I was able to get more; at the end of my junior year, in May of 1985, I left Colorado to spend six months living and working in Israel/Palestine and two months traveling through Europe to complete three of my passages for high school graduation. While the experience created a great deal of political and spiritual discord I still struggle with today, it was a real, raw, and hugely formative experience that still motivates everything I do. It took me many years to figure out how to turn a difficult experience into constructive action, but in the fall of 1995 I started teaching tenth-grade English in Costa Rica to the children of presidents, ministry officials, and the most powerful business leaders in the country. From that moment forward, my classroom became my platform and my platform was, in a nutshell, global citizenship—not just an understanding of the world but an urge to respond constructively and collaboratively to our shared challenges.
Early in my teaching career, in the late 1990s, the global education landscape changed significantly. In 1997, the Lincoln School where I taught in San José, Costa Rica, established one of the very first videoconferencing suites in a Central American school, marking the beginning of a new era in technology-enabled global education. Suddenly, students didn’t need to go anywhere to make connections and have authentic conversations with people around the world. They could engage with the world from inside the classroom, and even though physical travel remained a priority, teachers could create transformative experiences without spending money, fuel, or time in transit. Technology meant we didn’t have to wait until students were old enough to travel, either; even our youngest students could make connections with real people anywhere on the planet, as long as their teachers had access. It has taken several decades for mobile technology to narrow the digital divide more significantly, but online connections are increasingly accessible to students from more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
Since the late 1990s, technology-enabled global education has blossomed into a powerful movement, particularly as technology access has become increasingly equitable—though we still have improvements to make. Nearly every teacher I know is anxious to find a global partner—a classroom his or her students can work with to foster intercultural skills and see the world through a different lens. The tragedies of September 11, 2001, created new urgency around building better relationships between the United States and key regions of the world, and several public policy groups issued reports in the following years that “called for increased language study not only for its educational value but because having more citizens able to speak other languages is in the national interest” (Jenkins & Meyers, 2010, p. 8). Further, a series of reports from the Government Accountability Office documents how the lack of expertise in critical languages such as Arabic was affecting the United States’ diplomatic relations, capacity to gather intelligence, and ability to further its policy objectives (Jenkins & Meyers, 2010). The ground was starting to shift, and the word global, which had seemed threatening to so many during the Cold War, was suddenly at the heart of educational dialogue.
Nearly every teacher I know is anxious to find a global partner—a classroom his or her students can work with to foster intercultural skills and see the world through a different lens.
Why Foster Global Citizenship and Equity
Many scholars identify global citizenship and education as moral imperatives. While the term citizenship is a largely Western concept, related concepts of community engagement and responsibility are not. Harvard University’s Fernando M. Reimers (in his work with Vidur Chopra, Connie K. Chung, Julia Higdon, and E. B. O’Donnell, 2016), describes a global citizenship curricula as providing the following:
All students with effective opportunities to develop the dispositions, knowledge, and capabilities necessary to understand the world in which they live, to make sense of the way in which globalization shapes their lives, and to be good stewards of and contributors to the Sustainable Development Goals. (p. xx)
In an earlier work, Reimers (2009) emphasizes that schools must embrace the need to prepare students for the future, but he also points out candidly, that most schools don’t prepare students for the future. There is no question that schools need to provide early opportunities for practice and participation, especially since “globalization impacts job prospects, health, physical security, public policy, communications, investment opportunities, immigration, and community relations” (Reimers, 2009, p. 4).
While developing a classroom partnership can be very labor intensive, it is one of the best ways to develop these understandings, knowledge, and skills. Global partnerships can take years of effort and false starts before reaching significant success, but they are among the most rewarding experiences you can create for students when you take the time to make them equitable and relevant. A powerful global partnership experience can change lives, career paths, and even our shared world in the long run. Whether you are talking about five-year-olds in San Francisco understanding and upholding children’s rights through a partnership with students in Sierra Leone, a middle school class in Toronto sharing local mythology with students in rural Costa Rica, or high school students in Denver trying to understand the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through photography and poetry exchanges, directly connecting with real people in the world can help humanize your curriculum in powerful ways.
Direct connections with people are essential if you want to get students to a place of authentic citizenship, which is when students can realistically understand or empathize with others’ needs because they have met and collaborated with them personally. Ian Davies’s work (as cited in Evans, Hawes, Levere, Monette, & Mouftah, 2004) suggests that traditional attempts to transfer citizenship concepts such as tolerance, justice, and civic participation to students are nearly impossible using conventional teaching methods. Davies (as cited in Evans et al., 2004) finds that when students participate in inquiry with people worldwide, they are much more likely to become authentically engaged in practicing citizenship, both during and after the classroom experience. Julie Lindsay and Vicki A. Davis (2013) take this idea a step further, indicating that making personal connections with people around the world fosters open-mindedness and builds bridges. Pointing out that these connections are no longer optional for a better future, Lindsay and Davis (2013) write, “Students are the greatest textbook ever written for one another and will be travelers on this bridge” (p. 2).
Direct connections with people are essential if you want to get students to a place of authentic citizenship, which is when students can realistically understand or empathize with others’ needs because they have met and collaborated with them personally.
Unfortunately, much of what global education has produced fosters inequitable thinking, particularly when the partnership projects originate in more developed countries (Kubik, 2012, 2016). Global citizenship is often translated in simplistic terms, becoming an endless fund-raising campaign in which students in the West do what’s referred to as saving the rest. This is not meeting in the middle. This kind of global education does not foster true citizenship; instead, such experiences can dehumanize the people students seek to understand, turning them into empty vessels who can only survive with the outsiders’ solutions, not whole people with multifaceted lives and their own ideas about how to improve their communities. At their worst, these kinds of global connections can exacerbate power imbalances and even cripple local industry.
Consider the example of a classroom in Canada partnered with a rural classroom in a coffee-producing region of Colombia. Students in Canada discover the deficits in their partner classroom, including a lack of school supplies, technologies, and flexible school furniture. Students in Canada run a fund-raiser for which they buy the cheapest Colombian coffee they can find, mark it up, and sell it locally to donate profits to their partners. It sounds reasonable enough, but the students’ action actually exacerbates both the Colombian community’s