The importance of teaching global competence: Part 2
“Our students have the opportunity and challenge of living and working in a diverse and rapidly changing world. Public schools must prepare our young people to understand and address global issues, and educators must re-examine their teaching strategies and curriculum so that all students can thrive in this global and interdependent society.”
– Former National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel.
In the previous Look Into Education blog we discussed the importance of teaching global competence in schools and the benefit of educators gaining first hand global exposure to bring back to their classroom.
In this blog we will continue the conversation by taking a deeper dive in what it would actually look like for a student to be considered globally competent and how, as an educator or bachelors in education student, you can help them get there.
According to the Asia Society’s Center for Global Education, there are four key elements of global competence:
- Investigate the World: Global competence begins with a curiosity and interest in exploring the world around you. Globally competent students should be able to ask globally significant questions, analyze research from multiple sources, and develop evidence-based arguments that consider multiple perspectives.
- Weigh Perspectives: The ability to recognize and explain your own perspective, as well as the perspectives of other people, groups, or ideas, and be able to recognize global and cultural influences on those perspectives. Students should also be able to determine and explain how interaction of ideas and perspectives across culture influence knowledge, events, and other phenomena all over the world.
- Communicate Ideas: Students should be able to effectively communicate all they have learned to a diverse audience, and recognize that language and behavior, both verbal and non-verbal, can influence the audience’s perception and understanding of the message being delivered.
- Take Action: Taking the skills and knowledge students have acquired and developing a strategy for how they will use those tools to influence the world. Students must recognize their ability to advocate for and contribute to improvements on a local, regional, and global level, and then use their knowledge, creativity and innovation to take action.
Bachelors of education students at William Woods may take classes that focus on many aspects of these concepts, like EDU 201: Multicultural Education, where they will study the rationale, trends and goals of multicultural curriculum and learn strategies for teaching diverse populations.
For more resources outside of the classroom, in an Edutopia article, educators from John Stanford International School in Seattle, Washington share some tools and resources for teaching global competence including unit plans, useful websites, upcoming events and more.
The article features unit plans that can benefit education majors in any area of focus. Bachelor in history education majors, for instance, can examine lesson plans like 11th Grade History: Migration and Industry, focusing on migration and industrialization and how it transformed the U.S. and brought cultural and economic change to countries around the world.
For those looking to bring global competence into schools from the leadership level, William Woods offers an MEd in Curriculum and Instruction and an Education Specialist in Curriculum and Instruction Degree, both of which train educators to design and develop curriculum that will meet challenges and bring a better approach to learning into the classroom and assess its effectiveness.