Disclaimer: This website is not an official U.S. Department of State website. The views and information presented are the grantee’s own and do not represent the Teachers for Global Classrooms Program, IREX, or the U.S. Department of State.
Hello, San Francisco Bay Area teachers!
This Global Education Resource Guide has been designed especially for you! I You’ll notice I’ve tailored some of this guide – like the Digital Learning Environment Inventory — specifically to the women-centered community at Carondelet High School in Concord, where I teach 10th and 11th grade English, but I hope that much of this guide will be useful to teachers anywhere who are looking to globalize their classrooms.
This site offers some glimpses into my own travel experience through Ghana with the Teachers for Global Classrooms program. It also offers tips, resources, and opportunities for teachers who want to better understand and implement global learning in their classrooms.
As I continue to explore ways to deepen my students’ engagement with the world and to strengthen their global competencies, I find myself frequently referring back to one of the first comprehensive texts I encountered about global education: the Asia Society’s Educating for Global Competence: Preparing our Youth to Engage the World. In addition to defining global education and providing awesome rubrics and student work samples, the book provides a rationale for global education that will get any teacher fired up:
Increasingly, the work individuals in society carry out, civic participation, self-expression, social life, and health unfold in a global scenario. So while we welcome public commitment to teaching skills such as problem solving to all youth, we point out that the problems that students can learn about vary in significance, and we emphasize students’ substantive understanding of problems of global import. Thus the approach here focuses squarely on nurturing students’ substantive understanding of, and action in, the increasingly complex, diverse, and interdependent world in which they live. Globally competent youngsters will be prepared to further such understanding through inquiry, by recognizing perspectives, communicating with diverse audiences, and acting in competent ways (7).
My favorite part about global education, as the Asia Society’s global education task force defines it, is its emphasis on action. The kind of action that global education demands is not just an extra standard to check off for the unit. It is the natural civic-minded response to the kind of research and inquiry teachers have been asking of their students for centuries. Certainly, global education challenges us to think about inquiry and research in terms of diverse perspectives and audiences, but it calls teachers and students to move through the world not just has learning travelers but as acting citizens.
Global Education Resource Guide 