An Institutional Perspective and Global Education

Abstract

Adopting an institutional perspective to advance a program of global education leads to identifying the norms, structures, organization, and elements of the system which can support global education. Those elements include standards and curriculum, instructional resources, assessments, staff and development, school organization, governance, and funding. Key in this perspective is seeking alignment and coherence between these various elements of the system.

Adopting an institutional perspective to advance a program of global education leads to identifying the norms, structures, organization, and elements of the system which can support global education. Those elements include standards and curriculum, instructional resources, assessments, staff and development, school organization, governance, and funding. Key in this perspective is seeking alignment and coherence between these various elements of the system.

Realizing the vision of deeper, transferable knowledge for all students will require complementary changes across the many elements that make up the public education system. These elements include curriculum, instruction, assessment, and teacher preparation and professional development. (Pellegrino and Hilton 2012, 186)

A study of the implementation of global education in elementary schools in five provinces in Canada illustrates what happens when these elements are not well aligned. The authors found variation across provinces in the explicit focus on global education in the standards and that, even when the standards included global education as a curricular goal, there was very limited support offered by provincial ministries and education departments, so schools were left to their own devices to design curriculum. Provincial administrators largely saw global education as a non-essential, particularly at the elementary school level. Schools established partnerships with NGOs to receive support in global education, but the quality varied across schools, with many limited to one-off activities which engaged students in fundraising efforts. The result was great variation across schools and teachers in how global education was understood, and large gaps between the standards and the activities which took place in schools. Most of the standards emphasized knowledge of facts, rather than actionable aspects of global challenges (Mundy and Manion 2008).

UNESCO’s survey to governments to assess the extent of adoption of the recommendation of 1974, discussed earlier, revealed that whereas that the goals of the recommendation had been included in the curriculum to a great extent, the same is not true with respect to teacher education programs (UNESCO 2018).

6.1 Standards

Education is an intentional, goal-oriented process. Teachers work in institutions which are normed by a shared commitment to achieve certain goals and standards. Using standards as a lever for educational change is a common and effective strategy to reform education systems. If we want teachers to educate their students to be globally competent, this should be included in the standards. Very often it is not. As standards incorporate global education, choices need to be made about what to cover and how. Because education for sustainable development and global citizenship is one of the targets of the UN Sustainable Development Goals focused on education, that target and the proposed indicators are a useful place to start in any education system:

Target 4.7. Sustainable development and global citizenship. By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

Global Indicator 4.7.1—Extent to which (i) global citizenship education and (ii) education for sustainable development, including gender equality and human rights, are mainstreamed at all levels in (a) national education policies, (b) curricula, (c) teacher education, and (d) student assessment.

Thematic indicator 26—Percentage of students by age group (or education level) showing adequate understanding of issues relating to global citizenship and sustainability.

Thematic indicator 27—Percentage of 15-year-old students showing proficiency in knowledge of environmental science and geoscience.

Thematic indicator 28—Percentage of schools that provide life skills-based HIV and sexuality education

Thematic indicator 29—Extent to which the framework on the World Programme on Human Rights Education is implemented nationally (as per UNGA Resolution 59/113) (United Nations 2020).

Underscoring the importance of addressing global education in standards in the United States, in a study of social studies teaching in Indiana, teachers reported that they would pay more attention to global citizenship education if it was included in the Indiana Academic Social Studies Standards (Rapoport 2010, p. 185).

A number of countries which have a national curriculum and national standards have included global education. Australia adopted a national curriculum only in 2009, which gives prominent attention to global education, a topic which received high priority in the ministerial Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australian, which “established Global Citizenship Education as a key goal for Australian schooling…In stating this aim there is a clear intention that young Australians not only understand global issues, but come to see themselves as participating citizens within their local, national and global communities” (Peterson et al. 2018, p. 7). The Australian curriculum includes three cross-curriculum priorities, focusing on Aboriginal Cultures, Asia and engagement with Asia and Sustainability (Australian Curriculum 2019). The Department of Education sees the entire Australian Curriculum as a Global Education Curriculum, and has developed a series of resources to insert global education in the curriculum (Commonwealth of Australia 2012). In spite of the fact that the curriculum makes global citizenship education a priority, it does not define it, leaving it up to schools to develop specific curriculum. This accounts for great heterogeneity across schools in terms of what global education looks like in practice (Peterson et al. 2018).

Once standards incorporate global education, they may cover a variety of themes, reflecting the various definitions and intellectual traditions of global education mentioned earlier. For instance, a comparison of social studies curricula in developed and developing countries found differences in how the process of globalization was covered. Whereas standards in US social studies courses emphasize globalization primarily as an economic process, in developing countries this process was covered more multidimensionally (Beltramo and Duncheon 2013). A study of two programs of global education in the United States also concludes that social studies standards do not adequately include the study of the process of globalization or the study of human rights. In 2000, only twenty US states included human rights education in their curriculum (Myers 2006).

As an effort to provide states with frameworks they could include in their standards, the US Council of Chief State School Officers, in partnership with the Asia Society, developed a matrix which provides guidance on what students should be able to do to demonstrate global competency. This matrix defines Global Competence as “the capacity and disposition to understand and act on issues of global significance” (Boix et al. 2011). This capacity encompasses four skills: investigate the world, recognize perspectives, communicate ideas and take action. For each of these, it provides four specific definitions of what students should be able to demonstrate. The Asia Society has further developed performance outcomes and rubrics for global competence in the context of the subjects of mathematics, science, language, history and social studies, and arts (Asia Society 2019).

In the United States, various states have included global education in their standards. For example, in North Carolina the State Board appointed a task force of global education which developed a strategy, including dual language immersion programs, the designation of global-ready schools, and a global education badge for students (North Carolina State Board for Education 2013). The State Board also developed a global education rubric, designed to support schools as they developed their own global education curriculum and recommended that districts “provide content for embedding global themes and problem-based learning that focuses on global issues, including history, social studies and geography, throughout the K-12 curriculum consistent with the Common Core State Standards, the North Carolina Essential Standards, and the NC Professional Teaching Standards, including guidelines specific to a global-ready designated graduation Project” (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction 2017).

The United States Department of Education has produced a framework for “Developing Global and Cultural Competencies to Advance Equity, Excellence and Economic Competitiveness” which proposes standards for early learning, elementary, secondary and college, as well as for collaboration and communication, world languages, diverse perspective, and civic and global engagement.

The overarching goals of the framework are to educate globally and culturally competent individuals who are:

Proficient in at least two languages; Aware of differences that exist between cultures, open to diverse perspectives, and appreciative of insight gained through open cultural exchange; Critical and creative thinkers, who can apply understanding of diverse cultures, beliefs, economies, technology and forms of government in order to work effectively in cross-cultural settings to address societal, environmental or entrepreneurial challenges; Able to operate at a professional level in intercultural and international contexts and to continue to develop new skills and harness technology to support continued growth. (US Department of Education 2017)

Obviously, national standards and curriculum need not explicitly use the term “global education” to include goals which are global in nature. For instance, world languages, geography or world history, or science, or covering themes such as universal human rights, appreciation for diversity, peace, climate change or pandemics, are all avenues to develop global competencies.

For instance, in the United States, the new science standards, a set of standards for voluntary adoption by States developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Science Teacher Association, have introduced the subject of climate change in elementary school, with opportunities for deeper study in middle and high school (Chen 2017).

Standards can also include teacher preparation. For example, various states in the United States have included dimensions related to global education in their teacher preparation standards. North Carolina, for instance, included “global awareness” in its teacher standards.

6.2 Curriculum and Pedagogy

Students can access opportunities to develop global competency through a variety of curricula: infused within the existing disciplines, in a separate course in the curriculum, as part of travel abroad, and in extra-curricular activities. There are some subjects that are squarely focused on global competency, such as foreign languages, geography, and world history. Specialized courses can be also made available focusing explicitly on global themes, such as AP Development Economics or AP Human Geography or World History. Students can also participate in projects which provide them an opportunity to study global themes, such as research projects in various courses. Student clubs or travel abroad can also augment opportunities for students to develop global competency. The World Course proposed a dedicated space in the curriculum focused exclusively on the development of global competencies because we thought of this course as a structure that would support the integration of knowledge from different disciplines on behalf of learning to think and act about global topics and challenges. These two options—integrating global education in the curriculum versus personalized opportunities—are not mutually excluding, but complementary. An important question in designing curriculum is how to balance offering opportunity to students who are interested in global education with ensuring all students acquire a minimum baseline of knowledge. The skills and knowledge required in a traditional curriculum—language, math, sciences—are not optional, but essential requirements to participate in society. The same is true for global competency. Why should religious literacy, understanding of climate dynamics, or cross-cultural awareness be optional in a world increasingly interdependent? Richard Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States, in a recent book on global themes states, “A search of graduation requirements at most American institutions of higher learning reveals it is possible to graduate from nearly any two or four year college or university in the United States, be it a community college or an Ivy League institution, without gaining even a rudimentary understanding of the world” (Haass 2020, xv).

The late professor Hans Rosling undertook the measurement of the basic knowledge of facts about the world among people in various countries. The levels of knowledge he found were so abysmally low that he dubbed his project “the ignorance survey.” In the United States, for example, adults had very low levels of knowledge about the world population. In a three-item response question, only 7% correctly answered predictions regarding the expected total number of people in 2100, 29% knew in which continent most people lived, 53% knew current life expectancy of the world population, 22% knew current literacy levels, 25% knew world income distribution, 24% knew average level of schooling of the population, 17% knew the percentage of the population vaccinated against measles, 5% knew changes in poverty rates over the last decade, 46% knew what percentage of world energy comes from solar and wind power, and 45% knew global fertility rates (Gapminder 2013).

Even though there are many curriculum resources available, there is still much to be done to include global education content in national curricula around the world. The World Program on Human Rights Education of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights developed curricula to teach human rights. The program proposed integrating human rights education in primary and secondary schools. An evaluation conducted in 2010 revealed that most of the respondents had integrated human rights education into national curricula and standards, mostly as a cross-curricular issue, usually in civics or social studies classes. (UNESCO 2017, p. 290). A study conducted by UNESCO and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research revealed that the study of the Holocaust was included in the curriculum in about half of the 135 countries surveyed, usually relating it to local histories of human rights violations (UNESCO 2017, p. 290). Coverage of sexual and reproductive health issues are unevenly addressed in curricula around the world (Ibid).

A recent UNESCO report examined curriculum frameworks in 78 countries between 2005 and 2015 in terms of target 4.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The topics most commonly addressed include rights (88%) and democracy (79%) and some emphasis on sustainable development in three-quarters of the countries. Less commonly addressed are terms related to global citizenship: only half mention multiculturalism and interculturalism and 10% mention global inequality. Less than 15% of the countries address gender equality (UNESCO 2017, p. 292).

Several organizations have proposed pedagogies to support global education. For instance, the OECD and the Asia Society developed a resource guide which discusses the value of several instructional approaches to develop global competency, including structured debates, organized discussions, current events discussions, playing games, project-based learning and service-learning, and provides multiple examples of what effective global education practices look like (OECD and Asia Society 2018, p. 6).

Drawing on empirical research and analysis of good practice, the Alberta Council for Environmental Education (2017) identifies six key principles of excellent climate change education:

• (i) Frame climate change education in ways that focus on solutions, rather than on problems, build a positive narrative around shared identity. Focus on energy, conservation, and outdoors education. Rely on pedagogies which engage in deliberative discussions, promote exchanges with scientists, address misconceptions, and implement school and community projects.

• (ii) Keep the audience in mind. Develop curriculum that is appropriate to the age of the child, support teachers.

• (iii) Design programs which are action-oriented. Build agency of students.

• (iv) Develop activities that extend beyond climate science, including imagining a positive desired future, focus on local content, teach students how to think, not what to think, do not scare students.

• (v) Establish connections to the curriculum and identify competencies. Emphasize cross-curricular approaches, cultivate systems thinking, and help students understand the interdependencies between climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

• (vi) Evaluate for program improvement.

An empirical study of teaching practices for global readiness identified four factors as important: (1) Situated practice, so that learning is contextual and relevant to the students; (2) integrated global learning, teachers demonstrate the connections between local and global events; (3) critical literacy, teachers provide texts about past and present international events from multiple perspectives; (4) transactional experiences, students engage in intercultural-dialogue (Kerkhoff 2017, pp. 102–103). These four factors include the following items:

Situated Practice

• I take inventory of the cultures represented by my students

• I cultivate a classroom environment that values diversity

• I cultivate a classroom environment that promotes equality

• I provide a space that allows learners to take risks

• I provide a space that allows students a voice

• I attempt to break down students’ stereotypes

Integrated Global Learning

• I integrate global learning with the existing curriculum

• I build a repertoire of resources related to global education

• I use inquiry-based lessons about the world

• I assess students’ global learning

Critical Literacy Instruction

• I ask students to engage in discussions about international current events

• I ask students to analyze the reliability of a source

• I ask students to analyze content from multiple perspectives

• I ask students to analyze the agenda behind media messages

• I ask students to construct claims based on primary sources

Transactional experiences

• I bring in speakers from different backgrounds so students can listen to different experiences

• I ask students to utilize synchronous technology for international collaborations

• I ask students to utilize asynchronous technology for international collaboration

• I ask students to utilize technology for virtual interviews (Kerkhoff 2017, p. 103)

A study of three groups of social studies teachers, with varying levels of expertise, identified a number of shared pedagogical practices across the three groups. They connected global content to students’ lives, included students’ cultural backgrounds in the curriculum, and established connections across geographies and historical periods. In addition, exemplary teachers explicitly examined the relationship between local and global inequality, created opportunities for cross-cultural learning, organized global curriculum around themes, issues or problems, emphasized higher-order thinking and research skills, and deployed a variety of pedagogical strategies (Merryfield 1998).

A case study of the pedagogies used by an elementary school teacher identified the following “signature pedagogies” for global education: clear global purpose, disciplinary foundation, integrative units, spiraling repeated presence in the curriculum, meeting student’s needs, and openness to teacher inquiry (Boix Mansilla 2013).

Based on these findings, another study examined the global education pedagogies used by ten teachers in North Carolina in various subjects. “The three signature pedagogies evident across content areas were: (1) intentional integration of global topics and multiple perspectives into and across the standard curriculum; (2) ongoing authentic engagement with global issues; and (3) connecting teachers’ global experiences, students’ global experiences, and the curriculum” (Tichnor-Wagner et al. 2016, p. 12).

Foreign language instruction is an integral part of global education, and there is well-established knowledge about which approaches are most effective. For instance, dual language immersion is a very productive approach to educating coordinated speakers of two languages. One of the clearly established principles is that foreign language proficiency requires time, years of study, and access to courses at various levels of proficiency. Many schools offer only introductory level courses and devote too limited time to allow students to gain foreign language proficiency. The Modern Language Association is an excellent resource to provide access to curriculum, pedagogies and assessment resources in foreign languages (Modern Language Association 2019). It is possible to adopt these principles in designing effective and rigorous foreign language programs in public schools. The State of Utah has adopted an ambitious program of dual language immersion offering five modern languages (Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish) through a program that brings teachers who are native speakers of those languages to Utah (Utah State Board of Education 2019).

Other pedagogies for global education involve engaging students in study abroad. Global education programs can engage students in service projects or problem-based projects of the sort we included in the World Course. It is typical of many global education pedagogies to seek to cultivate the agency of students, engaging them with real problems and in processes where they attempt to generate solutions to those problems. These activities often involve working in groups, and working on challenges which may not have an obvious solution and where part of the learning opportunity is figuring out how to frame the problem. The value of these skills for life and work is clear, as the challenges adults face seldom come structured in a way that has an obvious solution or much scaffolding to solve them. These concerns were central in the design of the World Course:

In addition, rather than imposing on the students a list of the discrete skills, knowledge, and attitudes that we wished to impart to them, we wanted the students to find and make meaning in their learning. Thus, the World Course curriculum focuses on learning that is integrated and grounded in current social, political, economic, and other concerns and specifically on issues that are complex and without easy answers or solutions. We believed that students would find value in—and would desire to engage with—issues that are “real” and authentic; similarly, we believed that in being asked to engage with these real-life issues, the learners would be more motivated to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to understand and solve these issues. For example, the curriculum centers on issues like immigration and the impact of human migration on the environment and on the kinds of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are necessary to address these issues. That approach led us to fields such as demography, which is not a subject taught in many schools but is a topic that we thought was essential for learning how to address issues about population growth and its impact on sustainability. (Reimers et al. 2016)

Recent studies show that there are opportunities to improve pedagogies around the world to bring them in line with current science-based evidence on how to support deeper learning and twenty-first-century skills. In a study of teaching and teaching practices conducted by the OECD, pedagogies that require cognitive activation or that rely on enhanced activities are less frequently used than pedagogies focused on classroom management or teacher-directed instruction, as shown in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1 Teaching practices. Percentage of lower secondary teachers who “frequently” or “always” use the following practices in their class¹ (OECD average-31)

The same study shows that, on average, among the 48 countries participating in the study, only two in five teachers in lower secondary schools report that they present their students with tasks for which there is no obvious solution, only three in five give students tasks that require students to think critically, only half ask students to decide on their own how to solve complex tasks, only half have students work in small groups to solve a problem, and less than a third ask students to work on projects which require at least a week to complete. Additionally, only half of the teachers allow students to use ICT to work on projects or classwork. These are all opportunities that would help students develop important twenty-first-century skills, and they could all be readily deployed in global education projects. For instance, all of these activities are commonly used throughout the World Course (OECD 2019a) (Table 6.2).

Table 6.2 Teaching practices. Results based on responses of lower secondary teachers

Learning is a social activity, students learn not only from their teachers, but also from their peers, as they interact with them. This is a reason promoting interaction and collaboration among students of different backgrounds and identities can not only help reduce prejudice and stereotyping, but also develop essential skills to collaborate with others in diverse societies. An obvious implication of this is the value of structuring diverse classrooms and schools that are as inclusive and diverse as possible so that students have opportunities to interact with and learn from peers who are different. A diverse classroom and school will help students not only experience the benefits of learning from and with peers who are different, it will also help them articulate this experience with the academic study of concepts such as “human rights.” These benefits of inclusion are reflected in UNESCO’s (1994) Salamanca Statement on Principles, Policies and Practice in Special Needs Education, recommending the inclusion of all types of learners in the same educational environment, as inclusive schools and classrooms are most effective in “combating discriminatory attitudes, creating welcoming environments, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all” (UNESCO 1994, para 2). Schools that systematically exclude or discriminate against students with particular identities, such as students with special learning needs or nonbinary gender identities, teach a powerful lesson in bigotry to students about what is acceptable that will undermine any academic emphasis on the study of universal human rights in the curriculum. A recent World Bank report documents that children and youth with disabilities, indigenous identities and sexual and gender minorities are the most excluded and discriminated against in schools around the world (World Bank 2019).

Another means to provide students opportunities to collaborate with diverse peers is to offer them opportunities to travel abroad or to collaborate with peers in other countries using technology, as a way to expand the range of opportunities to benefit from collaborations with diverse peers beyond the diversity reflected in the composition of their schools. Building school-to-school partnerships requires thoughtful design so that it provides all students an opportunity to learn and not simply reinforce prejudice or a mindset that some students are “saviors” who can do for other communities what they cannot do for themselves (Klein 2017).

Yet, structuring schools that are racially, religiously, or socioeconomically diverse, or engaging students in collaborations with peers in other countries, is not enough to provide students with opportunities that are formative and beneficial to all. As cited earlier, Allport, in his pioneering work on racial prejudice, outlined conditions for positive inter-racial interactions as including equal status, cooperation, common goals and support from authorities. Results from the OECD study of teachers show the potential of diverse classrooms to support the development of global education curriculum as many teachers work in ethnically diverse classrooms, support activities or organizations encouraging expression of such diversity, organize multicultural events, teach students how to deal with ethnic and cultural discrimination, and adopt teaching and learning practices that integrate global education, as shown in Table 6.3. At the same time, the table shows that not all teachers adopt these practices, underscoring the importance of professional development to intentionally deploy classroom diversity in service of global education. On average, among the 47 countries participating in the study, 63% of the teachers support activities or organizations encouraging students’ expressions of diverse ethnic and cultural identities, 54% organize multicultural events, 73% teach students how to deal with cultural and ethnic discrimination, and 83% adopt teaching and learning practices that integrate global issues across the curriculum.

Table 6.3 School practices related to diversity. Results based on responses of lower secondary teachers and principals

A considerable number of teachers reports that they experience challenges teaching in culturally diverse classrooms. On average, for all countries in the OECD, 67% of teachers report that they can cope with the challenges of a multicultural classroom; 59% say that they can adapt their teaching to the cultural diversity of their students; 69% say they can make students with an immigrant background work with others who don’t share the same background; 68% say they can raise awareness about cultural differences; and 73% say they can reduce ethnic stereotyping among students (OECD 2019a, Table I.3.38) (Table 6.4).

The OECD report on teachers identifies professional development to work with the growing diversity of classrooms as a priority:

Not many teachers are trained in teaching in such culturally or linguistically diverse classrooms. Thirty-five percent of teachers report that teaching in multicultural and multilingual settings was included in their formal teacher education or training, and 22% of teachers said it was included in their professional development activities in the 12 months prior to the survey. Furthermore, teachers who have previously taught in a classroom with students from different cultures report that they do not all feel confident in their ability to cater to the needs of diverse classrooms. When teachers completed their formal teacher education or training, only 26% of them felt well or very well prepared for teaching in a multicultural or multilingual setting. At the time of survey completion, 33% of teachers still do not feel able to cope with the challenges of a multicultural classroom, on average across the OECD. Teaching in a multicultural or multilingual setting is one of the professional development activities with the highest proportion of teachers reporting a high need for it (15%). While a high percentage of teachers (almost 70%) report high levels of self-efficacy with respect to promoting positive relationships and interactions between students from different backgrounds, fewer teachers (59%) feel able to adapt their teaching to the cultural diversity of students. (OECD 2019a, p. 31).

Table 6.4 Teaching in multicultural or multilingual settings

Table 6.5 presents the percentage of teachers who identify a need for professional development in teaching in multicultural settings, teaching cross-curricular skills or working with people from different cultures.

Table 6.5 Teachers’ needs for professional development. Results based on responses of lower secondary teachers

It is particularly important to ensure that the growing diversity of schools and classrooms indeed translates into positive opportunities for all students. There is some evidence that minority students experience discrimination and bullying in schools. The OECD study of teachers documents that on average, across the countries participating, 13% of the principals report incidents of bullying in their schools, as shown in Table 6.6. In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented the prevalence of discrimination and hatred in schools. In a survey administered in 2018, more than two-thirds of the teachers and principals surveyed had witnessed a hate or bias incident the previous semester, but less than 5% of those were reported by news media. Most of these incidents were not addressed by school leaders: in 57% of the cases no one was disciplined, and only 10% of the administrators denounced the bias or reaffirmed school values in response to it (Southern Poverty Law Center 2019).

Table 6.6 School safety. Results based on responses of lower secondary principals

Innovative curriculum and pedagogies for global education should not simply be an “add on” to the existing curriculum, but an avenue to transform the curriculum and pedagogy broadly, in service on supporting deeper learning and twenty-first-century skills. Clearly, these competencies and the associated pedagogies of student-centered, active, collaborative, and project-based learning could be used in a range of subjects, and do not need an explicit emphasis on global education to be promoted or supported. Introducing these practices in the context of a global education curriculum, however, provides a framing of this process of pedagogical change that does not require confronting head on the established norms and mindsets with respect to teaching the existing disciplines in the curriculum, but rather can begin the conversation laterally, using a new framing to discuss teaching and learning in service of helping students develop the skills to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Data from the OECD study of teachers suggest that most teachers are open to educational innovation, as shown in Table 6.7. On average, among all countries participating in the study, four in five teachers are looking for new ideas for teaching and learning, three-quarters of teachers report that they are open to change, and four in five teachers are in search of new ways to solve problems.

Table 6.7 Teachers’ views on their colleagues’ attitudes towards innovation. Results based on responses of lower secondary teachers

6.3 Instructional Resources

As with other subjects, effective teaching can be supported by high-quality resources, textbooks, and online resources that engage students in structured opportunities to develop skills. Critical resources include the school infrastructure—the building itself—and technology infrastructure. These resources support learning in many ways. For example, schools can be “green spaces” and minimize their carbon footprint, which is not only a way to mitigate climate change but teaches students important lessons on how to live to minimize our impact on climate. In 2008, Australia adopted a national solar schools initiative with a major component to mitigate climate change. The initiative makes grants available to schools to put in place energy and water efficiency measures (UNESCO 2012, p. 13). Japan also has had a program of environmentally friendly schools since 1997 (Ibid, p. 16).

Access to technology, for teachers and for students, is another important resource which can support student work and the creation of collaborations with peers in other schools. There are a number of sites online which allow students to collaborate with peers, such as worldvuze, touchable earth, flat connections, global read aloud, or write the world (Klein 2017). The Global Citizen platform has many online resources to support learning and projects aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The UN also has resources online for the same purpose, as does the World’s Largest Lesson.

One of the findings of a cross-national study of reforms that broadened the curriculum in ten different countries is that many had relied on the use of tools, protocols, and textbooks to support the adoption of new instructional practices (Reimers 2020a). The same was found in a cross-national study of six national programs of teacher professional development, they relied on instructional materials to provide day-to-day support to new pedagogies (Reimers 2020b). This was also what we found in a comparative study of professional development programs aimed at educating the whole child (Reimers 2018).

There are numerous resources available online that can support global education, including textbooks or resource books addressing globalization and global themes, such as the recently published book ‘The World. A Brief Introduction’ (Haass 2020). Part of the process of advancing global education requires examining whether textbook use supports it. An analysis of secondary history, social science and geography textbooks between 1970 and 2008 found that mentions of international events increased from 30 to 40%, and globalization, almost not mentioned in 1970, was mentioned in 40% of the textbooks in 2005. Analysis conducted by UNESCO of textbooks in history, civics, social studies, and geography showed that about 50% mention human rights, compared to about 5% at the beginning of the twentieth century. About 28% of the textbooks mention international human rights documents. Coverage of women’s rights is much more uneven, from just about 10% in Northern Africa and Western Asia to 40% in Europe, North America and Sub-Saharan Africa. About 50% of the textbooks mention environmental issues (UNESCO 2017, p. 295).

Because finding what is needed when it is needed is time-consuming, organized collections can be especially helpful. Curating these and aligning them to standards and curriculum is a way to support global education. Various states and countries have developed websites which host curated lists of resources keyed to standards or to curriculum. Education Services Australia has created such a site, with resources aligned to the curriculum and to various pedagogical strategies (Education Services Australia 2019).

The organization High Resolves has also curated a range of education resources, with an application that allows teachers to re-purpose and re-organize those resources to align them to particular curricular goals (High Resolves 2019).

The organization Facing History and Ourselves has curated a collection of teaching strategies and instructional resources to support the promotion of tolerance, empathy, personal responsibility, and teaching history including Holocaust education (Facing History and Ourselves 2019).

UNESCO has also curated a variety of resources to support global education and teaching for sustainability (UNESCO 2019a, b).

When we developed the World Course, we deliberately chose not to develop specific lesson plans, but instead develop a curriculum at the level of “units.” The 350 units of the K-12 curriculum could then be developed into several lessons each. While we suggested activities and resources for each unit, we refrained from structuring specific lessons. We were able to identify thousands of resources on the internet that could support the development of lessons within each of the units. Our assumption was that teachers would benefit from and appreciate the flexibility of designing their own lesson plans to fit the particular circumstances and needs of their students. The feedback I have received from those using the book indicates that designing lesson plans takes time and skill, and that competing demands for teachers often prevent them from doing this. For this reason, the subsequent curriculum I developed with my graduate students “Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons” included sixty lesson plans. The feedback from teachers to having structured lessons, which they can then modify and adapt, has been very positive.

6.4 Assessment

Assessment is an important component in an institutional perspective because it provides evidence on how the intended curriculum translates into a taught or implemented curriculum and eventuallly into a learned or achieved curriculum. Where that evidence is used to hold teachers and schools accountable, it has powerful effects on instruction, as demonstrated by a study of the effects of test-based accountability in the United States which showed that the introduction of accountability emphasizing basic literacies, resulted in an increase in instructional time in literacy and mathematics and in a decrease in instructional time in science and social studies (West 2007, 54). A common misconception is that one of the obstacles to advancing global education is that it is not a domain typically assessed or where assessment is feasible. One of the findings of the comparative study of effective programs to develop the capacity of teachers to educate the whole child conducted by the Global Education Innovation Initiative (Reimers and Chung 2018) is that these programs typically focus on a broader range of skills than those normally assessed in state or national assessments. However, one of the features these programs had in common was a commitment to monitoring and evaluation as a way to continuously improve, which often required using additional assessment tools than those used for accountability purposes.

Because global competence is a construct encompassing a combination of knowledge and skills, a productive way to identify relevant assessments is to focus on those components of global competency, not necessarily to look for global education assessments. For example, foreign language proficiency is one of those components, and there are established metrics to assess foreign language skills. Similarly, a number of the components of global competency fall squarely within existing disciplines such as world history, social studies, geography, and science, and there are well-developed modes of formative and summative assessments in those disciplines.

For instance, knowledge and understanding of climate and the underlying science can be reliably assessed. The Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the OECD, shows that, on average, only one in five students in the OECD countries can consistently identify, explain and apply scientific concepts related to environmental topics (OECD 2012). Conversely, 16% of the students do not have enough knowledge to answer questions containing scientific information related to basic environmental issues, and 20% of the students are just at that baseline level of scientific proficiency. These low levels of scientific knowledge and skills are in spite of the fact that all students in the OECD attend schools teaching environmental science as part of the science curriculum. The latest administration of the PISA study revealed that less than 10% of all students tested could distinguish facts from opinions (OECD 2019b, p. 3).

There is a rich reservoir of assessment instruments which can be used to evaluate other dimensions of global citizenship education such as intercultural competency or global mindedness. The Intercultural Development Inventory assesses the capability to shift cultural perspective and adapt to cultural differences and commonalities. Another instrument, the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale, assesses the skills critical to interacting effectively across cultures. The General Ethnocentrism Survey measures how individuals construe “in-group” versus “outgroups.” The Global Citizenship Literacy Scale measures global awareness, intergroup empathy, valuing diversity, social justice, environmental sustainability and responsibility to act.

In addition, assessment instruments used to measure civic skills and values can provide information on competencies that constitute part of global citizenship. The World Values Survey Project, which has administered cross-national surveys on cultural values for decades, contains accepted metrics of constructs such as tolerance for diversity, attitudes towards the environment and various civic and political topics. Similarly, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement has, since the 1960s, conducted cross-national assessments of civic knowledge and skills. More recently, the inclusion of an assessment of global competency by the PISA program of the OECD will bring additional focus to the aspects of this competency reflected in that assessment.

Assessment can also focus on teacher knowledge, attitudes, and practices. For instance, Kerkhoff developed a scale to assess teaching for global readiness, which identifies four elements of pedagogy drawn from a factor analysis of teachers’ self-reports of their practices, based on a review of the literature on global education (Kerkhoff 2017).

A working group co-convened by UNESCO, The Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and the UN Global Education First Initiative Youth Advocacy Group assembled a toolkit with fifty assessment instruments (Center for Universal Education 2017). These instruments focus on three distinct domains “(1) fostering the values/attitudes of being an agent of positive change; (2) building knowledge of where, why, and how to take action toward positive change; and (3) developing self-efficacy for taking effective actions toward positive change” (Ibid, p. 11).

6.5 Staff and Development

One of the reasons global education is too often an aspiration for teachers and seldom a reality for students is because more time has been spent examining what it is than discerning how to teach it. As mentioned earlier in this book, much of the existent literature on the subject are academic discussions about competing views of what global competency means. If the studies on how to teach for global competency are few, research on how teachers can be supported to effectively educate globally competent students is woefully lacking. Clearly, effective global education pedagogy will not be possible if teachers and principals are not prepared to lead good instruction.

What is necessary is obvious: explicit high-quality initial preparation for teachers, and good professional development throughout teachers’ careers. These are the same requirements consistently mentioned in any study and proposal to advance twenty-first-century education and deeper learning (Aspen Institute 2019; Pellegrino and Hilton 2012; Reimers et al. 2016; Reimers and Chung 2018).

Current systems of teacher preparation and professional development will require major changes if they are to support teaching that encourages deeper learning and the development of transferable competencies. Changes will need to be made not only in conception of what constitutes effective professional practice but also in the purposes, structure, and organization of preservice and professional learning opportunities. (Pellegrino and Hilton 2012, p. 186)

Following Schon’s ideas summarized earlier, effective teacher education and professional development need to incorporate opportunities for practice, and opportunities to learn from practice. The knowledge base to educate globally competent students needs to be built, in part, by teachers themselves. Thus, teacher education programs must engage students in practice, and in reflection on and research from practice, to prepare them to participate in systems of continuous improvement, as proposed by Bryk and his colleagues (Bryk et al. 2015). A tighter coupling between initial education and professional support once teachers are in school would also support this two-way continuum from education to practice.

Initial teacher education should also provide teachers with the knowledge and the skills that encompass global education, including skills to teach foreign languages, develop the intercultural sensibilities of their students, promote civic engagement, teach about climate, sustainability, world history, geography, globalization, and other globally relevant themes. One challenge faced by teacher education programs in addressing these areas is that to do so effectively would require augmenting the capacity of faculty in teacher education programs. For university-based programs this could be done by developing more robust collaborations with other academic departments, for example with sciences, history, modern languages, or economics. Unfortunately, many teacher preparation programs occupy a relatively marginal place in schools of education, and in turn schools of education rarely develop curriculum or professional development in collaboration with colleagues from other university departments or professional schools.

A recent analysis of the role of education for sustainable development in the curriculum of teacher education institutions conducted in 66 countries found that barely 8% of the programs had integrated sustainable development in the curriculum (McKeown and Hopkins 2014). A survey of student teachers in a teacher preparation program in Wales, Bangor, found that while most student teachers recognize the importance of global education, few of them felt prepared to introduce this in their teaching. Among those surveyed, 59% thought global citizenship should have a higher priority in the primary school curriculum, 76% thought it should have a higher priority in the secondary school curriculum, and 64% thought it should have a high priority in initial teacher training. However, only 35% felt confidence in a whole-school approach to global citizenship and 31% felt confident to contribute to a whole-school approach to sustainable development (Robbin et al. 2003, p. 96). A study of global education in teacher training colleges in a province in the Netherlands showed that the meaning of global citizenship was vague for faculty and there was great variation in identifying a number of related subthemes as part of global citizenship (Van Werven 2012). A study of the integration of global content and co-curricular cross-cultural experiences in teacher preparation programs at a large public university in Florida found that a small percentage of teacher candidates participated in those courses and experiences, even though participation increased global perspectives. Two-thirds of students had taken no foreign language courses, two in five had taken one or no courses focusing on other countries and regions, 69% had taken no international or comparative courses and 25% had taken no classes that provided opportunities for intercultural dialogue (Poole 2014, pp. 49–50). A study of the role of human rights education in Denmark found that it was poorly implemented in schools and in teacher education programs:

This study shows that it is arbitrary whether pupils in primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark learn about rights of the child. It also shows that human rights are not incorporated adequately in the official curriculum at schools and teacher university colleges. An overall finding of the study is that teachers have insufficient frameworks and tools for creating quality in education when it comes to human rights education…87% the teachers respond that their teacher education did not motivate them at all, or motivated them only to a lesser extent, to teach pupils about human rights. (Danish Institute for Human Rights 2014, pp. 1–2)

Teacher education programs should also help teacher candidates develop their own intercultural and global competency, for instance, structuring cohorts which are culturally diverse, engaging students in exchanges with peers in other countries, using technology or via study abroad. Research on semester-long teaching abroad, however, shows that it does not guarantee the development of global knowledge or of intercultural skills (Ibid, p. 203). A study of the impact of a semester of teaching abroad for American student teachers shows that their intercultural competence increased. At the same time, they did not learn to see teaching as culturally based (Ibid, p. 209, 210). Student teachers from Hong Kong who participated in a six-week program of student teaching in New Zealand reported that this experience had enriched their cultural understanding, pedagogical knowledge and skills, language awareness, and classroom awareness (Lee 2011). Similar findings are reported in a study of 40 student teachers from a university in the Midwest of the United States who student taught abroad and reported enhanced global awareness and ability to consider themes from multiple perspectives. Teaching overseas also increased their employability and their ability to include cross-cultural content in their curriculum (Doppen and An 2014, p. 72).

These benefits of study abroad for teachers and teacher candidates contrast with the lack of study or travel abroad experiences of teachers around the world, as documented in an OECD study of teachers, as shown in Table 6.8. The result of such lack of travel is that teachers lack cross-cultural knowledge and experience. In the United States “teacher education students tend to be cross-culturally inexperienced and globally unaware, making it difficult for them to effectively address the differentiated needs in today’s classrooms” (Boynton-Haueerwas et al. 2017, p. 202).

Table 6.8 Teacher study abroad during teacher education. Results based on responses of lower secondary teachers

A study examining the participation of teacher candidates in online project-based collaborations reported various benefits in student engagement, development of professional relationships and motivation to pursue further global projects (Smith 2014).

A report on teacher preparation for global education produced by an expert group convened by the Longview Foundation provides the following framework to improve initial teacher education:

Framework for Internationalizing Teacher Preparation

• 1. Revising teacher preparation programs to ensure that:

  • a. General education coursework helps each prospective teacher develop a deep knowledge of at least one world region, culture, or global issue, and facility in one language in addition to English.

  • b. Professional education courses teach the pedagogical skills to enable future teachers to teach the global dimensions of their subject matter.

  • c. Field experiences support the development of pre-service teachers’ global perspectives.

• 2. Facilitating at least one in-depth cross-cultural experience for every pre-service teacher by:

  • a. Promoting study or student teaching in another country, or service-learning or student teaching in a multicultural community in the United States.

  • b. Financial support for such experiences.

  • c. Appropriate orientation, supervision, and debriefing to tie these experiences to prospective teachers’ emerging teaching practice.

• 3. Modernizing and expanding programs for prospective world language teachers by:

  • a. Preparing more teachers to teach less commonly taught languages.

  • b. Updating language education pedagogy based on current research and best practice.

• 4. Creating formative and summative assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of new strategies in developing the global competence of prospective teachers. (Longview Foundation 2008, p. 6)

Discussing the policy implications of that report, Professor Yong Zhao, one of the members of the expert group convened by the Longview Foundation, explains how current policies for teacher education in the United States are in fact barriers to achieving the recommendations of the report (Zhao 2010).

With respect to ongoing professional development, the findings from our recent cross-national study of effective professional development programs focused on educating the whole child provide the following guidance (Reimers 2018):

• 1. Design programs that are responsive to the needs of teachers and to the context in which they teach. For example, the cycle of whole school improvement proposed in the book Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons does that by situating professional development in the school and by engaging teachers themselves in defining professional development needs based on their proposed approach to global education.

• 2. Create multiple and intensive opportunities to build capacities, over an entire school year, or more.

• 3. Rely on a variety of modalities of professional development: independent study, discussions in professional communities with peers, coaching, demonstrations, independent research projects, and reflection on action. Access to exemplars can be a valuable resource to help teachers develop their own improvement goals. For instance, the partnership for twenty-first-century skills, an advocacy organization in the United States, has curated a series of exemplars of twenty-first-century schools which can be studied by in-service teachers (Battelle for Kids 2019). The World Economic Forum has provided mini cases of education programs which exemplify how to cultivate the capacities necessary for the fourth industrial revolution, including global citizenship skills (World Economic Forum 2020). In addition, study abroad programs can help in-service teachers develop their own intercultural competence and global knowledge. A study of the impact of a short-term study abroad program for in-service teachers designed a program integrating the five elements which existing research underscores as critical: the value of cultural immersion experiences, opportunities to teach, opportunities to learn the language, reflection, and collaboration. The study included only 12 participants, and found relatively more gains in knowledge about the culture than about intercultural attitudes and skills (He et al. 2017, p. 148).

• 4. The goals of these programs should be to help teachers develop a blend of capacities, including specific teaching techniques, approaches, and conceptual understanding.

• 5. Support teacher development in cognitive and socio-emotional domains.

• 6. Provide examples of instruction and assessment in global education.

• 7. Create multiple learning opportunities embedded in the school context.

• 8. Build partnerships with other organizations, such as universities and NGOs, which can enhance the capacity of the school. An immediate way to augment the capacity of the school is to tap into the community of parents as a resource. The World Course creates multiple opportunities for parents to serve as resources for the curriculum. There are also a number of organizations which can augment the school capacity, for instance offering professional development or support or both. For example, i-Earn is an organization that helps teachers connect with colleagues interested in developing collaborative projects between their students and students in other countries. As the program i-Earn supports teachers in developing those collaborations, the experience itself is a form of professional development for the participating teachers. A study of 126 teachers in the International Baccalaureate program in over 30 countries participating in online discussion forums found that teachers gained new understandings about open-mindedness, interconnectedness and cross-cultural learning from these exchanges (Harshman and Augustine 2013). The British Council Connecting Classrooms has similar purposes. Empatico is an organization that also helps teachers find colleagues across the world for collaborations of shorter duration than the project-based initiatives that i-Earn supports. The global classroom project also helps educators find partners to collaborate on teaching projects.

  There are many other organizations that can offer similar forms of support. For example, Facing History and Ourselves is an organization that offers teacher professional development to teach history, Holocaust studies and civics. The Global Scholars Program at Bloomberg’s Philanthropies provides teachers with curriculum and professional development to teach about global themes, with colleagues in several cities around the world. Education First is an organization that works with public schools organizing short-term study abroad for students, those visits often involve teachers and collaborations to integrate the short trips with longer periods of study during the academic year. Envoys works with teachers developing customized global curriculum that includes a study abroad experience for students. World Savvy supports teachers developing global curriculum.

• 9. Favor whole-school approaches to professional development over the development of selected individual teachers.

• 10. Use measurement to gain formative feedback that can be used in professional development. The role of assessment has been discussed previously.

• 11. Structure professional development to help the school become a “learning organization,” a theme developed in the next section.

6.6 School Organization

The work of teachers and students does not take place in a vacuum, but is nested in organizations whose characteristics and processes shape their interactions. An important feature of schools’ organization is governance and leadership: what kind of decisions are made at the school level and how the school is led. Over the last several years, a consensus has emerged in favor of more school autonomy for decisions where those closer to students are best positioned to have the necessary knowledge to make them. Along with this view, ideas about leadership as a distributed enterprise among those in the school have also emerged. These views reflect an evolving intellectual tradition that sees schools as learning organizations. The intellectual foundation of that tradition is in the field of organizational studies. The term “learning organization” itself originates in the theory of systems thinking developed by von Bertalanffy (1938). The theory of learning organizations was developed by Argyris and Schon (1978), Senge et al. (1990) and others. Several authors extended the use of the concept of learning organizations to the study of schools in ways that have become widely accepted when thinking about school change (Senge et al. 2000; Fullan 1995, 2001; Hargreaves and Fullan 2012; Bryk and Scheider 2002). A recent review of the scholarship on schools as learning organizations (Kools and Stoll 2017, pp. 61–63) synthesizes that literature in seven dimensions:

• Developing a shared vision centered on the learning of all students

• Creating and supporting continuous professional learning for all staff

• Promoting team learning and collaboration among staff

• Establishing a culture of inquiry, exploration, and innovation

• Embedding systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning

• Learning with and from the external environment and larger system

• Modeling and growing learning leadership

These dimensions are readily applicable to thinking about supporting global education, as I have observed in my work with schools and networks using the approach to change presented in Empowering Students to Improve the World in Sixty Lessons. The thirteen-step protocol guides professional communities in school in a collaborative process that includes negotiating a long term vision, translating it into a specific competency framework, examining the work already going on in the school in light of this framework, deciding on a next step for improvement, communicating in dialogue with the extended school community, deciding, obtaining resources, developing a framework to monitor implementation, developing a communication and a professional development strategy, executing, evaluating, and iterating (Reimers et al. 2017).

Developing a shared vision centered on the learning of all students requires creating opportunities for global education not just for some students, but for all. It is often the case that schools offer some opportunities to support global education for students in the form of foreign language courses, or courses on world history or geography, or study abroad, or opportunities to engage in global projects, but these activities are optional and can in practice be accessed only by a small fraction of the student body. A challenge of an inclusive and capacious vision for global education is to create conditions that ensure these opportunities for all students. For instance, if a key component of a school program of global education involves foreign travel for students, and this travel is funded by parents, an obvious limitation of that strategy is that it is likely to exclude those students whose parents cannot afford the cost of travel. Similarly, curricular choices can favor some students at the expense of others. For example, one of the approaches used to advance global education consists of creating certificates of global competency that recognize students for engaging in a range of these activities over the course of their studies. A study of the implementation of global education in two high schools in Massachusetts found two approaches had been used to advance a global education program. One of them relied on infusing global connections in the curriculum of all subjects, while the other relied on certificates as a way to allow students to build a personalized global education program. Many teachers expressed concern that the certificates provided opportunities to an elite group of students, leaving out most students:

[All participants interviewed] referred to the development and implementation of a student-centered, self-selecting Global Competence Program (GCP). The purpose of the GCP is to allow students to build a portfolio of courses, travel experiences, and community service requirements geared toward the acquisition of knowledge and skills that will in turn prepare them for success in a global society. The students submit a completed portfolio, and if accepted, are awarded a certificate of global competence at the time of graduation. (Kilpatrick 2010, p. 99)

The dimension of creating and supporting continuous professional learning for all staff is enacted in establishing a process of change at the school level which embeds learning in the process of doing the work. In effect, the thirteen steps are a protocol to establish and support a professional learning community of global education, enhanced with participation in a network of schools pursuing similar aspirations.

Promoting team learning and collaboration is reflected in the very design of the thirteen steps as an activity dependent upon distributed leadership. The process outlined in the protocol relies on a culture of inquiry and exploration, as it frames the process as experimenting in order to test the two hypotheses implicit in all curriculum: if we teach A then students will learn B, and if students learn B then outcomes C, D, and E will be achieved. The design of a process as one of continuous improvement, relying on design thinking methodologies to develop and test a global education prototype, reflects the idea that global education is a process of continuous experimentation and learning.

Embedding systems to collect and exchange knowledge and learning is reflected in the idea that theories of action about global education are evaluated, as is the impact of professional development.

The dimension of learning with and from the external environment and the larger system is reflected in establishing partnerships with other institutions, such as universities and community resources, as a way to provide access to knowledge and augment the capacity of the school. Many universities have developed resources and can support schools in developing curriculum and offering opportunities for teacher professional development. In the United States, for instance, grants from the federal government support centers for international studies, most of which have an outreach requirement to collaborate with schools or with other institutions that reach the public (National Research Council 2007).

The dimension of modeling and growing learning leadership is reflected in the distributed leadership of this process, and in engaging students in leadership roles in constructing projects and other opportunities for global education.