Global education is an approach to learning and teaching that appreciates how interconnected the world is. It may not be obvious that a purchase made in New York City has meaningful roots in six countries, involves international trade, the politics of raw materials, and the different ways people across the globe are affected by its manufacture, sale, and use. But this is a sensibility our global human community needs to develop in order to succeed at resolving climate change, conflict, and the resource impoverishment that leads to many kinds of injustice. Importantly, it is also a way to cultivate more agency and intellectual depth from students by extending their frontiers beyond the immediate until they encompass the entire planet.
Global competence is a multifaceted capacity for students to analyze global and intercultural issues, understand myriad perspectives, engage in meaningful exchange with diverse people, and take action for the collective benefit of humanity. You’ll find resources here that assess how powerfully classroom activities support this competence.
As a participant in the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program, I studied and created approaches to global education, established connections with American and Peruvian educators, and traveled to Lima and Cusco to learn and teach from students at the oldest high school in Peru.
It is my hope that this global education guide can inspire any teacher to broaden their practice to consider issues from perspectives which transcend local ones and connect their students to the wider world.
A global mindset can be engendered in any classroom without fundamentally altering the mission all teachers are on, even if the effect is far-reaching. Actions large and small can add lenses to the content and skills every teacher already utilizes and this guide has something for either approach. An entire new unit or a slight modification can each be powerful tools to start getting students thinking about communities beyond their own.
Ideas for small actions:
- Making a box on every worksheet asking students to think globally about something. How does this affect people in another country? Why does this matter to the whole world?
- Selecting occasional readings from reliable news sources about distant lands and their peoples.
- Presenting occasional media that centers on a land far away.
Ideas for large actions:
- Designing a unit which provides vocabulary, resources, experiences that help your students become practitioners of a global mindset.
- Connecting with students from a distant land on a regular basis, so that students can go through the entire year thinking constantly of how what they’re learning is relevant to people that now matter to them.
- Designing a community-based project which involves project-based learning and an action-based influence on a local or distant community, like a community garden or fundraising project to help girls in Afghanistan afford school.
Below are a set of curated resources you can use to explore the ideas of global education and some suggestions for how you might integrate them into your teaching and learning practice. There are so many! My recommendation is to just explore one or two and if they leave a good taste in your mouth, then come back and add another to your quiver of arrows.
Teacher As Artist 