It is necessary and urgent that teachers prepare students to understand the world in which they live, in all its complexity, to recognize the way in which global and local affairs are intertwined, to understand globalization and its consequences, including global risks, and to have the skills and the desire to contribute to improving the world.
Current political developments in Europe — including the British vote to exit the European Union — and in the United States signal that a significant proportion of the population does not embrace globalization, including the increased frequency and intensity of interactions with people from many different identities. At best, this resistance to a world that is coming together at accelerating speed will exacerbate tensions, and cause us to miss many opportunities to collaborate along lines of difference in improving the world. At worst, this rejection of the results of globalization will lead to social instability and conflict.
Which way things go rests on what teachers do.
As teachers provide students the opportunities to understand globalization, how it shapes their lives, to develop the capacity to collaborate across all lines of difference to advance worthwhile purposes and to improve the world, students will recognize education as relevant to their lives, as a way to help them make sense of the world in which they live, and to find their voice in it.
Societies make great efforts to educate students in hopes that this will help them advance themselves and contribute through work, citizenship and service. It was not always the case that most students could attend school, and today many of those who do are not engaged. Lack of engagement leads some students to drop out of school, with high costs to themselves and to their communities. The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that increasing the high school graduation rate to 90 percent would increase earnings for those graduates by $7.2 billion, create 65,150 new jobs, increase state and local tax revenue by $700 million and federal tax revenue by 1.1 billion and increase annual gross domestic product by $11.5 billion.
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Students are often disengaged because they don’t see the point of what they are learning, they don’t see how it relates to their lives, or to lives they might imagine for themselves. They don’t see the relevance of education to their lives. Perceived irrelevance leads to boredom.
Helping students see how learning can help them achieve their dreams is a powerful motivator. The effects of the engagement that result are long lasting. Surveys of college graduates conducted by the Gallup organization show that three of the most powerful predictors of long-term self-efficacy and satisfaction are taking courses that relate to the “real world,” engaging in extended projects that are led by students and having professors who challenge the students to excel. Students who have those experiences in college are significantly more likely to report they are good at their craft and to be happy many years after graduation. Unfortunately, most college graduates don’t have the benefit of experiencing these three powerful activators of student motivation and engagement.
One way to make education relevant is to support students so they gain the competencies necessary to understand the world in which they live, to appreciate it and its complexity, to understand its challenges, and to care enough about them to want to contribute to address them. With a group of colleagues, I have developed a curriculum to help empower students as global citizens. We have published this curriculum in a new book (Reimers, Chopra, Chung, Higdon and O’Donnell, ” Empowering Global Citizens” 2016) in which we explain why global citizenship education is an imperative of our time, review alternative approaches, make a case for a 21 st century approach to global education and on that foundation build an interdisciplinary K-12 curriculum of global citizenship education.
Global citizenship education is not a new idea. Global education helps students become curious and understand the world and globalization, to make sense of how global and local affairs are interdependent, to recognize global opportunities, and to have the skills to act on those opportunities, advancing progress, global stability and peace. Global engagement can enrich the life of a person and enable them to participate, economically and civically, in a world that is coming together at accelerating speed in activities such as:
— Understanding and speaking a foreign language;
— Collaborating with people from different cultural backgrounds;
— Doing business in different countries;
— Appreciating our common humanity in various art forms from different cultures;
— Understanding various religious traditions and how they influence worldviews of those who partake in them;
— Joining efforts with others in environmental sustainability or in reducing poverty.
The aspiration to educate students to be cosmopolitans is at the root of the creation of public education systems. More recently, at the beginning of the 20 th century, various progressive educators saw that schools could teach students global understanding as a way to create the conditions for peace.
The first and second world wars led many to see the urgency of educating students for international understanding, and numerous educators developed initiatives to advance peace. At the end of World War I, for example, the Institute of International Education was established to promote educational exchange among students and teachers, as a way to advance global understanding. The institute also sponsored the creation of international relations clubs on college campuses.
In the 1920s, a few colleges in the United States, including Harvard University, offered their students the opportunity to participate in simulations of the League of Nations with the purpose of educating them on global issues, interdependence and the factors that threatened peace and security. In 1925, professor Isaac Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University argued at the conference of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, that high schools should teach world studies as a way to foster international understanding.
Similarly, the United World College and the International Baccalaureate were developed after World War II to help students recognize their common humanity with students of different nationalities, and to help them to understand the world.
Since then, many more programs have been developed to expand the range of opportunities for global education, including student and teacher travel, global curriculum, programs to support teachers, and programs that deploy internet-based communication technologies to facilitate teacher and student global collaboration such as iEarn, the Global Scholars program at Bloomberg Philanthropies or the Out of Eden Project at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Organizations such as Education First, Envoys, Global Citizen Year or Thinking Without Borders offer innovative programs of student and educator travel. Primary Source and World Savvy, among others, offer teacher professional development programs. The Asia Society has developed excellent materials to support curriculum development, teacher preparation and collective leadership on global education. Organizations like the Peace Corps or World Teach provide college graduates opportunities to develop their global skills through global service.
Even though global education is not a new idea, there is a new urgency to be more intentional in pursuing it. Not all students who have the opportunity to go to school learn to recognize their common humanity with others across lines of cultural, racial, religious or national difference. Not all learn to be curious about those differences, or skilled at finding ways to use those differences for the benefit of more collaboration in jointly addressing the challenges we face in the world.
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These challenges are well summarized in a global compact that articulates what we must do to secure peace in the world, what is necessary to create conditions that eliminate poverty, reduce gender and social inequality and promote health, education, sustainability and social and economic progress. This compact, called the Sustainable Development Goals, provides a framework to guide the efforts of individuals, organizations and nations so we indeed improve the world. To achieve those goals, we will need more determined and more effective education programs to help students understand the importance of these goals, and of the specific targets for each one them.
At the core of what must be done to achieve these goals, which is to say an inclusive world in which we live in peace with one another and with the earth, is to educate all people, so they develop the capabilities, and the willingness, to do their part in the achievement of each of the seventeen goals. In “Empowering Global Citizens,” we offer an integrated, multidisciplinary, project-based K-12 curriculum that illustrates how to offer students opportunities to develop those capabilities. The curriculum is designed not just to help students understand the world, but to improve it.
From a distance, in pictures taken from space, the Earth seems beautiful, small and fragile. We have unprecedented means to solve the challenges we share. We have also the means to cause each other and the earth more harm than never before in our history. We can significantly improve the world, or we can destroy it. What choice we make rests on whether or not we educate the young to take themselves seriously as stewards of inclusive and sustainable development on this planet we share, on whether we empower them as global citizens.
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