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