Читать книгу The Global Education Guidebook - Jennifer D. Klein - Страница 12
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
PREPARING FOR GLOBAL COLLABORATION
Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.
—Paulo Freire
Which aspects of your curriculum might improve with the kind of humanizing that comes from building connections and relationships? What kind of learning experience do you hope to build for students through your global partnership? What regions of the world connect to what your students are studying? How do you envision partnerships playing out in your day-to-day classroom work? What knowledge and skills do you hope your students will develop? This chapter will explore these considerations and more, and help you establish your partnership goals in concrete but flexible ways before you seek a partner.
It’s up to you whether to join an existing project for partnership, which we explore in chapter 4 (page 73), or whether you’d rather seek a partner and build something from scratch, which we explore in chapter 5 (page 93). Both are viable means of engaging, but building from scratch often requires more time. Some teachers develop a collaborative project idea first and then invite other classrooms to join in, welcoming anyone who likes their idea, while others start by finding a partner and then building the project idea together. (Chapter 5 helps you navigate asking a classroom to join yours.) You can work with one or multiple classrooms during your partnership, or you might prefer to connect your students with a few individuals. The key to building effective and sustainable international partnerships, according to Yong Zhao (2012), “is mutual benefits and understanding. Learning to discover mutual benefits and develop mutual understanding itself presents opportunities to develop global competency” (p. 228). I encourage you to consider this your central goal as you begin developing your partnership ideas: How might you craft a partnership that leads students to discover mutual benefits and develop mutual understanding? What mutual benefits and understanding will you need to develop with your partner teacher in order to get students there?
How might you craft a partnership that leads students to discover mutual benefits and develop mutual understanding?
Building a global partnership requires an incredible amount of resilience, flexibility, and patience, regardless of design. If you go in expecting high levels of success in the first year, your experiences may be disheartening. If you are concerned that you don’t have enough global competencies yourself and hold back from the elements that feel challenging, you may end up creating a superficial experience for your students. But if you can see yourself as a learner, can really embrace concepts like failing forward (because everyone fails, John C. Maxwell [2000] says what you do afterward determines whether you fail backward or forward), and are willing to be transparent with students as you hit the bumps, the partnership will be stronger in the long run—plus your students will have the important experience of learning with you more than from you (Freire, 2000).
Consider the following questions when contemplating the kind of partnership you would like to cultivate.
What Do I Want Students to Learn From Their Global Partnership?
The first serious consideration is the kind of learning experience you want to create for your students. If you consider the other classroom a true partner, and that’s the goal, you should find a teacher you would like to work with and then make most of your decisions with your partner. (Finding partners is discussed in detail in chapter 4 and chapter 5.) Serious equity issues can emerge if you overplan the project before your first call, as doing so can make you less receptive to your partner’s needs—and can even make you come across as dominating what should be a collaborative relationship. However, seeking a partner before clarifying some goals and hopes for the encounter can also be problematic. Even worse, failing to establish your readiness and needs, and then trying to coordinate your internal logistics after meeting your partner, can cause long delays in communication that can hurt your relationship with the other teacher.
It is important to ground your global partnership plans in significant learning goals that are fully relevant to your grade level and disciplines. The more you can ground your work in significant learning goals, particularly those that you can quantify through traditional assessments, the less resistance you will encounter from administrators, colleagues, parents, and students who might consider global learning “fluff” or see soft skills as less important than core content. William Kist (2014) notes that the necessary integration of technologies in global education exacerbates these misperceptions, as the use of new media often includes what Kist (2014) calls “the entertainment factor,” and new technologies are often perceived as detracting from the “seriousness of school” and putting fun over rigorous learning (p. 62).
It is important to ground your global partnership plans in significant learning goals that are fully relevant to your grade level and disciplines.
You must balance the effort, however. While academic grounding and learning goals can help legitimize a global partnership experience within your school or district, remember that just getting to know students in another part of the world will matter to your students. Launching into too much significant content too quickly in a global partnership often results in initially unengaged students. It is worth taking the time to explore each other’s lives (and not just at the lower-grade levels) to understand your partners as people before collaborating toward a specific goal. Sharing seemingly unimportant facets of life—such as students’ family makeup, pets, favorite music, movies, or books—can help create the initial connectedness that will ensure meaningful engagement throughout a partnership. How much seemingly off-topic banter is acceptable? Kist (2014) notes that teachers often wrestle with how much to keep students on task during international communication:
Most teachers in the global collaboration projects felt in the end that some amount of off-task chatter was acceptable and even desirable as students got to know each other. In the end, off-task conversation may help further the goals of global education projects in that students may learn more about other cultures through such informal conversations. (p. 61)
During a videoconference I facilitated between students at St. Mary’s Academy in Colorado and Falastine Dwikat, a young poet in Palestine, a seemingly off-task question about what Dwikat was reading led to a surprisingly powerful conversation. It turned out that she had just finished a book all the juniors in the room were reading for class—and hating—at which point Dwikat spent five minutes convincing them that it was worth their time. Ultimately, controlling the conversation too much or insisting on significant content over building connections may result in missing a rich opportunity for more layered and meaningful learning and relationship building.
Along with leaving room for unplanned discussion, build plans that leave plenty of room for student choice on both sides of the partnership. Thematic frameworks, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (http://bit.ly/2ho5QMO) or the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (http://bit.ly/1VXvanH), can create space for both classrooms to participate in relevant and meaningful ways, and to make choices that ensure all students explore issues relevant to their lives. As explained in chapter 7 (page 129), it’s important to come to partners with project ideas that can flex to the partner teacher’s needs; thematic approaches often allow for more flexibility, creativity, and equity because both classrooms can focus on the same framework (the sustainable development goals, for example) but can focus in on the issues most relevant to each community (such as exploring how to ensure high-quality education for girls in one classroom, while exploring how to end poverty in the other).
Most teachers around the world specialize in one or two academic disciplines from fifth grade onward. However, some of the best global partnerships are interdisciplinary. An interdisciplinary project can also make it easier to find the right partner teacher, as the project will be relevant to more potential partners. In fact, we do students a disservice when suggesting that each discipline exists in isolation. As a ninth grader at Parish Episcopal School in Dallas put it in his final reflections on an interdisciplinary global studies class, “It’s very important to see the connections between multiple classes because it mirrors the way the world works. Nothing stands on its own and everything is connected in some way” (A. Jennings, personal communication, May 12, 2016).
Once you find your partner teacher, you can have a conversation about where your curricular priorities intersect. Consider your two classrooms as the two circles of a Venn diagram, and start your partnership conversations in the areas where your goals and course content overlap. But until you connect with your partner directly, it is more important to note where you can enrich your curriculum with the opportunity for primary-source investigations into global issues and perspectives through collaboration with people outside your community. Once you meet with your partner teacher, you can work together to identify your common learning goals and design a partnership experience that meets those goals. We will explore a wide array of global partnership examples in chapter 3 (page 49), all of which are tied to grade level–appropriate learning objectives in language arts, social studies, mathematics, science, and the arts across the K–12 spectrum.
Some of the best global partnerships are interdisciplinary.
How Can I Take My Students Beyond the Fs of Global Education?
It’s easy and fun to engage with what many connected educators call the Fs of global education, but staying there often leads to superficial and less-than-humanizing partnerships. The Fs include topics like flags, food, folks, fun, festivals, and fashion—those elements of culture that are easy to see (Hall, 1976). Using Edward T. Hall’s (1976) cultural iceberg model to understand this issue, it becomes clear that we miss approximately 90 percent of a culture or individual’s identity if we only explore the Fs. According to the cultural iceberg model (Hall, 1976), we see only 10 percent of a given culture when we look at what’s visible (such as fashion, festivals, and food). Below the waterline lies 90 percent of who we are, just as the majority of an iceberg is invisible. That is where we find the beliefs, values, and thought patterns beneath our behaviors, rituals, and rites of passage. It’s not that we should avoid those surface-level Fs completely. In fact, many elementary and world language teachers spend a lot of time on them because topics like food and festivals help get kids excited and curious about different cultures and languages. But it’s important to recognize that the Fs are only a starting point, and to find ways to intentionally take students beneath the waterline over the course of our partnerships.
Edutopia blogger Suzie Boss (2016), author of Bringing Innovation to School, suggests that too much focus on quick, superficial explorations relegates global education to “at best a sidebar to the regular curriculum,” pointing out that “one-shot events or content-light programs do little to help students develop the global competencies that the 21st century demands of them.” She quotes Harvard’s Fernando M. Reimers, who fears that too many schools turn global education into an annual festival (Boss, 2016). Reimers claims, “Schools check the box and say, ‘OK, we’ve done global,’” based on festivals and brief events that really have nothing to do with building deep global competency and citizenship (as cited in Boss, 2016). Perhaps even more problematic, superficially exploring a culture can more easily lead to cultural misrepresentation, a serious danger to watch out for in this work, as it can be more diminishing than humanizing, exacerbating stereotypes rather than nuancing students’ understanding of the many layers of culture (Klein, 2017).
One way to move your students into a deeper experience is to use the Center for Global Education at Asia Society’s four domains of global competency—(1) investigate the world, (2) recognize perspectives, (3) communicate ideas, and (4) take action—to provoke questions that require deeper cultural competency to answer. (See table 1.3 on page 22 for more on the domains.) Regardless of whether you explore the Fs initially, how might you ensure that students will have opportunities to investigate the world more deeply, recognize perspectives, communicate ideas, and take action (Mansilla & Jackson, 2011)? What might it look like to try to understand the reasons beneath what we see when investigating the world? Why do people in a given place hold the perspectives they do? Who do we want to communicate our ideas to, and how might we act to improve conditions? As soon as you start considering such questions, your partnership will build into an experience in which the Fs provide the appetizer to a more meaningful meal. For example, an exploration of a country’s flag can lead to a deeper conversation about national and local identity, and even an opportunity to redesign a local flag in order to capture modern culture, as you’ll see in the Global Partners Junior example in chapter 3 (page 56). All the Fs have a deeper cultural context, so make sure students dip below that waterline to reach more nuanced understandings of the places and people they connect with.
Why do people in a given place hold the perspectives they do? Who do we want to communicate our ideas to, and how might we act to improve conditions?
PERSPECTIVES ON THE Fs OF GLOBAL EDUCATION: HOMA SABET TAVANGAR
Author of Growing Up Global and The Global Education Toolkit for Elementary Learners
I have a love-hate relationship with the notorious Fs—food, fun, and festivals. On the one hand, I rush to their defense when I hear them scoffed at. I have seen numerous instances where an international night, day, or week filled with the Fs brings school communities together, helps engage teachers who otherwise would not feel confident enough to incorporate various cultures or global perspectives, and draws in families from diverse backgrounds to showcase their experiences with pride. I’ve seen it build empathy among populations of recent immigrants and longtime locals, and serve as a springboard for deeper global learning, when teachers or school leaders noticed how engaged and creative their students and families could be, thanks to the Fs.
On the other hand, food, fun, and festivals might get one more F—freak show—tacked on, usually unconsciously, when cultures go on display in isolation from human experience, empathy, and humble learning; so these Fs can backfire. In isolation, a display of foreign food, fun, and festivals might create a single story, out of context and often distorted, and result in a great disservice to a complex culture, issue, or the experience of our neighbors. Rather than destroy prejudices, they could reinforce them. So, similar to the experience of technology use and social media, these Fs are not inherently good or bad. It’s how we present them and utilize them in the process of facilitating learning. Whether it’s a student-driven, personalized learning environment or a more traditional one, the role of teachers and school leaders can powerfully set the tone and facilitate authentic, empathy-building experiences—or not.
Source: Adapted from H. S. Tavangar, personal communication, April 30, 2016.
How Much Time Can I Put Into Crafting This Partnership?
This is an important question for any overworked educator. Realistically speaking, if you don’t have the time to communicate consistently and craft something meaningful for all classrooms involved, you’re better off going with an existing program, such as those explored in chapter 4 (page 73). Many are successful and provide excellent, ready-made projects with partners already in place. Because most existing programs have a set curriculum and standardized systems, they can lack the flexibility some teachers prefer, but as you make connections to partner teachers through existing programs, you can often develop your own innovations. If you’re willing and able to put in more work to craft something from scratch, you can build a learning partnership that flexes to the curricular needs of all teachers. Chapter 5 (page 93) explains the process of finding a classroom or teacher partner for a from-scratch pairing. Neither approach necessarily comes with a better guarantee of success; partnerships succeed and fail in established programs as much as they do in homegrown projects. Which method you choose is really a question of the kind of educator you are; if you prefer established systems and programs, or have limited time to invest, go that route. And if you tend to struggle with existing structures, build something of your own. See the reproducible “Global Partnership Checklist” at go.SolutionTree.com/21stcenturyskills for all the steps addressed in this book, both to help you be realistic about what you can take on and to help you stay organized as you progress.
I strongly recommend that teachers trying their first global partnership have at least a few of their regular duties assigned to another teacher in the first year, such as removing a few lunch, homeroom, or advisory duties, to provide more dedicated time for communication and collaboration with their partner teacher. Some school administrators even build global work into teachers’ contracts and provide them with additional professional development and other support designed to help ensure success. Australian thought leader Julie Lindsay (2016) emphasizes the importance of a supportive administration, writing that the best global education leaders she’s worked with are people who “instead of crushing new ideas, provided support through time release from the classroom, who provided funds for digital resources, and who listened with some understanding to my vision of the way things could be” (p. 72). While time release can be challenging, particularly in underfunded school environments, shifting even small responsibilities can make a big difference. Schools that have time delineated for collaborative teamwork can create a team for emerging partnerships, which builds in not just time but also community collaboration around addressing global partnership challenges. Regardless of whether you craft from scratch or join an existing program, you’ll need time—and the support of your leadership—to make a new partnership work. Chapters 8 (page 143) and 10 (page 177) discuss more about the importance of administrative support.
With What Country or Region Do I Want to Connect?
Do you hope to connect with a different hemisphere, native language, or culture? Are there specific countries that connect to your current curriculum, or are you seeking to better understand topics that exist across multiple countries? While finding a partner without a specific country or community in mind can be much easier than searching with too many specific expectations, it’s best to go in with a few ideas—and a lot of flexibility, should you find a committed partner in a country you hadn’t considered. If a specific country is key to the curricular connections you want to make, however, then it’s good to identify that from the start. For example, a language arts teacher studying Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus might prefer to partner with a school in Poland because of the book’s focus and the insights Polish students can offer, whereas a language arts teacher interested in having students share their original poetry could partner with any country. On the other hand, if the teacher wants students to have equal footing as learners and experts, he or she might want two classrooms that are not in Poland to read Maus. It all depends on the kind of learning experience you want to create.
For world language teachers, this topic is all the more complex. Language classrooms have an intrinsic reason to connect with native speakers, and language teachers use a variety of approaches to partner native speakers with nonnative speakers. In some cases, two classes study each other’s language, and this can work well because both classrooms bring an expertise and an area for growth. I’ve seen this approach fail, however, when teachers didn’t see their students’ growth process the same way. (See chapter 9, page 155, for an example.) In other cases, teachers choose to partner based on the language being studied, so both classrooms are working toward mastery in the same target language. This removes the opportunity to hear authentic accents and fluent native speakers, but it can engender more risk-taking. In my mixed-level Spanish classes, for example, I found that non-native speakers were far more likely to practice and take risks with their Spanish when there wasn’t a native speaker in the conversation. In fact, if students don’t share a common language other than the one being studied, the partnership may create even more language fluency, as students will be motivated to use the new common language out of authentic necessity. Visit University of Minnesota’s The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (http://carla.umn.edu/index.html) to learn more about instructional strategies for building motivation and risk-taking during world language acquisition, and the research behind those approaches.
Language classrooms have an intrinsic reason to connect with native speakers, and language teachers use a variety of approaches to partner native speakers with nonnative speakers.
Which Design Best Supports the Global Competencies I Want to Foster?
While many global competencies can be challenging to teach and assess, coupling academic goals with global competency goals will help ensure that students develop not just global knowledge but also the skills needed to act on that knowledge and engage with the world as active global citizens—and even leaders. Refer back to the global competency frameworks explored in chapter 1 (page 11) and think about your students’ age groups and subject areas. Which global competencies best match your project ideas and topics? Which feel most developmentally appropriate for your age group? Keep in mind that students may use a wide array of global competencies in the course of a collaborative partnership, but it makes sense to choose just one or two to focus on most intentionally. Try to make sure those are competencies you can both foster and assess. For example, the critical thinking involved in gathering multiple perspectives on any given topic is fairly easy to teach and assess, while empathy or humility—central goals in many global partnerships—can be much more challenging to define, teach, and recognize in student work and behavior.
There are many design strategies for global partnerships, and your choices will impact which global competencies your partnership fosters. Before you find a partner (which is covered in chapter 4, page 73, and chapter 5, page 93), it’s important to consider the following design strategies for how your students might engage with their global counterparts.
Classroom-to-Classroom Exchange
In a classroom-to-classroom exchange, students share or exchange the work produced in each classroom, often in relative isolation. Much like a physical student or teacher exchange program, many exchanges include sending students’ projects to each other. For example, two music classes might create and share videos to teach each other songs and ask each other questions. In other cases, like the Teddy Bear Project outlined in chapter 3 (page 49), physical objects are sent from one class to the other and then back again. This design strategy is particularly useful with younger students who can’t travel themselves, but also allows students at higher grade levels to share the work they’re doing. For example, students in two countries might take photographs of what they see from their windows in their homes, dorms, or classrooms, ultimately sharing final photo essays with each other. This style of partnership is often more manageable than collaboration or co-creation, as most work occurs in the individual classrooms rather than requiring regular live connections between the two groups. This design strategy is all about sharing and learning from and with each other, and it is ideal when your goal is to build students’ sense of connectedness with other people in the world.
Classroom-to-Classroom Collaboration
A classroom-to-classroom collaboration usually includes students working concurrently in two or more classrooms, perhaps on a local problem that impacts both communities, and sharing work regularly along the way. In this approach, students offer each other feedback on ideas and products, and sharing strategies and learning from each other becomes as important as addressing the local challenge itself. This approach is more complex than an exchange, as it builds in opportunities for students to see each other’s thinking and help each other improve their work. As the example from Global Partners Junior (page 56) demonstrates, this approach helps students recognize that communities worldwide often share local challenges and themes, and it gives them the opportunity to learn from other communities as they craft solutions for their own.
Classroom-to-Classroom Co-Creation
While this is the most complex approach to global partnerships, it is often the most meaningful as well. In this design, students work together between two or more classrooms to produce one collaborative product. For example, students might work together to address a borderless global challenge, such as human trafficking or hunger, that affects both communities and requires collaborative efforts. In #Decarbonize, the project on climate change outlined in chapter 3, students work in multischool teams to co-create a white paper to bring to the Climate Change Conference of the Parties. However, a co-creation partnership doesn’t necessarily require a solutions orientation; students could work together to create a piece of collaborative art, a music video, or a public service announcement to educate others, to name a few.
Nonschool Partners
Connecting with individuals doing global work on their own or through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can help fill gaps and bring meaningful global perspectives to your students, particularly while teachers are working to develop long-term partnerships with classrooms. Having a passionate individual connect with students is far less complex than collaborating with a classroom because you don’t have to juggle as many variables with an individual, particularly in coordinating live connections. For example, an individual can often shift schedules to connect during class, regardless of time zone differences, whereas coordinating across two or more classroom schedules can be challenging. Also, global Skype (https://skype.com/en) sessions with individuals doing important work can have just as much impact on students’ worldviews as connecting with other classrooms—and can even help students envision new career paths and avenues for creating change. In chapter 3 we explore several examples of nonclassroom partnerships, including those with an urban planner, a Navajo elder, and an international human rights lawyer, among others. The most important quality of a global speaker is his or her ability to make the topics students are learning about human, relevant, and real for their age group. Besides being easier for the teacher to coordinate, skyping in global speakers can often create high-profile learning opportunities, which increase community and administrative buy-in and get people excited about global partnerships without the expense of travel and speaker fees. Also, global speakers are usually one-off experiences that you can integrate into a larger global unit or project, which is part of why they’re easier to set up, whereas global partnerships between classrooms are richer if communication happens repeatedly over time.
What Are the Ideal Duration and Timing for the Project I Have in Mind?
Partnerships can range from a month to the entire school year, depending on the teachers’ needs and investment. Shorter projects tend to be more successful as you begin partnering with a new teacher, while longer, deeper projects can take time to develop. Many projects that start small grow into something significant, even in their first year, as the teachers get to know each other and learn to work together—and anything is possible when two or more committed partners move into their second or third year of collaboration. Often, it is best to start small, with the expectation of one or two synchronous (live) events, and one or two offline experiences, over the course of a month or two. See what might build from there.
While short projects can be meaningful, there is a difference between a global activity (one Skype call) and a true global partnership, which might include several calls and some collaborative, asynchronous communication in between. While global activities that make connections are still meaningful, you can dig deeper as you get to know each other better—and show students that global engagement isn’t fleeting or episodic, but something to work at and grow with over weeks, months, and even years. This deeply engaged mindset is part of the key to retaining partners, too, as your partner teacher is likely to sense if your intentions are brief and episodic rather than deep and committed. In their essence, global partnerships are global friendships. They are global relationships that yield richer results—and develop more nuanced global competencies—as we find ways to dig deeper over time.
In their essence, global partnerships are global friendships. They are global relationships that yield richer results—and develop more nuanced global competencies—as we find ways to dig deeper over time.
You may be unable to control the pace of your partner’s engagement, and I discourage you from forcing your priorities on your partner. Partnerships often take longer than expected to cultivate simply because communication styles are different, and teachers in different parts of the world often have vacations, national exams, and other demands at different times of the year. These complexities mean that building in more time for connecting than you estimate needing, and being flexible enough to allow global engagement to continue even after you’ve moved into new material, are paramount to your success. Most often, if one class has finished final products and needs to move on to new material while their partners are still working on theirs, reconnecting is just a question of circling back to share student work and celebrate the learning together. For example, in a mythology project done at Appleby College (Canada) and Paraíso High School (Costa Rica), classes work on products at totally different times of year because their school year calendars are so different. Teachers have learned to transition in and out of the projects as needed.
Creating the best timing possible means choosing a time frame that works well for you and your partner teacher. Flexibility is key to equity, as chapter 7 (page 129) explores, but sometimes curriculum sequencing or seasonal themes make it hard to move a topic to better fit the needs of a partner teacher. For example, many elementary teachers in North America explore reproduction in spring, when students will see evidence of animal and plant birth around them, so a partnership on this topic would need to occur in spring for both teachers—which means that a simultaneous partnership between Southern and Northern Hemisphere schools would be impossible. To avoid problems later in the partnership, be specific if you have time frame requirements (and be sure to identify timing in your outreach by naming the months, as seasons vary depending on hemisphere). Keep in mind that Southern-Hemisphere schools are on summer break during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter, and vice versa, which means that connecting northern and southern schools requires timing partnerships from September to November and from March to May, when schools in both hemispheres are most likely to be in session simultaneously.
How Important Is the Opportunity for Synchronous Communication?
