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Teaching for Global Competence
The Challenge How do we prepare young people for a world facing critical ethnic, religious and political conflicts?
A world where young North Americans depend economically and environmentally
upon people around the globe?
A world where new technologies spread ideas, trends, news, and products across the planet every day.
Global education rests on these assumptions:
1. The human experience is an increasingly globalized phenomenon in which people are influencing and being influenced by transnational & cross-cultural interactions. Needed: Cross-cultural competence, knowledge of global economic & political systems, movement of people & ideas.
2. There are many cultures and actors on the world stage. Knowledge of diverse cultures and multiple perspectives, understanding of how beliefs & values affect actions of individuals, institutions, NGOs and other organizations as well as governments past and present.
3. The future of humankind is linked to the world environment. Knowledge of world systems and ecology; understanding of environmental issues facing the planet.
4. Present social, political, and ecological realities can lead to alternative futures. Knowledge of the state of the planet, recognition of critical decisions, alternatives, and their consequences
5. There are many ways in which citizens can participate in and influence world affairs. Experiences in cooperation, collaboration, participation and informed decision-making
From the National Council for the Social Studies Position statement on
Global Education, 1996.
Oxfam’s characteristics of a global citizen:
• Is aware of the wider world and has a sense of their own role as a world citizen
• Respects and values diversity • Understands how the world works economically,
politically, socially, culturally, technologically and environmentally
• Challenges injustice • Participates in and contributes to the community
from the local to the global • Is willing to act to make the world a more equitable
and sustainable place • Takes responsibility for their actions
Oxfam, Curriculum for Global Citizenship (1997)
Research tells us that K-12 global education addresses specific content:
Local/global connections The increasing interconnectedness of
people and events across the planet Insider perspectives and authentic
voices from cultures under study Multiple, conflicting perspectives The world as a system Global issues
And these skills, experiences and
dispositions: Prejudice reduction & openmindedness
• Cross-cultural skills and experiences Active participation in local and global
communities Research and higher level thinking skills Worldmindedness Anticipation of complexity
Four Strategies
1. Examine the legacy of imperial worldviews.
2. Confront exotica, stereotypes, and lack of information on diverse cultures through multiple perspectives, primary sources, and literature.
3. Analyze how people’s power and status shape their knowledge and worldviews.
4. Experience cross-cultural learning to work towards intercultural competence.
1. Examine the inheritance of imperial worldviews
We need to learn again how five centuries of studying, classifying and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and educate the world.
John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World, 1998, p. 2-3.
How did imperialism divide the world into countries
Africae nova descripto...W. J. Blaeu 1630
and classify all that is in it.Le Rouge, G. L. Atlas Nouveau Portatif Paris: 1756
Define other cultures through European frames of reference
and teach differences as exotic, amusing, savage or bizarre.
Organize history as European diffusionism.
Blaeu’s Aethiopia, Abissinorum sive presbiterioannis imperium. c.1667.
.
Frame other cultures in opposition to European superiority.
Justify racism as scientifically underwritten.
Saarjite Baartman, The Hottentot Venus”
Does an imperial framework live on in North American schools and media?
__Is knowledge of “the Other” based upon European/American perceptions and scholarship?
__Is there a focus on divisions between people who are “like us” and people who are “different” from us?
__Do differences make others appear as primitive, ignorant, amusing, violent, exotic or bizarre?
__Do Whites dominate discourse and set the agenda?
__ Are there omissions of discrimination or justifications of inequities or oppression?
__ Does nationality equal racial difference or ethnic purity?
__ Is there an assumption that “pure” or traditional is more interesting than realities of dynamic cultural change?
__ Do colonial language, literature, or perspectives dominate?
__ Is there an assumption that Americans or Europeans know what is best for people in Africa, Asia, or Latin America?
2. Confront exotica, stereotypes, & lack of knowledge through primary sources,
literature, and multiple perspectives.
Culture-General Framework for teaching about other cultures
Decisions• Categorize &
differentiate. • Make ingroup
outgroup distinctions.
• Differences in learning styles.
• Explain causes of behavior.
Beliefs and values• work• time & space• language• roles• importance of group
vs individual• social class/status
Richard Brislin et al, 1986
Susukino districtin Sapporo http://www.hbc.co.jp/videont/susuki_l.jpg
Literature & media from other countries
http://www.africaaccessreview.org/
Online newspapers from around the world
3. Analyze how power and status shape knowledge
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. W.E.B. DuBois, 1989, p. 3.
Culture Shock
“Disorientation that occurs whenever someone moves from their known, comfortable surroundings to an environment which is significantly different and in which their needs are not easily met.” Cushner et al, 1992, p. 44.
Culture shock happens everyday in American schools when children leave their homes and enter a different culture from the one in which they have been socialized.
Global approach Non-global
Teach about injustice and how people have worked against oppression.
Ex. Students create a timeline of events in which Africans worked for freedom against European domination.
Have students develop critical reading skills to recognize bias and underlying assumptions.
Ex. Students analyze colonial documents and travel writing for their assumptions about race, power, and rights.
Often ignore oppression and injustice in other countries
Ex. Tells the story of European colonization of East Africa as “a glorious era of Europeans bringing light to the Dark Continent”.
Often gloss over American injustice and oppression or imply it was all in the past.
Ex. Teaches about the slave trade in Africa without attention to the suffering and oppression of Africans by Americans.
Global approach Non-global
Teach literature and history that writes back against the literature of the oppressors.
Ex. Students read excerpts from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and other African literature to understand colonialization from Africans’ experiences and knowledge.
Have students evaluate how one’s worldview shapes how one makes sense of events and issues.
Ex. Students examine effects of racist colonial language and images on Americans’ perceptions of Africa by surveying people in their community.
Do not use knowledge constructed by the Other (US minorities, people in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, etc.) that challenges the mainstream version of events or issues.
Ex. Teaches a unit on colonial Africa without using any African sources or literature.
4. Experience cross-cultural learning to work towards intercultural competence
Milton Bennett’s Ethnocentric stages
1. Denial
2. Defense, as evidenced by denigration or feelings of superiority
3. Minimization from either physical or transcendent universalism.
The Ethnorelative Stages
4. Acceptance of behavioral and value differences
5. Adaptation of skills for interacting and communicating are enhanced
6. Integration
Milton Bennett, 1993, p. 59.
Going global
“During the attempted coup in the former Soviet Union in August 1991, Moscow television was showing Swan Lake ballet and old movies. But Soviet educators were sending messages on the WorldClassroom global network asking for information about the events happening around them. Network subscribers from North America and Europe were able to respond by sending teachers and students firsthand reports about standing overnight with the crowd defending the Russian White House. The messages expressed fear of what the Soviet soldiers might do but also captured the excitement of victory and the beginning of change in their country.” Wishnietsky, 1993, p.30.
Retrieved from http://www.bayside.sd63.bc.ca/home/rcoulson/globaled/Perspective.html July 4, 2006
Multicultural and Global Education share these elements:
• Teach historical antecedents of structural and institutional inequities
• Teach about people’s efforts to overcome oppression and gain self-determination
• Work to improve intergroup relations and cross-cultural skills
• Reduce stereotyping, prejudice, and the use of pejorative language
• Teach understanding of both cultural universals and cultural differences
• Help students reflect on their own culture and what it means to be an American
• Provide access to multiple perspectives through the use of literature and other primary sources
• Develop an understanding of power and its role in the process of knowledge construction
Both multicultural and global educators
often identify experiences where, because of physical, economic or linguistic differences, they
• were considered inferior,
• looked at as outsiders,
• knew they would never belong
as turning points in their cross-cultural understanding.
