regard, a sense of purpose may well be the most important global competency we can develop in our students. Particularly as they begin to grapple with the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of life in the 21st century, a deep sense of purpose—fostered through their connections with real people and experiences—will help them feel empowered rather than helpless.
Global competencies are not about gathering data or proving that students think globally; global competencies are about students becoming people of good conscience who work with others around the world to create a more sustainably just and peaceful world. Our planet needs young people everywhere to become self-motivated global thinkers who care about all stakeholders’ priorities, meaning that they work in partnership to find innovative ways to improve the lives of all people involved in or impacted by the global issues we explore, feel connected to others through a sense of common humanity, are curious about what is distinct in our cultural experiences, and are eager to learn from and collaborate with others. As you begin envisioning the sort of global partnership experience you’d like to create for your students, and which pedagogical and instructional strategies you want to embrace, keep these lofty goals in mind—but remember that first steps can be small as long as you connect students with perspectives and experiences that are humanizing and authentic.
Arguably the most important element of global competency originates in the sense of purpose that making an authentic connection can develop in students.
